Apologies for radio silence - it's been quite the couple of weeks in the bookstore. First the great news: March was our most profitable month in the store ever, since we opened back in 2022. It was also our best non-holiday month for sales, ever. There are a
Fascinating and outrageous piece by Alex Reisner in The Atlantic today about how Facebook used a gigantic repository of pirated books to train their AI models. When employees at meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be
An ironclad rule in publishing.
Every so often I get an email from one of our publisher reps about a "drop-in" title. That is, a book that wasn't in the publisher's seasonal catalog of upcoming titles but has been "dropped-in" as a last minute addition. Usually drop-ins
Kim Scott, legendary author of Radical Candor and Radical Respect, just posted the above graphic on Instagram. As she explained...
A behind the scenes video from Simon & Schuster's warehouse in Riverside, NJ. This is how we get books into the store.
You might recall a couple of days ago, I wrote about Sarah Wynn-Williams' book about her time at Facebook, Careless People. Specifically, I wrote how the book would likely have landed with a dull thud were it not for Facebook's desperate efforts to convince readers not to
Some unassailable facts... Books about tech awfulness don't sell. Books about Facebook-uh-Meta definitely don't sell. Careless People is a boring title. "A cautionary tale of power, greed, and loss idealism" is an even more boring tagline. Nobody has heard of Sarah Wynn-Williams. And yet
A failure of communication.
Every author should get the chance to sit in on a sales call to see how books are sold to bookstores.