We publishers were thick in the throes of the digital transition. Benign ambivalence to the new ebook format aside, most of the drama related to tensions across the value chain. From authors to publishers to retailers to consumers, everyone — but most especially we publishers — were under intense pressure to justify our share of the pie. What, exactly, were we for in this new world?

The reckoning was good for us. It forced clarity about our role: publishers are not printers, nor are we distributors. Our job is to be the best possible partner to the author — not only in creating the best book, but in trying to solve the infernal discovery problem (in a rising sea of content, how do we persuade someone to buy this book?).

Back to Eric’s talk. It was part of a conference hosted in the Random House “cafetorium” on the 2nd floor at 1745 Broadway. There were other speakers, but Eric is the only one whose words stuck.

Whether or not you’ve read The Lean Startup, you have likely absorbed at least some of its lessons and language (”pivot,” “MVP”). Eric was teaching the value of moving away from the traditional, long-lead industrial development cycle and toward the virtuous cycle of rapid build → measure → learn, repeat. The lean methodology was so widely adopted by builders of all kinds that it’s hard to remember when it wasn’t gospel.

But while we as Eric’s publisher were proudly — and successfully — supporting him and his message, it was clear from his talk that we were very, very far from absorbing the method into our own business practices. In the kindest way possible, Eric mapped out the whole of the publishing process, pointing to every juncture where he’d hoped for testing and iteration and instead found an opaque and rigid assembly line.

I scribbled pages of notes as he spoke and, much to the likely annoyance of colleagues, took to hounding everyone about his explicit and implicit points. Why couldn’t we change to allow for adaptations based on reader signals? Why couldn’t we give the author full transparency at every stage of the process? Why couldn’t we accept that an author might know more than we did — not just about the words inside a book, but about how to build and activate an audience?

Publishing has evolved in many ways over the last fifteen years. That transitional period gave birth to the Random House Author Portal (h/t to my current colleagues Nina and Andrea for that!) — still the best in the business at providing authors open access to sales, marketing, and royalty data. Production and go-to-market cycles have become at least somewhat more flexible, though with a long way to go. Many publishers have embraced opportunities to test covers and campaigns, and to use their backlists as living laboratories for pricing and program development.

So why is there still, often, resistance to new ideas? Why is the process still relatively opaque and rigid? Why is there still an allergy to the idea that authors might know more than we do? Usually, however it’s articulated, the honest answer comes down to scale.

It’s easy to make dramatic changes in process when you’re adapting to the needs of a single author. It’s much, much harder when you’re publishing hundreds of authors a year and being measured on the volume of profit you extract.

From an entrepreneurial perspective, this industry challenge is Authors Equity’s opportunity. Publishing one book at a time means focus and flexibility are built into the foundation. And since learning from our authors is one of our primary team goals, the partnership presupposes an openness to their ideas.

But could this advantage erode over time? As months pass, the list grows. Even at our current rate of about 20 new books per year, that still means an ever-expanding population of past, present, and future books — all in need of our customized, very human attention.

If our value to authors is derived from our defiance of industrial efficiency, does that mean we can’t scale?

How do we grow while staying true to our mission?

I know I’m not alone with this founder’s anxiety, and that’s one of the very many reasons I’m glad to be reunited with Eric Ries.

The Lean Startup gave a generation of founders the tools to build quickly, to scale, and to create massive value. But, as Eric now writes: “I failed to anticipate what came next. I taught people how to build something worth protecting — but not how to protect it.”

While examples from tech are likely the ones that will spring to mind first, the graveyard filled with once-good intentions comes from across all industries.

Eric has thought long and hard about remedies. He’s studied two centuries of capitalist history, foraging for the secrets to better outcomes. Some of his answers are wonderfully pragmatic — tied to governance and structure. Others are refreshingly radical, like creating a new definition of profit itself.

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…And How Great Companies Stay Great hits bookstores next Tuesday, but the ideas inside have been hard to contain.

