My journey, mission, and transparency statement | last updated in April 2025
The Bottom Line is an independent publication that covers the book publishing industry and adjacent media, with a focus on authors’ interests. It started as The Hot Sheet in 2015 and was rebranded in early 2025.
The Bottom Line publishes on Wednesdays at lunch time, with some exceptions for holidays, business events, and other special news. Offering a mix of original reporting, analysis, commentary, and curated links, the newsletter offers a signal amidst the noise during a transformational time in the publishing industry and all creative media.
Who subscribes? Writers of all levels and backgrounds; people at traditional publishing companies, authors organizations, retailers, and distribution companies; freelance editors and literary agents; marketers and publicists; librarians, professors, and educators; and other people who serve writers.
I alone decide what merits coverage in the newsletter; no one can pay for coverage or placement, aside from issue sponsors, which are clearly labeled. When I have potential conflicts of interest, I state them. I am not on retainer or employed by any company or organization. Most of my income is derived from paid subscriptions, teaching, and speaking.
Who else is involved in The Bottom Line?
- Since 2015, Nicole Klungle has served as copyeditor and fact checker. She is paid a professional wage.
- My business partner, Mark Griffin, provides production assistance and customer support.
- Cartoonist Bob Eckstein is a paid contributor to every issue.
- I welcome contributions from freelance writers and I pay well. See submission guidelines.
How do you get your information?
In addition to being an avid reader of other news sources, I’m in regular communication with many of the people and companies that I write about, both on and off the record. I also attend industry events in-person and online. I offer original analysis and reporting whenever I can, quoting sources by name.
How much do you earn from The Bottom Line?
Roughly $150,000 in top-line revenue per year.
What does The Bottom Line cover?
My focus evolves with current events and issues of importance to writers. Here are the issues I’m covering frequently right now:
- Artificial intelligence: I carefully track legal issues and licensing; how AI is being used by authors, editors, and publishers; and new businesses and services using AI.
- Book marketing and promotion: In a world of media fragmentation, how are authors and publishers finding readers and launching books? Also, TikTok/BookTok: how is it evolving and what is its fate?
- Bookselling evolution: I monitor changes at Amazon that could affect publishers and authors alike; I’m also following the reinvention of Barnes & Noble and the growth of Bookshop.
- Publishing startups: Where is innovation happening? What startups are worth paying attention to? Who’s getting funding?
- Trends in the Amazon/Kindle market: What genres/subgenres and categories are doing well for self-publishing authors?
- The intersection of traditional publishing and self-publishing: More traditional publishers are striking flexible deals with successful self-publishing authors, and those authors more often hold onto their digital rights.
- New publishers, new agents: I always keep tabs on new publishing opportunities as important market indicators.
- Sales trends. I follow Circana Bookscan reports, the Association of American Publishers StatShot, and more.
How do you see the writing and publishing industry?
I began working in the traditional book publishing industry in 1997, at a mid-size Midwestern publisher then known as F&W Publications. I started as a book editor, transitioned to the magazine side of the company, and ultimately became publisher & editorial director overseeing a complex media business that encompassed books, magazines, subscription services, online education, advertising, and conferences. I saw firsthand how the Internet, digital publishing, social media, and online retail (namely, Amazon) transformed writing and publishing.
Some of my first reporting responsibilities were tied to Writer’s Digest magazine (still published today), where I was tasked with covering the self-publishing community. From the start, I saw how self-publishing was considered “lesser than” and stigmatized by most people, even by my colleagues in-house. This elitism and dismissiveness extended to ebooks until Amazon Kindle came along and changed everything.
Throughout my tenure, Writer’s Digest accepted advertising from paid publishing companies and other services that were and still are considered predatory in the writing community. The publication was sometimes criticized for this, but the amount of ad money was so significant that it was a business impossibility to turn it down and keep the magazine profitable. Today, that has made me extra critical of companies that appear more interested in taking writers’ money (often making unrealistic promises and using flattery to do so) than in helping them succeed.
Unfortunately, in my final months at Writer’s Digest, my worst nightmare came true: company executives demanded we partner with Author Solutions—the largest paid publishing services provider at the time—on a new imprint called Abbott Press. I quit my job before it became a reality. (Abbott is now closed, but Author Solutions and its subsidiaries still exist.)
