The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
November 5th, 2025
Beware: This post talks about metadata for books, and it talks about ONIX, the data format used to convey metadata for the retailing of books. But it is also about technology in the age of AI. It would be impossible to recap the whole story of metadata for books here, except in the clumsiest of…
May 25th, 2024
The AI Revolution in Book PublishingA Concise Guide to Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Writers and Publishers Order the book here or on Amazon. Are you feeling left out of the conversation about book publishing, authoring and artificial intelligence? Most publishers and authors are — it’s not just you. The AI Revolution in Book Publishing will…
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…
May 31st, 2020
The most vexing challenge in digital marketing for publishing is, without question, developing a strategy for Google search; how to be discovered on Google. It’s quite different from an Amazon discovery strategy. But it’s core to an author’s and a publisher’s overall strategy for metadata deployment. I’ll explain more as we proceed. This post considers…
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…