Already, Dan Heath has called it “the best and most important business book of the year.” And, already, Eric’s hearing from new waves of founders and leaders hungry for the wisdom and help it offers.

What does it actually take to build an incorruptible company? We’ll be back with Eric next week — if you have a burning question, leave it in the comments below.

— Madeline

Incorruptible is out next week. Preorder your copy at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop, and wherever books are sold.

Publishing and parenthood came into my life at around the same time — I was fresh out of NYU when my first baby was modeling Penguin-branded onesies on the company website. When my next pregnancy turned out to be twins—twins!—my partner and I were suddenly carrying a double stroller up and down subway stairs and figuring out which one of us had to leave work first to relieve our nanny.

Long story short, we parented. We changed diapers, researched preschools, opened yogurts, introduced the kids to sushi and soup buns. In some ways we took the easy road, like when we decided to leave a Brooklyn walk-up for the green backyards of the Colorado suburbs. In some ways we chose the harder road, like letting each of our teenagers choose their own high school.

Over the years, I culled parenting tips from Love and Logic, The Whole-Brain Child, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Some told me to follow my kids’ lead. Others told me to push harder. I liked them, but never really saw our parenting style reflected — until Brandon Webb’s Puddle Jumpers.

At the end of the day, what we all want is kids who can handle whatever life throws at them. That’s exactly what Puddle Jumpers is about.

As a Navy SEAL performance coach, Brandon once believed mental toughness came from pressure and perfection. Then he became a dad — and everything changed. He discovered that real resilience isn’t built by pushing harder. It’s grown through compassion, connection, and giving kids room to mess up and try again.

I came across it at just the right time. With older kids, it’s harder to find family time together; harder to find those little moments that instill your values. And just as the stakes get higher, the years start to go faster. I wrote this quote at the top of our family calendar whiteboard in red Expo: “We lead them when they’re young, so they can lead themselves as they get older.” From the aptly named chapter “Shift from Command to Counsel” — which has become our mantra when we’re tempted to micromanage.

My husband loved Puddle Jumpers too — and if you’ve ever tried to get a dad to pick up a parenting book, you know that’s saying something.

I hope parents, grandparents, and caregivers out there love Puddle Jumpers as much as I do. And with Father’s Day right around the corner, it also makes a pretty great gift for the dads in your life.

Today I’m sharing our team’s favorite post from Brandon’s Substack (about staying calm in a very noisy world) — enjoy.

— Sarah

Puddle Jumpers Parenting

Be the Calm "Airline Captain" Voice in the Cabin for Your Kids

The world feels really loud right now…

Read more

5 months ago · 12 likes · 4 comments · Brandon Webb

Puddle Jumpers is available now. Get your copy today at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop, and wherever books are sold.

Then we met Josh. And man, does he have heart.

Rookie, on sale today, is Joshua Bassett’s raw, deeply intimate account of getting everything he ever dreamed of, losing it all, and finding hope on the other side. He explores themes so many of us face: fear, imposter syndrome, addiction, PTSD, sexual assault, vulnerability, faith, gratitude – with the soul and style of a songwriter.

Josh’s goal in writing Rookie was simple: to share his story so others feel permission to do the same. It’s why, this year, he became a NAMI ambassador — and why they’re partnering with us on the campaign.

He gives us all permission to be rookies. To never stop dreaming. To start before we’re ready. To have faith that no matter what happens, we’re going to be okay. And unlike most look-back memoirs, Josh is still very much in it. In the mess. The insecurity. The uncertainty. And he’s bringing us along on his journey.

In the last few weeks as we’ve approached publication, I’ve had a front-row seat to Josh’s rookie journey. He’s shared that he’s terrified – to release something so vulnerable into the world, especially after the world turned on him — loudly, and publicly. He understands the range of emotions that come with living life online — which, increasingly, we all do. And how growth comes from pushing through. From facing down your fear. From starting before you’re ready.

