Back To The Future of Publishing
A reflection from my time at a conference for smart, curious book nerds
Anna Gát is one of the most interesting people you'll ever have a chance to meet. With an infectious smile, signature red lipstick, and master’s degrees in philosophy of art, English, and theatre/dramaturgy, Anna seems to be everywhere all at once. Her company, Interintellect (backed by O’Shaunessy Ventures), recreates the French Salons of the late 19th century for the modern age. A place for smart, curious people interested in a wide variety of topics to gather, debate, listen, and learn from one another. Her whole enterprise is ambitious in a way that feels different in our age of AI. It’s ambitious in that it challenges us to deal with what it means to be human. I was sort of familiar with her work from afar but for one reason or another never fully engaged. That was my loss.
On a windy and grey mid-April Saturday, in New York City’s Upper East Side, Anna’s company hosted a 1-day conference titled The Future of Publishing. The event took place at the Pratt Mansion, home of the Marymount School. An ornate gilded age building on Central Park, reminiscent of the beaux-arts buildings in Paris, the kind with carved stone cherubs, wide spiral staircases, mahogany paneled walls, and oversized classical realist portrait paintings. Inside, roughly 150 writers, editors, publishers, podcasters, startup founders and content creators, as well as other members of the digital intelligentsia gathered to rub shoulders and hear what the panelists had to say on the future of book publishing. To give you a sense of Anna’s bias to action, she thought of the idea 6 months earlier around a campfire, musing that there ought to be something better than the Frankfurt Book Fair because we are, after all, in a technological age. People thought she was joking. She was not. The work started in earnest in February and by mid-April there we all were at the Pratt Mansion.
Non-fiction author and novelist Tara Isabella Burton led the first panel, The Future Reader, interviewing a panel consisting of startup founder Nathan Baschez of Lex (the tool I use for most of my writing), Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, and Jennifer Banks senior executive editor at Yale University Press.
“With academic papers” Renée explained “the empirical research is the important work.” Academic papers are more dense, technical, and have a specific reader in mind. Usually other academics. But the 1,500-2,000 word articles she writes for The Atlantic is meant to be more storytelling and reach a wider audience. If the academic papers serve as a snapshot in time of her research, the eventual book is the through-line across all of those papers and articles. In each case, the reader is different and therefore the style is different.
There’s a growing sense that traditional publishers now focus mostly on celebrities and somewhat-famous internet celebrities that they can help make even more famous through a published book. Jennifer disagreed. “Almost none of our authors use social media.” When we think of traditional publishers, it’s easy to imagine a monolith but there are likely unique differences between different types of publishers like say a New York Big-5 publisher and a university press.
Almost at point blank and with little warning, Nathan was put on the spot about whether AI, and by extension his company Lex, was destroying writing. In a room full of writers, all eyes suddenly seemed fixated on how he might answer. Undeterred, Nathan rejected the premise, explaining that Lex isn’t meant to do the writing for you. It uses AI to be a thought partner and to help you uncover what isn’t working in your writing.
The next panel, Independent Publishers, featured Saeah Lee Wood, of Otterpine, who has worked with Derek Sivers on his books and took a bold stance on what she sees as Otterpine’s vision — high quality publishing outside the model of the big publishing houses. Beautiful hardcovers. And an author-centric model. That last part was probably the biggest point of agreement of all the panelists, which included Eric Jorgenson of Scribe Media and Jesse Finkelstein of Page Two Books. Each saw themselves as more “author services” companies, not just book publishers. If that feels vague, consider how they translated that. Being author-first might mean doing things like publishing a book in which all copies are gifted to a non-profit. Or choosing to only sell offline. Or deciding ahead of time to limit the number of total books that would ever be printed. Those types of decisions are much harder to pull off, maybe even non-existent, when working with the traditional publishers who like to do things, well, traditionally. Consider that traditional publishers may also have ownership groups and bigger overheads that make them structurally hesitant to be risky.
Jesse in particular highlighted how obscene she felt the traditional author contract is in terms of the rights authors are asked to give up. Re-imaging the contract was her gateway into the indie publishing world.
Jimmy Soni, the moderator of the panel and author of The Founders, dropped a major announcement to the crowd. “I went traditional publisher for my first 2 books. I won’t be doing that for my third. Giving away 85-90% of royalties makes no sense to me.”
Eric, who wrote the best-selling Almanack of Naval Ravikant, gave the digital version of the book away for free, at Naval’s request, and found that those same customers would often come back to purchase the physical book, either to keep on their bookshelves or to gift to friends.
Before we go further, let’s get a few things clear. There is obviously some upside to working with a traditional publishing house, which all of the panelists (who themselves are fighting the very system we’re about to compliment) admitted. For starters, when you sign with a traditional publisher and get your advance, the clock is now ticking. There is real pressure to get the thing done. Secondly, the copyediting and quality control is best-in-class. If you’re fortunate to publish with a traditional publisher, you should expect “fastidious editors”. But is that it? All of the panelists had a sober understanding of the behemoth they were up against and felt an equanimity about their unique, differentiated approach to make a dent in the world of book publishing. Being independent, they reminded us, did not mean they would be any less serious than their traditional counterparts.
“We will hurt your feelings” Eric said bluntly, “before we let you publish a bad book.”
After Jimmy’s panel, the next one up was Pixels vs. Paper, a panel on the difference between physical books and digital writing. Featuring Washington Post columnist and podcaster Shadi Hamid, Bria Sanford, senior editor at Penguin Random House, Tamara Winter, commissioning editor at Stripe Press, the panel was moderated by my friend Dylan O’Sullivan of O’Shaughnessy Ventures.
