Rethinking what publishing is—and where it's going
Running a publishing house gives you a lot to think about. Above all, I find myself wondering just how much value our content—or the things we want to say—actually has. I ask myself whether a given book has any real exchange value at all.
When we unspool our thoughts into words, pour them into the vessel we call a book, and share and announce them to the world, we feel something like the satisfaction of reaching self-actualization—the very top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
But once the book is out and produces no particular effect or response, most authors simply file the whole thing away as a fond memory.
The publisher's dilemma
What I've come to feel in this business is that, above all else, you have to sell books for the enterprise to keep running. And so the line that separates an author content with personal satisfaction from a publisher watching that author with a growing sense of unease is drawn at exactly one moment: the day the book comes out.
It would be wonderful if a book spread naturally once it was published. But what if the author is satisfied simply with having published it? For the person running the business, that is genuinely agonizing.
Asking why a book should exist at all
In a time like ours, anyone can easily put out a book, and there's no shortage of content ready to take its place. So why should books exist at all? Now and then I find myself posing that question, half in self-mockery.
It pushes me to think hard about what a book really is—what meaning it carries and what role it ought to play.
Is it merely a product to be consumed as paper or pixels? Or is it a vessel holding knowledge, a medium through which someone shares their value with the world?
Writing and publishing in the age of AI
AI has made writing genuinely convenient. On top of that, it's made revising your writing convenient too. But that doesn't mean all of those texts ought to become books. Some writing clearly deserves to be made into a book—and some doesn't.
Here's the genuinely interesting part, though: good content doesn't necessarily sell well. Good writing or bad, that seems to have become beside the point in this era.
What matters is whether the author has already built a relationship with readers before ever sitting down to write. In other words, by the time the book appears, there should already be people waiting to read it.
The future of publishers and bookstores
Publishers no longer seem competitive in a role limited to making good books and doing the marketing. If anything, I cautiously suspect that the future of publishing is one where both publishers and bookstores vanish, and authors and readers are able to meet directly, with knowledge at the center.
The work of unspooling our thoughts into the form of writing will remain important. Compared with audio or video, what's conveyed in writing can be far more concise while still offering deep insight.
Where Libretto Publishing is headed
As someone who runs a publishing house, I believe that publishers and bookstores alike should disappear. That age feels like it's coming soon. So what becomes of the role of the bridge in the middle?
That's what I keep researching and turning over in my mind. Through Libretto Publishing, I want to build that future—on the ground, together with all of you.
