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March 28, 2024

Seth Godin: This Will Be the Last Book I Publish in a Traditional Way.

Seth Godin, prolific author and marketer supreme, says he is publishing his last book. Why?

“It’s been years since I woke up in the morning saying, “I need to write a book, I wonder what it should be about.” Instead, my mission is to figure out who the audience is, and take them where they want and need to go, in whatever format works, even if it’s not a traditionally published book.

If you’re among the majority reading this that has never bought one of my books in a bookstore, not much will change. But I thought I’d share with you this fork in the road. Thanks for reading, in whatever form you choose”.

Godin talks about his largely positive relationship with the book industry, while noting that “the architecture of [the] industry is fundamentally broken.”

Well, worth a read by journalists and those that pay them, as we face fundamental questions like how much do journalists need publishers, and how much do publishers need journalists?

In the old days, publishers were a taken-for-granted necessity. Of course, publishers owned the presses, and the presses printed journalism. Or the station owners held the station licenses and the technology needed to create programs. Now the Internet is the press and the station and so much else, a pipeline of universal and always-on distribution. Many obstacles still loom, like getting readers and viewers to know your stuff is out there on the web, yet new writers and groups of journalists are finding ways to get to audiences.

For publishers, outsourcing — to Demand Media for niche content, to bloggers for local content, to India for copyediting — is increasingly a way to cut costs while increasing the amount of content under their brands.

Make no mistake: Big news brands — like big book publishers — still have many advantages, but in a Facebook-sharing, Twitter-spread world, direct-to-consumer sales of book, and journalism, offers new promise.

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