So, while there are indeed “bombshells” in Rookie, it’s so much more than that.

It’s a book for young people. Early readers have shared that it validates their experience being a young person in a digital age. (My shorthand for this one is: “The first celebrity memoir for the Anxious Generation”; this caught the attention of Jonathan Haidt’s team. More on that soon.)

But it’s also a book for parents who want to understand the world their young people are living in.

And it’s for regular 30-somethings like me, who could stand to remember that we are, in fact, all rookies. That to face down our fears is what makes us grow. Makes us feel alive. I came in skeptical. I’m leaving hopeful. (I also leave enrolled in the New York City Marathon…with Josh…where we’re running for Team NAMI in November. Rookie for life.)

— Carly

An excerpt from Rookie

Rookie is available now. Get your copy today at Amazon, B&N (signed), Bookshop, and wherever books are sold. Or listen to the audiobook, read by Joshua, on Spotify.

My lucky job is to shepherd many of our books from finished draft to finished book. My favorite part is working with the authors themselves: not surprisingly, each of them brings a completely different perspective to this part of the creative workflow. They care about and prioritize different qualities of design, want different levels of input, and respond differently to schedules—they always keep me on my toes!

Of all the books we’ve published so far, Daniel Arsham’s Future Relic—Failures, Disasters, Detours, and How I Made a Career as an Artist has been my favorite from a craftsmanship perspective.

Future Relic is a brutally honest masterclass in how to pursue an artistic career. It combines elements of memoir and how-to, showing readers what it takes to sustain a creative life over time.

Each aspect of the book’s design and production was ambitious, and we had excellent partners in this work: the book’s design team, the legendary type and design studio House Industries. And of course, Daniel himself.

You don’t need a perfect idea to start. You don’t need a grand vision. You just need to make something, and then make something else. —Daniel Arsham

When the author is a visual artist, there are extra treats in store. The first was that Daniel created a new sculpture to serve as the basis of the cover art. It’s one of his labyrinth sculptures, cast in bronze or sand with intricate detail. Translating this to the jacket meant using a sculptural emboss. While standard embossing evenly raises height wherever it’s applied, sculptural embossing uses a custom die created specifically around the artwork, with varying depths so the image lifts off the page dynamically, like relief sculpture.

Inside, the book has printed endpapers and a meticulously typeset interior full of quotes, photos, and sketches. Even House Industries’ font, Trillium, is an original interpretation of square Roman capitals, in line with Arsham’s style of mixing ancient and modern. The first line in every chapter opens with elaborate hand-drawn drop-cap letters Daniel created from scratch for the book. Each one is an architectural drawing in the shape of a letter: a race car in the curve of an O, a building in the shape of an A. And if you get your hands on the signed edition, the hardcover case includes the subtitle stamped in white, hidden under the jacket like a treasure to discover.

Fittingly for a book about detours and persistence, the process of bringing it to life has involved adjustment and refinement. From revising printer proofs to fine-tuning the balance of text blocks and images, the creative work on this book was deeply gratifying. Making ambitious things is hard. It’s iterative, it’s humbling, and it’s so worth it.

Future Relic is far from the only book on our list where we’ve learned from our partners and been able to get creative with specs. Our 831 Stories novellas feature 831’s signature embossed gold foil Cupid logo—the perfect finishing touch on their unique color-block covers designed by C47. Also in the romance world, our deluxe LYX packages feature collectible touches like stenciled edges and sticker sheets. To get the sculpturally embossed foil mansion just right on James Frey’s Next to Heaven jacket, designed by Rodrigo Corral Studio, I even drove from NYC to our printer in Maryland to see how the color of the LithoFoil rendered on press. Who doesn’t love a rental car mission and graciously collaborative printers?

The focus of our list and the close partnership with our authors mean we can approach each production decision from a one-off perspective instead of sticking to a scaled process. It’s about what’s right for the individual book and its individual author.

