from Authors Equity
You can’t hand-deliver books to Rock Center.
And other lessons from our first year.
Hi, all.
A year ago today, I was part of a tiny sleep-deprived band setting out on the streets of midtown Manhattan to test a theory. The theory was simply this: after chasing scale for most of our corporate careers, we thought we could get further faster by running the other way.
Instead of getting big, we’d go deep. Deep into a small list of books with a small list of authors. Instead of leaning on organizational heft, we’d see how far organizational agility would get us.
We met with a host of literary agencies all around town and basically said: trust us, we can do this, really. It’s a miracle anyone said yes — but enough of them did that it let us take our first steps, make our first books, sell our first books, achieve our first bestsellers.
We’ve added a few colleagues, but we can still all fit on a zoom screen and around the table in our one-room office. Still small by any normal definition of company size. But when you add the authors who’ve embraced us and the partners of all kinds who’ve helped us, we feel big indeed.