The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
January 17th, 2022
Last October I wrote an article for Publishers Weekly, “AI Comes to Audiobooks.” With the growth of audiobooks continuing at scale, it’s not surprising that some enterprising vendors would start to explore where AI might enable the audiobook production process. It comes down to using synthetic voices to supply the narration. Synthetic voices have come…
October 3rd, 2021
This is a select guide to books about book publishing, the catalog of someone who loves publishing and is on a never-ending quest to better understand how it works.
May 23rd, 2021
This blog post is a love song to backlist books. Confined to the shadows beneath the bright light of publisher frontlists, these books are too often neglected. But there are many gems on the backlist: books with proven potential and solid profit margins. Eat your veggies: every publisher knows that focusing attention on the backlist…
April 28th, 2021
Three different items “crossed my desk” this week that made me think more about the role of technology in the future of book publishing. They’re from different sources, but the messages converge. The first item was a March blog post by Benedict Evans. (His excellent free weekly newsletter is a ‘must-subscribe’; the paid version is…
January 5th, 2021
When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, the press coverage was overwhelming. The trusted book publishing media, including Publishers Weekly, Publishing Perspectives, Publishers Lunch, The Bookseller in the U.K. and Quill & Quire in Canada, each did a fine job of monitoring developments within publishing and bookselling. Then, early in the pandemic, Amazon prioritized what it…