Reimagining Books
Publishing is being reinvented by people with taste
From time to time, your life experiences position you to see an opportunity invisible to most.
In 2022, I helped Vivek Mashrani with his book You Can Compound — originally self-published, it became a national bestseller in India, and was then re-published by Penguin — and I realised that the book publishing industry is ripe for disruption.
The sheer inefficiency in the process — long turnaround times, debates over inelegant designs, timeline negotiations — combined with the fact that leading publishing houses pay authors only ~10% royalty, presented a screaming opportunity for someone to start an unconventional book publishing company.
My conversations with author Jimmy Soni, founder of OSV Jim O’Shaughnessy, designer of the eudaimonia machine David Dewane, and director of UChicago Press Garrett Kiely, each corroborated this intuition.
All of this crystallised what I think a great publishing house looks like:
Author-first, both economically (higher royalty %) and philosophically (focused on enabling authors to produce their best work). When all the insights in the book are the author’s, why should they get only 10% of the economic value? Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected by 121 publishers: the traditional system nearly killed one of the greatest books of the 20th century.
Has good taste, meaning it is selective and only publishes high-quality books. Now obviously these are subjective notions. But in practice this means that for a certain group of readers, the phenomenon of ‘I will read any book Sebastian Mallaby writes’ extends to ‘I will read any book Stripe Press produces’. As a reader, you trust the taste of not just a specific author, but the publishing company as a whole. The current paradigm of readers having ‘favourite authors’ transforms into readers having ‘favourite book publishers’.
Crafts an immersive reading experience. This could mean high-quality printing, aesthetic fonts and cover designs, and even digital companions to the physical book. For example, this version of the Bhagavad Gita has a speaker pen that orates verses while reading them. And Tyler Cowen has written this AI-native book about the marginal revolution in economics.
I’m thrilled to see many smart people catching onto this opportunity. In this article, I highlight some of the new-age, unconventional publishers that I’m most excited about. These companies range from well-established with dozens of books published to newly-started with a couple of books announced, but each represents a distinct bet on what publishing can become.
Perhaps one of the first to catch onto this opportunity (?), Stripe Press has helped popularise books like Where Is My Flying Car? and The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, and bring to life books like The Scaling Era by Dwarkesh Patel. Their books also have really cool ‘living covers’ online.
Having said that, I’m not exactly a fan of the Stripe Press version of Poor Charlie’s Almanack — I prefer the blue-cover version for its numerous aesthetically-pleasing illustrations, which make a world of a difference to the reading experience.
As a math and physics buff, I love reading Quanta Magazine, and it’s so exciting to see their upcoming books The Proof in the Code (about the math proof verification software Lean), Six Math Essentials (written by the legendary mathematician Terence Tao), and Everything is Fields (a book about quantum field theory from one of its most passionate communicators, David Tong).
I imagine I will read every book that Quanta Books produces…
Founded by Jim O’Shaughnessy and headed by Jimmy Soni, one of my favourite authors. I loved his books A Mind At Play (biography of Claude Shannon) and The Founders (founding story of PayPal). An author who has gone through the traditional publishing process can bring deep nuance and insight into a publishing company, and Infinite Books is poised to benefit from his wisdom.
Their model treats the physical book as the anchor of a broader experience — their first book Two Thoughts came with an audiobook accessible only to buyers of the physical copy, an early example of what I think will become a growing trend towards digital companions for physical books. The book also came with a bunch of cool stickers!
From the creators of Arena Magazine. They have a coffee table book called Silicon coming out in May that I pre-ordered as soon as I heard about it. It’s “an art book and anthology” about the semiconductor revolution and looks stunning! Talk about good taste: this book has “a special foil stamped cover, a genuine thread binding, and 384 pages of European archival paper”, hundreds of full-page photographs, and essays by such insightful people as Dylan Patel.
Challenges
The biggest challenge I see for someone wanting to start a new-age publishing house is distribution. The existing publishers — HarperCollins, Random House etc. — are too embedded in conventional channels like bookstores.
I am yet to see a Stripe Press book at an airport bookstore. Publishing a book with Penguin almost guarantees a certain level of visibility, discovery and sales, and it is hard to see why any author would give that up voluntarily.
Online channels, particularly social media and online newsletters/podcasts, seem to be the most plausible solution to the distribution problem for these new-age publishing houses. Quanta and Arena each have magazines with thousands of readers they can cross-sell their books to (so does Stripe, with Works in Progress). Jim O’Shaughnessy, Jimmy Soni and Dylan O’Sullivan have strong personal brands and a substantial social media follower base to drive sales for Infinite Books. If done well, the distribution problem can be solved.
It is also an open question whether it is possible for the publishing company to be profitable while giving authors a larger chunk of the royalties. My understanding of the unit economics is that currently, a large chunk of a book’s retail price goes to Amazon or the bookstore as their profit margin. Sidestepping this by constructing an alternative distribution pipeline can enable the publisher to provide a greater share of author royalties.
The other possible route is that a high-quality, devoted reader base — attracted by being tasteful — means you have pricing power. Arena’s Silicon book is priced at $99, for example.
The upshot of taking on these challenges is that we can break the shackles of the conventional publishing industry and create deeply meaningful, well-crafted books that are works of art. We can create the next generation of GEBs, Power Brokers, and Poor Charlie’s Almanacks that continue to inspire curious minds. Seeing this wave of new-age publishing companies makes me feel like a kid in a candy store — it’s an exciting time to be a bookworm!
Feedback and reading recommendations are invited at malhar.manek@gmail.com
Lost Art Press fits your criteria - they publish books on woodworking. https://lostartpress.com
Love the intuition, but correct me if I'm wrong -- do any of these nascent ventures publish fiction?