After Indigo’s recent board upheaval and sad earnings report, returning CEO Heather Reisman is taking a page out of the Barnes & Noble reinvention playbook: A return to bookselling after a costly detour into lifestyle retail. Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch noted (sub required) that Indigo’s goal is to increase book sales to 65–70 percent of the company’s revenue; the last time books held that kind of revenue share was March 2015.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