We’ve ended up with a breadth of special packages including James Clear’s upcoming spiral-bound Atomic Habits Daily Calendar; the endlessly giftable Puzzle Mania! (with stenciled edges and an extra foldout, only at B&N); and Joseph Nguyen’s Anxiety Antidote Boxed Set collecting both of his clothbound books into a beautiful package.

In each case, our goal is always the same: find as many ways to say yes to our authors’ visions as we can. I feel the result every time I run to the door to see the finished copies for the first time—it’s like being a kid unwrapping presents, and the excitement is renewed every time.

—Rose

Future Relic is available now. Collect the limited edition signed copy while supplies last. Order your copy today at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop, and wherever books are sold.

There are some good parallels with being a (tantrum-free) toddler. We continue to learn at a furious rate (often from our authors); we continue to make new friends (so many wonderful partners!). Sometimes we trip up, but we shrug it off and move on to the next adventure. And we eat a lot of cookies.

Since our last birthday, we’ve published thirteen new AE books, one boxed set, and three card decks. Our partners at 831 Stories have five new books that fans and indie stores are raving about. We’ve launched a partnership with LYX for new adult romances, and already have five books out to show for it.

Our team has grown too, with Erin Vandeveer, Danielle Finnegan, Becca Kadison, and Maddy McGovern joining and expanding our pins on the map to include Pittsburgh, Austin, and Portland, Maine.

So, yes, a lot has happened. But as I write this, I happen to be sitting in the same coffee shop where I wrote the very first notes to myself about what this company might be. I’m struck by how closely we’ve hewed to that original caffeine-fueled vision (as seen below!).

It was all about people wanting to bet on themselves. Authors looking for a different kind of partnership. Editors, designers, and other talent looking for flexibility and focus. And us: so sure there was a better way to connect the puzzle pieces that we wanted to build it ourselves.

We haven’t had much time for self-celebration this birthday month, but we did host one party — and it was the most fun my publishing heart could hope for: a puzzle party with a few hundred independent booksellers at Winter Institute in Pittsburgh.

Winter Institute is the annual convening of ABA booksellers. It just happened this time to take place in my hometown — and to coincide with the blizzard that swamped the Northeast. Craig, who had championed us going, ended up stranded in NYC by canceled flights. Luckily Erin, our production guru, was able to jump in — and that meant both Erin and I got to experience what it’s like to be at a show with Deb. Deb’s been selling books since before some members of our team were born, and she knows everyone.

I had the honor of joining the editors’ buzz panel, where I got to present upcoming books by Eric Ries and June Cohen alongside some incredibly wise and entertaining fellow publishers. And I joined a conversation with indie publishers about new business models for the industry.

But the experience I’ll never forget was emceeing the puzzle party. The star of the show was Joel Fagliano, editor of New York Times Games and of Puzzle Mania! — except that blizzard had him stuck on the other end of the state. Zoom and the incredibly supportive ABA team came to the rescue: Joel led puzzle play from the mega screen in the ballroom.

We’ve witnessed some seriously impressive puzzle play since publishing the book, but even Joel was blown away by the wits on display in that room. And what I loved most was the number of booksellers who are now making their own plans to adopt puzzle parties in their own stores. (Let us know if you want to explore this yourself!)

Our actual official birthday last Thursday was packed: a morning-long planning session with an author and his team; moderating a virtual conversation between two other authors and their fans; a visit to Spotify with another author; and an evening at a dinner honoring yet another. For an introvert like me — I will confess it’s sometimes a lot.

But I still love every day of this adventure. I’m still grateful for the leap of faith from my fellow cofounders, who looked at those few lines in my notebook and saw something worth building together. And we founders are even more grateful for the even bigger leaps of faith from the colleagues and authors who chose to bet on themselves alongside us.

