Please Stop Bashing Book Publishing

'- “Publishing advances one bankruptcy at a time”– Robert Cottrell

-Starting a publication or publishing arm (Reboot and Paper Gains are two fun examples)

B2B media has long been looked down upon by the consumer side as a lesser form. That was somewhat deserved, since most trade publications were synonymous with being industry cheerleaders, shoddily reported and very boring. One of the bets we had at Digiday was to have a consumer media approach to reporting, design and product while not forgoing the... See more

I know what kind of work it takes to complete a book manuscript, and I want to do that work, but to arrive at the end of it and learn that what I should have been doing instead is flooding the zone on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? That is fundamentally demoralizing.

Books matter. Making them is a combination of craft and insight. Publishing them is a generous act of faith. Adding to the corpus of shared knowledge is important. Books change the culture when people act on them, even if they don’t sell many copies. And sometimes the backlist surprises the accountants.

But the economics of new books have nothing to... See more

The economy is interconnected. There are a lot of reasons newspapers have died off. Some were out of their control. I imagine a future where there are plenty of local publications that serve their communities with smart reporting, structured data sets around important issues and great ad products for marketers.

publishing houses work more like venture capitalists. They invest small sums in lots of books in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the re