The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
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…
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…
March 1st, 2016
Catching up on my industry reading I’m facing the large effort required to try to digest the latest Author Earnings report and then wading into the vast cesspool of vitriol it engenders.
September 28th, 2015
In 2008, Heidi Julavits published a marvelous short piece, The Writers in the Silos, a satirical glance at where writing and publishing is headed in “our current conglomerating, lowest-common-denominator, demographically targeted publishing industry.” I fell in love with it and bought the rights to reproduce the article on The Future of Publishing. As it’s buried somewhere at…
March 15th, 2015
I’m thinking about complex industries. I’m thinking of… Pharmaceuticals (you might check out 23andMe, “a personalized DNA service”) The design and launch of high-tech products (the intriguing Apple Watch) Aerospace (think Airbus A350 XWB) Launching a new car company (think Tesla) Telecommunications (“rewiring” the Internet to reconfigure performance)