Here’s to another trip around the sun. One request before I go: is there a topic you’d like to see us tackle in year three? Share in the comments — we’d love to know.

Best,
Madeline

Since we launched Authors Equity, journalists have often reached for the shorthand “hybrid publisher” to describe us. It makes us squirm — and here’s why.

In the book world, “hybrid” is used as a catch-all for companies that sit somewhere between traditional publishing and self-publishing. In practice, it most commonly describes a fee-for-service model: authors pay upfront for editing, design, production, and printing. They receive a finished product, but limited reach into the retail market. That model works for some authors. It’s just not what we do.

Our authors don’t pay us. We fund every cost related to making and marketing the book — editorial, design, production, promotion, and more — and we only get paid if the book is profitable. That means we have every incentive to reach the widest possible audience and actively sell and distribute to all retailers and libraries, which we do via a distribution partnership with Simon & Schuster. We share 60–70% of profits with our authors — meaningfully more than the profit-share arrangements traditional publishers occasionally offer, and significantly more than the standard advance-against-low-royalties model that leaves many authors with far less than their work deserves.

Some journalists might apply the “hybrid” label because we don’t pay advances. But the absence of an advance doesn’t mean the absence of commitment. We are fully invested — financially, strategically, and creatively — in every project we take on. We work with authors as genuine partners, collaborating on every aspect of the publishing process. We bring decades of publishing experience, established industry relationships, and new partnerships with people who aren’t typically part of the book world at all. Our incentives are fully aligned with those of our authors.

A separate source of the hybrid misnomer might involve format rights. We sometimes work with authors who have previously self-published, and in a small number of cases we’ve agreed the author can continue to sell a certain format directly if we don’t believe we can add meaningful value. Our job is to build the best possible publishing plan for each book, not to collect rights by default. But even in those cases, we’re all in with every one of our authors.

The same thinking applies to our licensing terms: rather than locking authors into the standard life of copyright in the U.S. — a lifetime plus seventy years — we license rights for ten years at a time. We believe we should have to earn our place as partners, not just assume it. None of that is hybrid thinking. It’s the opposite.

Why do we care about this label? Because words shape expectations. “Hybrid publisher” implies we’re half-in, half-out. That framing misses what we’ve actually built: a model that takes the best of traditional publishing — the expertise, the relationships, the distribution reach — and pairs it with the freedom to think differently about how books reach readers, and an economic structure that finally reflects something that has always been true: authors are essential to their book’s success, and they deserve to benefit accordingly. That’s the root of what publishing should be. No qualifiers needed.

Built from Broken by Scott Hogan approaches pain differently. Instead of asking how to manage it, Scott asks why so many bodies break down in the first place—and what’s actually within our control. He challenges the idea that discomfort is inevitable, or that the only options are rest, medication, or doing less of what we love.

Since Scott self-published the book in 2021, it’s reached nearly a million readers who were looking for something more practical—and more hopeful—than “learn to live with it.”

Below is my conversation with Scott Hogan about why joint pain is so often misunderstood, how well-intentioned routines can work against us, and what it looks like to rebuild strength and mobility in a way that lasts.

—Carly

Carly Gorga: A lot of people assume that joint pain is just part of getting older. What are some of the most common pains you see that feel inevitable—but actually aren’t?

Scott Hogan: This is the crux of the problem—people accept joint pain as normal. There’s a lot more we can do than people realize to tilt the scales in our favor.

The first thing to understand is that the vast majority of joint pain occurs in, or stems from, what I call the Big Three joints: the low back, knees, and shoulders. If we can bolster these joints and improve mobility around them, most joint pain throughout the body resolves on its own.

The second key concept I talk about in the book is tendon-related pain. Roughly 60–70% of non-arthritic joint pain is actually tendon pain—not cartilage, ligaments, or other tissues, but tendons, which connect muscle to bone. Of that tendon pain, about 90% is caused by repetitive-use overload.

