The other Jane Friedman—here’s Porter’s profile at The Bookseller—was at Random House’s Knopf for twenty-nine years, and for eleven years was HarperCollins’s chief, the first woman CEO of a major worldwide publishing power. Friedman’s widely admired Open Road Media is developing verticals this season as one of its key strategies—offering us a good chance to acquaint you with this readership-development construct if you’re not familiar with it.
A vertical in publishing is a niche interest in which a publisher can concentrate products and cultivate audience relationships: community. Even without the terminology, you probably know one vertical as soon as we mention it: Writer’s Digest is one of the verticals of F+W. Under the Writer’s Digest vertical, you’ll find a magazine, a book imprint, online education, events, editing services, and competitions—a whole range of offerings that add up to the key goal of verticalization: engagement.
Two models of vertical are operating now at Open Road, which publishes more than 10,000 books by more than 2,000 writers:
- The Lineup—”Where Murder and Mayhem Is Delivered Daily”—concentrates on mystery and crime titles in Open Road’s collection. Readers can receive free stories weekly via email, subscribe to a podcast, and follow a dedicated blog.
- Feed Your Need to Read offers breezy coverage of pop issues and current affairs for book lovers. For example, a recent article helps you figure out what book to read based on which US presidential candidate you favor. And The Academy Awards: Read Between the Oscars rounds up books related to the award nominees this year.
Open Road continues to test topics, response, and the impact of email marketing on a host of organizing themes and interests.
Bottom line: Authors can spot verticals, such as Simon & Schuster’s Riveted (see Links of Interest), being used by publishers and explore their own potential for inclusion in verticals, either in commercial settings or in author collectives. Curation, context, engagement: the more you’re aware of verticals at work in the industry, the more you can learn about their potential to boost your own readership outreach.
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.
