Yesterday, after a several week long push, I finished a draft manuscript I've been working on for the last several years. It's bubbled along beneath the surface of other projects, going through one unreadable iteration after another, and I've scrapped and reworked it at least twice.
Fear Not, Little Flock is a book of encouragement and exhortation, meant to offer up a little bit of steel for the spines of small congregations. There are plenty of Jesus MegaCenters out there, and having an alternative where life together functions on a human scale is a blessing. It's due to my publisher in a month, so it'll be there well ahead of schedule, which is how I prefer to treat my editors.
I'll be writing more on the topic over the next little bit, I'm sure. But what was on my mind, as I finished up, wasn't small churches.
It was the humble footnote. The manuscript has footnotes, and I don't know if they'll make it through the process of editing. It seems unlikely.
This is a bummer, because I love footnotes.
Footnotes...those little superscriptural markers that lead you to explanatory text or bibliographic information at the bottom of a page...are entirely out of style in the contemporary publishing industry. The editorial herd has moved on. First, it was endnotes, where that little number or an in-text citation had you flipping to the back of the book and futzing around to find the deets.
Then, as was the case with my last two books, the new "style " was to not provide any superscriptural marker in the text at all, and to instead slap a chapter by chapter list of bibliographic references on the hindquarters of the book, with only page numbers to connect you to the actual reference.
I have no idea why this happened, but it's two steps backwards. Endnotes are an inferior UI. The "Tramp Stamp," or whatever the heck it's called when endnotes have no direct marker in the text? That feels like it's just there for liability purposes, as it offers no meaningful opportunity for reader engagement at all.
Footnotes, particularly when coupled with a complete bibliography, immediately connect the reader with an informational metanarrative. As you encounter resources or other writing that has informed your author, it's right there in front of you. It's not "distraction." It's openness of process, and immediately raises reader awareness of the textual foundations of a work. It is, for author and reader alike, a superior way to convey information, by an order of magnitude.
But it can be more than that. Footnotes are also a lovely place for an authorial aside. You can share a related story or reflection. You can snicker sotto voce in the wings at something in the main text, like you're Statler and your reader is Waldorf and the main text is Gonzo's latest failed routine. Those marginalia add delight.
So why was this change made? Why the shift in style?
Is it that we've lost the technical prowess in printing to manage doing footnotes? Of course not. Best I can tell, the change was made to save the costs of more complicated typesetting as the publishing industry has withered and retrenched and withered and retrenched again. Mucking about with footnotes really does make the process of changing physical type more time consuming, and the additional labor required costs money. It's collateral damage from industry decline, an inelegant adaptation rather than a step forward.
But with most publishing now fully digital, that logic no longer holds. Physical typesetting has been supplanted, once again for cost saving purposes, yet still the style remains.
It has become yet another way fad trumps function, an "advance" that makes life harder, and whose industry-driven logics have nothing to do with the author-reader connection, reader engagement and education, or the reason books exist.
Other than that, I have no problem with it.
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