The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
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…
September 22nd, 2020
In last Sunday’s New York Times there’s a wide-ranging profile of Madeline McIntosh, chief executive at Penguin Random House, the largest trade publisher in the U.S. The article is by Alexandra Alter, who writes about publishing and the literary world for the Times. I was pleased when she asked me for a few observations on…
March 29th, 2020
For my new column in Publishers Weekly I’ve tried to reimagine metadata as a game. Not quite a board game; maybe a parlor game. When it comes to book publishing, metadata is a game of chance. We don’t know which BISAC categories work best for any particular title, which keywords outperform, or how to write…
March 23rd, 2020
There’s a lot of coverage of the challenges facing book retail right now because of the coronavirus. The situation is shocking and sad. But it feels careless to forget that even if every bookstore in the world shut down for the next 12 months, people would still have over ten million different ebooks available for…
August 19th, 2019
Last week the U.S. Census Bureau reported that U.S. bookstore sales dropped 5.1% in the first six months of 2019. I filed the report away — as I always do with industry sales reports — with the thought “up a little here, down a little there….” While a 5% shift is, by most measures, more than…