The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
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…
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…