The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
March 30th, 2017
A few weeks ago AuthorEarnings released their latest book industry report. As always, there’s a lot of important information to grapple with—this time, even the title takes some wrangling: February 2017 Big, Bad, Wide & International Report: covering Amazon, Apple, B&N, and Kobo ebook sales in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The…
January 10th, 2017
NOTE: New version of this report to be published by Publishers Weekly in November, 2022. At the link below you can download my latest report, An Authoritative Look at Book Publishing Startups In the United States. I collected the data in the report over nearly 5 years. I wrote the analysis in December, 2016, and…
December 22nd, 2016
I’ve become intrigued with the intersection of book publishing and machine learning, text mining, natural language processing and the like: technologies that get lumped under the rubric of artificial intelligence. Cliff Guren, who runs the publishing consultancy Syntopical, is emerging as one of the book publishing industry’s top specialists in this area. I thought it…
December 1st, 2016
In my last post I looked at the new book, The Bestseller Code, by Jodie Archer & Matthew Jockers. As it turns out the book also captured the attention of a colleague, Cliff Guren, who runs a publishing consultancy, Syntopical, based in Seattle. We decided to engage in an online dialog about the book, and…
September 21st, 2016
The Bestseller Code is already the most talked about insider’s book on the writing and publishing industry. Who wouldn’t want to know if a computer can predict whether a manuscript will be a bestseller? What author wouldn’t want to know if there’s a scientific formula for plotting and writing novels that will propel them onto the New York Times…