After more than two decades in publishing—across startups, established houses, and everything in between—I’ve learned that staying relevant takes more than just passion. It takes adaptability, strategic thinking, and a willingness to unlearn old habits. Below are a few key lessons I’ve picked up along the way—insights I hope will help other independent publishers navigate an industry that’s constantly evolving.

Lesson 1: Discoverability Requires More Than Just Metadata

The importance of metadata, especially for online discoverability, is widely known. While the quality of metadata throughout the industry has vastly improved over the years, the days of getting a huge bump in discoverability as a result of metadata enhancement are somewhat diminished. The fact is, we are in an environment in which everyone collectively is receiving similar guidance or is using the same tools. I’m not saying you should abandon metadata. My point is that publishers no longer can just rely on metadata for optimal discoverability. Having a well-rounded approach will serve you well.

For example, social media and digital advertising (e.g., Amazon Advertising, YouTube) can be effective tools to help generate discoverability for titles. In a crowded space, it’s important to adapt and play around with new services that will aid in discoverability. Of course, these things can be intimidating and costly, so my advice is to start slow, play around, and see if they help you move the needle. Once you have a better understanding of the opportunity, have a team member get trained up or hire a freelancer to assist.

Lesson 2: Embrace Tools That Make You More Efficient

As technology continues to advance at a breakneck pace, it’s important to take a deep breath, step back for a minute, and ask yourself if your publishing company is running efficiently based on available software and services within the marketplace today. We tend to run our businesses in the same manner for many years (or even decades) due to change being daunting, time-consuming, and requiring some investment. The reality is, independent publishers can pivot quickly and thus have somewhat of an advantage over big-house publishers, who tend to struggle with steering a large ship, internally competing for resources.

Cloud-based workflow platforms (outside of the publishing industry) are abundant, and the monthly user costs are very reasonable. For example, we use Asana for production workflow and project management, which includes the ability to assign tasks to third parties outside of our organization without requiring a user license. Take a moment to look around!

As you probably know by now, AI is another rapidly developing tool for our industry. The applications of this tool are endless. AI can write a job description, generate a presentation, write marketing copy from a printer file, output reports based on data, write a business plan, build a schedule, etc. The use cases are endless. I highly recommend carving out some time in your day and giving it a try.

Lesson 3: Cost Awareness Is a Form of Strategy

Making money in the publishing industry has become increasingly more challenging. All of us have experienced rising costs (e.g., printing, shipping, labor, benefits, insurance, software), which has increasingly put pressure on our margins and made us wonder whether we should raise prices. What exactly is the price elasticity for books? To be honest, there hasn’t been enough research and discussion about pricing within the industry. Maybe it’s because we don’t want to see the price of books go up. Regardless, it’s a question we should all be asking ourselves as the retail landscape continues to evolve.

At the end of the day, we all need to pay our employees and suppliers while having capital to invest in new books and projects. This brings me to controlling costs. It’s not a popular topic but one we all need to be vigilant about. My guidance here is simple. Revisit projects and company initiatives that are bleeding capital and get some outside opinions on whether you should continue down the same path. We tend to have blinders on, so a third-party opinion can help keep us grounded.

Next, make and maintain a list of contract renewal and opt-out dates. Those auto-renewals will creep up on you! Paying for a service that you may not need or want does not help your bank account. Also, keeping track of when a contract is coming up for renewal should give you ample time to search for a new service provider or to negotiate with your existing provider.  

Lesson 4: Data, Not Hope, Should Guide Your Publishing Decisions

Over a decade ago, I started up a publishing company with a few other folks called Callisto Media. The idea around Callisto Media was to identify underrepresented topics of high consumer demand and to output books within 30 days to fill that demand. This methodology served Callisto Media well and is still very much relevant today as a number of publishers are successfully doing similar things today.

My point here is, to run a successful publishing company, you need to be aware of consumer demand before investing time and capital into new titles. Look at Bookscan data, Google Trends, social trends, popular keywords being searched on Amazon and Google, etc., before you decide to publish a title. With the amount of available data at our fingertips, the days of blindly publishing new titles and hoping for the best may just end up disappointing you. Passion projects are OK, but they don’t always pay the bills.

Oh, and don’t forget to look at your backlist regularly and see whether you have existing titles on topics that are trending. If so, you might want to repackage and make these available quickly.

Lesson 5: The Industry Isn’t Changing as Fast as You Think, But You Can

I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years now, and I continue to hear how much the industry has changed. In my opinion, the industry hasn’t really evolved all that much when compared to other industries. Yes, we now have e-books and audiobooks, but these are just mediums for consumption. When e-books were introduced to the marketplace, many folks in the industry were worried about the print book going away. In reality, e-book adoption in North America (only about 10%) has been somewhat of a failure when compared to other countries around the world.

Print-on-demand has reduced the barrier to entry and thus allowed more people to enter the marketplace globally without needing to tie up capital in inventory, adding millions of new titles to an already crowded library of content. So yes, reducing a barrier to entry is a milestone for the industry. But when you think about the industry as a whole, we continue to see more consolidation to generate growth.

Over the next couple of years, I think we’ll continue to witness rapid consolidation, more physical retail stores (indies and nontraditional retailers choosing to sell books), and Amazon pulling back resources from the book division as it continues to focus on more lucrative categories and business ventures. The opportunity for you is to find ways to take advantage of these evolving moments in time, of data and trends, and apply them to your day-to-day business.

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