Preview: A Book About Books

Available everywhere books are sold March 11, 2025

Reader, I have a confession. While I started Publisher Guide to share lessons on the business and inner workings of publishing books, I also intended it to help focus my writing practice and develop my second book, A Book About Books.

I receded from a regular publishing cadence here because I was honing in on completion; much of the themes I would share here were being fleshed out in the manuscript at hand.

A Book About Books is a compression algorithm of my professional experience in the book business. Readers will gain an understanding of the fundamental principles guiding each step of the publishing process—editorial, production, distribution, marketing, and acquisitions—across independent, self-published, and Big Five models.

This book is for those interested in working in the industry or starting their own publishing company. It is also for authors who want to better understand the often opaque machinations behind their titles, as well as self-publishers looking to maximize today's distribution tools.

The way this industry has changed—and will continue to change—is dynamic and thrilling. The book begins by highlighting a series of challenges faced by publishers, authors, and readers alike, then explores how the industry may evolve in the future.

I am happy to share that A Book About Books is complete and will be available everywhere books are sold March 11, 2025. Now that this milestone has been achieved, I will be returning to Publisher’s Stack with excerpts, lessons, and additional content surrounding the world of book publishing.

ABAB is available for pre-order directly from me, and I will personally sign these copies. Pre-order here.

The title is also available on Amazon and, soon, everywhere books are sold.

Thank you for your readership. I will leave you with the opening foreword to A Book About Books.

“I found that literature, like all religions, is also a business.”
– Jason Epstein, Book Business

Festina lente, latin for make haste slowly, is represented in the logo of publisher Doubleday Books; a dolphin (agile, lithe) curling itself around an anchor (cold, grounding). What a perfect thing to say about what a publisher does—make haste, slowly.

Every step in the process of making a book is slow, but the cerebral and market pressures surrounding the act of publishing demands agility. Distributors command seasonal catalogs from their publishers, editors keep their authors to their deadlines, and authors are in concert with whatever demon is coaxing them along their own twisted and alchemical process.

In cultural industries we are constantly balancing and often at odds between the realities of making art (space, time, meandering) and patronizing art (capital, market, audience). This balance has seen dramatic moments of accelerated change from the days of Doubleday in its establishment in 1897 to today’s online-induced rapidity.

Doubleday Books is now the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, a part of the Bertelsmann global media conglomerate; a company that holds a little over 10% of the US book trade. In 2023, Penguin Random House released approximately 20,000 new books across its imprints.

Legendary book publisher Jason Epstein, formerly of Doubleday, witnessed the change of publisher priorities when Doubleday was purchased by Penguin and subsequently opened up for an IPO. He remarks in his book Book Business of the shift in the company’s priorities from editor interests to shareholder interests. Today we are witnessing more shifts in priorities as many of Epstein’s predictions have come to fruition since his seminal title released in 2001. Accelerationism fueled by capital, communication technology, and corporate consolidation has created an entirely new landscape for publishers and authors to contend with. The dolphin has abandoned the anchor.

* * *

This book brings together roughly ten years of lessons in developing literary programs, from building new publishing houses to deploying post-graduate classes on the business of books. A constellation of workshops, pitfalls, and successes inform this slim volume. The content is largely skewed toward the high level business components of book publishing, with some interjections on aesthetics, marketing, and vibes.

Readers will walk away with a better understanding of how the business of books functions from first principles—the underlying supply chain of the trade-released book from concept to bookstore shelf. Authors will gain insight on the financial realities behind making a title available anywhere books are sold, what separates quality independent labels and Big Five labels alike, and things to think about when seeking a publisher. For those who want to work in publishing there is useful information to be found with entry-level application, along with some universal fundamentals for those looking to build their own publishing company or simply enrich their understanding.

Today, publishers are all faced with a similar fundamental problem: balancing cash flow. It’s common to throw the margins of books under the bus when scrutinizing book publishing as a business, but cashflow is the killer culprit: fixed costs with staff, variable upfront costs with print manufacturing, and typical quarter-long delays in receiving revenue. These capital-intensive realities demand hits, which are far more difficult to engineer in today’s saturated content market. The valley between titles that sell hundreds of units and those that sell tens of thousands of units is immense; it’s estimated that 1-2% of titles sell over 10,000 copies within their first year, with an estimated 70-80% selling under 1,000 units.

Compared to other media businesses, 10,000 units is a relatively small number, but an immense milestone in books across genres. All publishers are under pressure to sustain dealflow with titles that meet sales expectations, needing killer accuracy on their catalog planning to ensure proper cashflow management. This requires creative strategy when dealing with today’s distributors and wholesalers; parts of the supply chain that are over a decade behind the times. Let’s say it here first: distribution is a massive source of today’s problems in the book business, and as such, a big vector for disruption. This theme is a constant throughline in this book.

Why this book, why now? I feel like we haven’t received a proper book on the business of books since Jason Epstein’s Book Business in 2001. I love that book, and I recommend you read it. Epstein’s book is important because it gives readers an understanding of how we got to today’s consolidation of everything, a phenomenon that is not unique to book publishing. He lived through Random House becoming Penguin Random House and going public, the results of priorities skewing from privately held interests to shareholders. Epstein also predicted Ingram’s moves on two fronts; a consolidation in distribution and print on demand.

Print on demand and online e-commerce technologies together have fundamentally changed the behavior of books over the last decade by radically democratizing key components of publishing. There are upsides and downsides to this, the boons and ramifications experienced in real time. This book is a representation of this very disruption, having been self-published via my self-publishing imprint designed to take advantage of the suite of global e-commerce and automated print platforms that now exist. There is no easier time than today to fully conceptualize and deliver on a book, but know that you’re competing against approximately 7,000 to 15,000 new title uploads a day across leading self-publishing platforms.

I have spent the better part of a decade contending with the problems I call out in A Book About Books; problems publishers, authors, and all who are concerned with the state of literature face. Potentially one day we will work on solving these problems together, or you will exceed me in my own competitive path. I wrote this book for three reasons: to act as a compression algorithm for my partners, to encapsulate all of my class material, and to keep my own writing practice sharp. I am excited to share the results with you, reader. Herein we lower the opacity on how this all works and inspire something in you to go out and build.