During my time at F&W, I became intimately familiar with the business side of commercial book publishing and online retail, as well as the ins and outs of online marketing and subscription businesses. I was curious about social media, started a Twitter account that grew to a quarter of a million followers, and also launched my own website and blog before I left my job in corporate publishing. In those early days, I was optimistic about social media, online literature, and the digital revolution for writers. This was when literary publishers were launching all kinds of blue-sky initiatives, plus self-publishing took off in the early 2010s. Many people thought ebooks (and perhaps self-publishing more generally) would “kill” print and traditional publishing. That of course has not happened and will not happen, although the landscape has certainly changed. Mass-market paperback publishing has mostly gone extinct in favor of ebooks; mass-market fiction has been mastered by self-publishing authors, who sell most of their work through Amazon.
After leaving F&W, I took a brief detour through academia (2010–2012), teaching writing and publishing at the University of Cincinnati, before accepting a job at the Virginia Quarterly Review, an award-winning literary journal that badly needed to be brought into the digital era. In that role, I experienced the resistance to change that often dooms literary publishers unless they have significant institutional support, a big endowment, or plenty of donors. Too many literary publishers don’t understand how to build and sustain a readership or survive in today’s market conditions—which ends up being a disservice to the many writers who rely on them to get discovered and build a career.
While still at the Virginia Quarterly Review, I co-founded and co-edited a digital app and magazine, Scratch (it was still the heyday of magazine apps) that explored the intersection of writing and money for an audience of writers. My business partner and I had different perspectives about what we wanted to accomplish. I was (and still remain) pragmatic and want to offer writers accurate information and analysis so they can wisely navigate the business, while my business partner was more interested in sociopolitical issues and activism. So it wasn’t surprising when we parted ways after a few years.
From 2011 onward, I’ve been writing and publishing content for writers here at this site to help everyone better understand the publishing industry and how to grow and sustain a writing career. I created The Key Book Publishing Paths chart that I still update to offer transparency into the industry, without any judgment on how people publish.
In 2014, I left the Virginia Quarterly Review and started my own business. I began a paid newsletter, The Hot Sheet, in 2015 in partnership with industry journalist Porter Anderson. I bought him out in 2019 and have been running the newsletter independently ever since. It has won multiple awards and grown in subscribership every year.
In 2025, I decided to align my paid newsletter with the rest of my offerings at this site.
Here are some of my beliefs about the publishing industry.
- Authors who rely on publishers, editors, agents or anyone else to know and take care of the business side of their careers are more likely to be taken advantage of or end up in bad situations. My business philosophy: Partner, but do not depend.
- Despite ongoing changes in the industry, fundamental business principles underlie writing and publishing success. However, because of rampant misinformation, rage baiting, and fear mongering (all exacerbated by the current political situation), authors can easily get upset and anxious about changes that don’t in fact meaningfully affect their earnings or overall situation. I try to reduce anxiety in my analysis and reporting whenever possible.
- Author earnings surveys are mostly flawed unless you dig into the granular results, which are rarely made available to the public. When I notice something important in the market that will affect author earnings, I put that front and center in my newsletter.
- Ongoing consolidation (in the form of Big Five publishers) has not prevented quality work from reaching the market. There may be many reasons to dislike or object to consolidation, but dampening authorial creativity and initiative is not one of them. I don’t automatically assume Big Five publishers are doing bad things to authors and literature, but they are trying to grow profits, of course.
- Too many publishers and authors are focused on distribution and sales via bricks-and-mortar retail (which carries low profits and high risk) instead of the broader challenge of discoverability to readers. This means there’s a lot of discussion about what Barnes & Noble is doing, or how bookstores are performing, but this can become a distraction from marketing and promoting books so readers learn about them. The chain bookstore era—where publishers depended on store placement to make a book—ended years ago. Bookstores still matter, of course, just in a different way.
- Publishers tend to be very interested in visibility to tastemakers, critics, booksellers, librarians and industry insiders. Whether this helps an author sell books is an open question and depends on the book. Authors are generally better served by focusing on how they can reach readers directly over a long period of time without relying on a publisher or retailer (or anyone else) doing it for them.
- More than 60 percent of all books are sold at Amazon, regardless of format, but most authors don’t act or behave as if they really understand this. For the average author, markers of status and prestige (e.g., being carried in Barnes & Noble or getting reviewed by The New York Times) don’t necessarily translate into sales success or career success.
- Publishers and traditionally published authors still have a lot to learn about direct-to-consumer sales/marketing and online retail.
- Publishers are not evil; literary agents are not evil. Some are muddling through. Some are incredibly bad at business. In fact, I’d argue the majority of people working inside the publishing industry have bad to mediocre business skills because that’s not what publishers and agencies hire for.
- True innovation in publishing is exceedingly rare.