Here's the deal. I am a production editor at a small independent publisher in the U.S. I won't say which or where, so don't ask, as I'd like to keep my job. The pay isn't that great, but it's an easy gig, and I like the people I work with. A lot of what we publish are what you'd call coffee table books. The kind people flip through when they're bored, but almost nobody ever reads cover to cover. Bland pictorial histories of certain cities or states that sell well in regional gift shops. The occasional book of maps or a biography. A few museums outsource their gallery catalogs to us. That kind of thing. The work is boring, but it's steady and we get enough jobs and our books make enough money to stay afloat, which is a lot more than most small presses can say these days.

Because we've been around a while, our name is somewhat known to history buffs and people who think they're an expert on such-and-such town in Nowhere, Idaho or some esoteric topic nobody really cares about. We get a lot of unsolicited manuscripts from people that really shouldn't be writing books, and unsolicited CDs full of photographs from people that shouldn't be taking pictures. Because we're small, and don't have a separate acquisitions editor position, the job of going through this "slush pile" gets passed around the office.

Very rarely, somebody will find something worth pursuing and pitch it to the rest of us, but our Senior Editor/Publisher gets the final say. For the last nine months, I've been working more or less nonstop on a book that everybody at the office was pretty excited about. Our copyeditor found it during his turn with the pile. An old guy I won't name had contacted us out of the blue and offered us the chance to publish his rare archival photo collection, provided we treat the subject matter with the respect and seriousness he felt it deserved.