There is a romantic notion that a book is the product of a single author’s obsessive work, perhaps locked away somewhere — a garret or a basement — sweating the details down to the last comma.

While there’s some measure of truth in this image, when you go into a store and hold that finished book in your hands, in reality, you’re looking at the product of the work of dozens of people — editors, designers, marketers, publicists — literal teams that are tasked with bringing an author’s work to its best final form.

Having witnessed this process with each of my own books and comparing the final package with what I might’ve been able to accomplish on my own, I came to appreciate the necessity of these people with the expertise and dedication to doing the work not of writing, but of publishing.

Currently, some of the folks who do that work for the publisher HarperCollins are on strike in order to establish conditions of employment that allow them to do their work better, work that ultimately benefits all of us as readers.

After having worked without a contract since last April, staffers from the design, marketing, legal, publicity and sales departments called for an indefinite strike this past November. Since that time, HarperCollins reportedly hasn’t engaged in formal bargaining sessions with union leaders.

The primary negotiation point for the striking workers is raising the minimum pay from $45,000 per year to $50,000 in order to make it more possible for lower-level employees to live in New York City, one of the most expensive cities in the country and the locus of the majority of U.S. publishing.

Authors, including HarperCollins authors, have pledged support for the striking workers. That includes big names like Barbara Kingsolver and Jacqueline Woodson. Additionally, more than 200 literary agents have pledged not to submit any new manuscripts to the publisher until the strike is resolved.

Importantly, the striking workers are not asking people to boycott HarperCollins books, recognizing that such a move would punish authors.

It’s a complicated dynamic, as Dan Kois writes in an essay at Slate discussing his conflicted feelings over publishing his debut novel “Vintage Contemporaries” with HarperCollins, even as he supports the staffers who are on strike.

There does not appear to be a way to force HarperCollins to the bargaining table, unless things really start to fall apart. The money it would take to increase the minimum salaries of staffers is truly trivial measured against the size of HarperCollins corporate parent News Corp.’s bottom line.

I must admit that for a number of weeks, I’ve wanted to write about this situation, but have hesitated because I wanted to be able to provide a suggested action or some fresh insight on the situation, but the fact of the matter is that things are at an impasse and there’s not much bystanders like us can do about it.

But as I realized that the vast majority of regular reading folks are probably not aware of the strike, and might not know the kind of service these employees provide, I felt the least I could do is to use my platform to say that these workers deserve a living wage, and the books we read would be lesser things without them.

John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”

Twitter @biblioracle

Book recommendations from the Biblioracle

John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.

1. “Hamnet” by Maggie O’Farrell

2. “Coventry” by Helen Humphreys

3. “Mister Pip” by Lloyd Jones

4. “The Lantern Men” by Elly Griffiths

5. “What are People For?” by Wendell Berry

— Anna N., Winnipeg, Manitoba

A Willy Vlautin novel is a powerful emotional experience, and it’s not something every reader appreciates, but looking at this list, I think Anna will be absorbed and moved by “Don’t Skip Out on Me.”

1. “Beyond the Sea” by Paul Lynch

2. “The Man Who Died” by Antti Tuomainen

3. “Afterlives” by Abdulrazak Gurnah

4. “Sugar Street” by Jonathan Dee

5. “Weapons of Mass Delusion” by Robert Draper

— Bill M., Atlanta, Georgia

For Bill, I’m going to suggest a pairing that I experienced by reading “Sugar Street” and Lydia Millet’s “Dinosaurs” back-to-back, two novels with a similar premise — a main character who walks away from a previous life — with very different trajectories after those acts.

1. “The Professor and the Parson” by Adam Sisman

2. “In a Free State” by V.S. Naipaul

3. “Prometheus Bound” by Aeschylus

4. “The Looking-Glass War” by John le Carré

5. “An African in Greenland” Tété-Michel Kpomassie

— Connor G., Oxford, England

For Connor, I’m going to recommend a mordantly funny novel about philosophy. Looking at this list, he looked like a good candidate for Lars Iyer’s “Spurious.”

Get a reading from the Biblioracle

Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.