A hardcover book costs $28. You pick it up at the bookstore, hand over your credit card, and walk out with a physical object containing 80,000 words that someone spent years writing and that a team of people spent months… Read more →

People rarely talk about how books are priced. There’s an assumption, even among avid readers, that book prices are either arbitrary or dictated by some invisible market force that publishers don’t control. Neither is true. Pricing a book is a… Read more →

In the past twelve months, we’ve received somewhere around 400 nonfiction proposals and about 600 fiction queries. We said yes to nine of them. That’s a hit rate of roughly one percent, and while we’re not proud of the volume… Read more →

Last November, I walked into Powell’s City of Books in Portland with a vague idea that I wanted something to read on a long flight. I didn’t have a specific book in mind. I didn’t have a genre preference. I… Read more →

Here’s a number that surprises most people: the five largest publishers in the English-speaking world account for roughly sixty percent of all trade book revenue. Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. Between them, they dominate shelf… Read more →

Over the past year, I have had long, candid conversations with independent booksellers across the country. Not formal interviews with tape recorders. More like dinners, phone calls, and after-hours drinks at book fairs where people let their guard down. I… Read more →

I read seventy-three books last year. That number sounds impressive until I tell you that I remember maybe eight of them well enough to have a real conversation about what was in them. The rest left a vague residue: a… Read more →

Every week, somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five manuscripts land in our submissions queue. Some arrive through agents we know well. Others come over the transom from writers we’ve never heard of. A few are referrals from authors we’ve already published.… Read more →

Nobody in publishing likes to talk about this. There are hundreds of articles about how books get acquired, how they’re edited, how they’re marketed. There are interviews with bestselling authors, profiles of legendary editors, features about the magic of the… Read more →

I once received a book as a birthday gift that was so perfectly chosen it changed my opinion of the person who gave it to me. We had been casual friends. After that gift, we became close ones. The book… Read more →