Four Years!

Help Me Decide The Shape Of Year Five

My book proposal starts in ONE WEEK! There are a few spots left; sign up here. Happy to answer any questions over at anne.trubek@gmail.com.

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I was mulling a topic for this week’s newsletter, so I browsed through the archives. I had to keep scrolling down and down to get to the first post, and only then realized I’ve been writing this for newsletter for 4 years (the first ones were sent via TinyLetter; I moved to Substack a few months later). Four years!

In the early days, I was very focused on being useful, and providing information about the publishing business I thought would be helpful to authors, prospective authors, anyone interested in going into publishing, academics, and, of course, readers. After two years, I expanded upon and revised together those “useful” posts into a book, which was published into the pandemic-haze of July 2020. The goal was transparency, to draw back the curtain on what has been an unnecessarily opaque industry. I was learning it as I went, and wanted to share what I was learning with others.

Since then, I have weighed in on publishing controversies and topics du jour, and published some deep dives into American publishing history, a topic I’ve been researching for awhile now (I’m still obsessed with 18th century printing/publishing/bookselling), and continued to write nuts-and-bolty newsletters expanding upon those earlier ones.

But as this newsletter’s readership continues to grow—there are about 4,000 of you—I’ve become less certain of who its audience is, and thus less sure what would be useful to write about. Four years ago I had a sense of who I was writing for and what they might be interested in—people who worked in publishing, fans of Belt, those interested in the relationship between books and technology, and, of course, friends.

But these days I have less of a clear conception of who you are, there on the other side of screen, clicking your inbox. As Substack has grown, so has their recommendation engines, and I receive dozens of new subscribers a week, with names and domains I don’t recognize. It’s hard to be useful when you don’t know who your audience is—what questions they may have, what they are curious about. The best writing, I firmly believe, always stems from a clear communication between a writer and an imagined reader.

So I wonder: who are you, readers?

If you are so inclined, I’d love it if you could help me imagine you. Tell me who you are and why this newsletter is useful to you; which topics you are interested in; what questions you have; any topics you’d like to see research and address as I start my fifth (5th) year writing Notes from a Small Press. Thanks in advance to all who do; comments are open!

ALSO! Two corrections to last week’s post on misconceptions about publishing: I was too hasty to proclaim most books are printed in China; it may be the majority are printed in the US. Also, publishers who pay royalties on net revenue may not always be paying authors less than those who pay them on a percentage of list price, so apologies for that as well, and thanks to my publishing friends for helping me set the record straight!