Last year the Department of Justice won the anti-trust lawsuit against Penguin Random House when it had tried to acquire Simon & Schuster. The financial penalties led PRH to eliminate a good number of people from top executive positions. Not surprisingly, some of those great minds decided there might be a different business model for book publishing worth investing in and have started Authors Equity. Madeline McIntosh (former chief executive of PRH) Don Weisberg (former chief executive of Macmillan) and Nina von Moltke (former president of strategic development at PRH) provide executive leadership for Authors Equity with investments from some big name authors including Louise Penny and Tim Ferriss. Their business model signals an inflection point in publishing. Authors Equity won’t offer a contract with money upfront or guarantee payment, but it promises to provide authors with 70% of the profits in return for an initial investment. Successful authors recognize a better deal than 5% net profit on their books with traditional publishers. Subsidy publishing has gone mainstream. Advances on copyright royalties have dropped so low in recent years that it is untenable for authors to spend a year or two writing a manuscript for a few thousand dollars. Increasingly, agents are unable to sell manuscripts to the top trade publishers who are only acquiring new projects from authors who have previously had blockbuster sales. I now hear traditional publishers referred to as “legacy” publishers. There is a fundamental shift of financial risk from the publisher to the author underway.…

For nearly 20 years, Margot Bloomstein has shaped the content strategy industry. She’s the author of Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project (Morgan Kaufmann, 2012) and the principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston. Bloomstein developed the message architecture-driven approach to content strategy now popular with many practitioners. Recognized in 2015 as one of Boston’s “40 Under 40,” Bloomstein shaped the communication of corporate social responsibility at Timberland, content for crisis response at Harvard University, and strategy for cultural tourism in the state of Nevada. She has spoken at events worldwide and teaches in the content strategy graduate program at FH Joanneum University in Graz, Austria, and earned a BFA in Design and Anthropology at Carnegie Mellon University. She also guest lectures at universities, where she especially likes to focus on her work for Lindt & Sprüngli. It offers a vital lesson: if you get the opportunity to work for a chocolate company, do it. Trustworthy: How Smart Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap by Margot Bloomstein will be released in March of 2021 from Page Two Books. To regain the trust of consumers and citizens, marketers talk about empathy and authenticity. But how do you get beyond those buzzwords? Empower your audience to earn their trust. Smart organizations teach their audiences to evaluate product options, engage in continuous self-education, and make more informed choices and confident decisions. Airbnb, the FBI, TED, the United Kingdom Government Digital Service,…

Six or seven years ago my advice to aspiring authors of nonfiction books was to build an audience platform by blogging. An example of how critical blogging could be to securing a publishing contract can be found in the case of Ann Marie Ackermann, author of Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee. After an initial assessment of her manuscript, I had recommended she start a historical true-crime blog, and she did. In fact, the editor of the ideal book series at Kent State University Press became a fan of her blog and invited her to submit a book proposal. Her book won a 2018 IPPY in the True Crime category, closed a 180-year-old cold case, and has also been translated into German where it received critical acclaim and was recognized for its scholarly contribution to the history of forensics. Today, blogging may or may not be something an author decides to invest time and energy in. If your authority as an author is based on your subject-area expertise, it remains an important goal to have a visible presence on the internet establishing your credibility. Whether blogging is the best means to achieve that goal depends on you and your project. It may be more important to be listed as an expert source available to journalists and appear as a credible source in news publications covering your subject area. HARO (Help A Reporter Out) may be a better fit to…