Dylan is a tall redheaded Irishman with dry wit and piercing blue eyes that had the room bursting out laughing with his pointed deadpan questions. He is the kind of person Fyodor Dostoyevsky described as interesting at first sight before a word has been spoken. Bria led off the discussion by admitting that things were changing rapidly in the publishing world since she got started in the industry. Penguin used to obsess over how to improve the e-book experience, which is even strange typing the words “e-book” since they’re not just considered books. Today, however they don’t spend any energy on innovating there. They’ve given up. They focus much more on the audiobook experience. Another example she shared was that readers used to buy front-list books, whereas now there is a marked shift towards back-list. (Front-list is industry jargon for books published within the last year, Back-list is everything else). “There’s definitely an ideological narrowness” in the traditional publishing world, Bria confirmed. In traditional publishing, it’s common for authors to experience something on the extreme ends of the spectrum from “I had to do everything on my own, the publisher didn’t help me with anything” to “they didn’t let me have a say in anything.”
In an age where private corporations’ access to user data feels like a forgone conclusion despite attempts to counter it, almost all of the panelists admitted to knowing very little about who is buying their books. Shadi even asked, somewhat rhetorically, for everyone in the room to consider if their readers are actually their readers or are they just peers who want to do the same thing you’re doing.
When we think of indie publishers as sort of opening the gates for more written work, it’s normal to assume that will translate into a boom of more books. Not so for Stripe Press, who purposely only publishes 1-2 books per year, each one in beautiful hardcover. Stripe Press, Tamara explained, does know their reader and is laser focused on serving them—high agency, intellectually curious, open to having their beliefs changed. “Our philosophy is ‘something to add, nothing to prove’.” “We have a responsibility” Tamara continued “to not add clutter to the world”.
In between sessions the audience had a chance to get up, stretch, and mingle. The types of people I met were fascinating. From non-fiction writers to the CEO of a corporate intelligence firm in Texas, the audience was as varied as the panelists’ backgrounds. Two of the more interesting people I met weren’t writers or publishers at all. They were the behind the scenes crew for one of the authors in attendance, Luke Burgis who wrote the best-selling book Wanting. Stanley Goldberg, Luke’s social media manager, and Christian Acker, a brand designer and partner at Mythic Proportions were just two of Luke’s team I met out of a team of 5-7 people who help make his whole enterprise run smoothly. Of all the panels that day and all the authors on stage, I don’t remember hearing much about the teams involved and the people behind the scenes who make it all happen. From copyeditors to designers to social media managers, authors can quickly turn into mini-enterprises and while some publishers offer the team-in-a-box approach, there’s still many, like Luke, who prefer to hand pick the right people for the job. These unsung heroes deserve way more credit for helping bring books to the world.
The last panel of the day, The Future of Publishing, featured Kyla Scanlon, who blew up on TikTok teaching Gen-Z and Millenials about finance and economics and is now writing a book, as well as Sahil Lavingia, who built the popular software for creators Gumroad, and Coleman Hughes, a firebrand author, commentator, and podcaster who is no stranger to tackling thorny political issues head on, well, you were bound to get some hot takes. Tina He, co-founder and CEO of Station Labs, moderated the panel, but with the mix of personalities on stage she didn’t need to do much but let them work their magic.
“You shouldn’t write a book” Coleman explained “unless you have a puzzle you want to go deep on that you don’t yet know the answer to at the beginning.” If you know the answer and have an opinion, just write an Op-Ed or an Essay. Kyla agreed saying the reason she works so hard to be on different social media platforms as well as write Op-Eds in newspapers and write a book is because, in her view, each person learns differently and she wants to meet them where they’re at. Her goal is to create a “human thread” about topics we’ve known forever, but pulled into modern times.
In Coleman’s experience, there was a clear Venn diagram in his head of finding the book you want to write with the book a publisher wants to publish. Sometimes, that happens even when you’re not sure you want to write a book. After writing this essay in the New York Times (based on her vibe-cession post on Substack), Penguin reached out to Kyla asking her to write a book.
Sahil experienced the same after his essay Reflecting On My Failure To Build A Billion Dollar Company went viral. The $150,000 advance Penguin gave Sahil meant, in his head at least, that he now had a singular focus—write a book for Penguin. With that frame he was able to commit himself to writing at least 1,000 words every day and made that part of his routine. Every time he felt some resistance, he reminded himself that he worked for Penguin and owed them a book for the money they gave him. Not wanting to just write a longer version of the Essay he’d already written, he began with a question—why don’t more people start businesses? That led to him writing The Minimalist Entrepreneur.
The panelists all felt that the act of writing a book was their answer to the lingering question of “why aren’t more people like me?”. In that sense, the book is about finding your people. Writing a book helped Coleman think about knowing what he thinks, in a way that tweets and even Op-Eds can’t deliver. Sahil admitted he used to believe physical books were largely pointless.
“A friend once said to me” Sahil rembered “that a book is like a totem.” You can gift it to someone in a way you can’t with digital media.
“Write the chapters of the book” Coleman finished “or fragments of it at least, on Substack.”
Good advice.
Side note: During the main panels there was a separate breakout room called Speaker’s Lounge where Niko McCarty, Alice Albrecht, Andrew McLuhan, Lisa Wehden, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Eugene Wei, Brian Gallagher, Susanna Black Roberts, Nick Whitaker, and Musa al-Gharbi spoke. Since I stayed in the main panels all day, I unfortunately wasn’t able to listen and get any notes on their talks. If you did, please send me a dm on X. I’d be happy to update this post with a link to your notes.
Paul Millerd had an excellent post on X with his half-baked ideas on future of book publishing as did Ellen Fishbein, the CEO of a new indie publishing house Altamira Studio, which was more of a stake in the ground for why Altamira exists. Both are worth reading.
More photos of the panelists here.
Thank you so much for this, Tom!
Great to meet you, Tom