So we’re left with a pretty eye-opening takeaway: fix and prevent repetitive-use tendon injuries, and you’ve addressed roughly 80% of joint pain. That’s the Archimedes lever for managing healthy joints throughout life.

CG: Many people are active—they walk, do yoga, spin, or run—and yet something always hurts. What are the warning signs that a “healthy” routine is quietly breaking the body down instead of building it up?

SH: This is an important and very common challenge.

In the age of cold plunges, massage guns, and regenerative therapies, I’m seeing more people cover up root-cause problems with surface-level recovery aids. Put simply: if your exercise program requires anti-inflammatories or recovery tools just to keep you functioning, something is wrong with the program.

The most telling warning sign is pain from exercise that doesn’t resolve within 24 hours. That’s a signal your body isn’t recovering properly, or that you’ve overextended and are drifting toward repetitive-use injury. An elevated resting heart rate first thing in the morning is another good indicator that your system is running on fumes.

Interestingly, the solution isn’t always more rest—it’s often better countertraining against the habits that lead to injury. For example:

• A regular golfer needs to mobilize and strengthen muscles that aren’t used during their swing.

• An office worker needs to mobilize the hips and fronts of the shoulders to counteract habitual slouching at a keyboard.

This kind of countertraining helps prevent asymmetries from turning into repetitive-use injuries over time.

CG: You’re skeptical of stretching as a solution for tightness, which will surprise a lot of people. If someone stretches regularly and still feels stiff or achy, what’s really going on beneath the surface?

SH: There are a few problems with stretching as a solution to joint pain. First, it’s important to distinguish between dynamic stretching—moving through a full range of motion repeatedly—and static stretching, where you hold a stretch for 20 seconds or longer. Most of the research focuses on static stretching, and it’s not particularly encouraging. Some studies even suggest stretching before exercise can increase injury risk and reduce strength.

From a behavioral standpoint, static stretching is also boring for most people, which means adherence is very low. I’m much more in favor of dynamic stretching, where you move in and out of positions five to ten times.

But the bigger issue is stretching without purpose. People often end up stretching muscles and joint systems that are already unstable. The better approach is targeted: identify which joints need stability and strength, and which need mobility, then address each accordingly. The blanket strategy of “stretch everything” just doesn’t work well in real life.

CG: The book emphasizes that you can rebuild your body with surprisingly little time. If someone trains just two or three days a week, what has to be true for that time to actually improve joint health?

SH: It’s a common misconception that daily or near-daily training is required for exercise to be effective. Research shows otherwise. Studies of untrained seniors, for example, demonstrate that just two days of resistance training per week can deliver the same strength gains as four or five days—if it’s done purposefully.

When training only two or three days per week, each session needs to pull on two key levers:

• A functional warm-up that mobilizes common tight muscles and problem joints

• Resistance training designed to improve connective tissue resilience and overall strength

If someone does that even twice per week, and adds variety of movement into everyday life, they’ve stacked the deck in their favor for warding off joint pain and degeneration.

CG: You promise that people can feel meaningfully different in 4–8 weeks. What are the first changes someone should notice if the process is working—and what do those early wins signal about long-term recovery?

SH: I truly believe people can see dramatic improvements in 4–8 weeks, whether they’re new to exercise or longtime fitness enthusiasts.

First, people should feel good leaving a workout—whether that’s at the gym or at home. Not broken down or exhausted, but energized and activated. That’s an immediate indicator the session was successful and helps build momentum.

Second, most people are stuck because they’re avoiding the main constraint in their system—their biggest bottleneck. We gravitate toward what feels good and what we’re already good at, but progress there is incremental. When you instead address unstable joints or mobility restrictions head-on, improvements in both performance and pain can be dramatic.

What surprises people is how enjoyable this process is. Strengthening the weakest link tends to improve everything else automatically. Resolve low back pain, for example, and suddenly movements feel easier across the board—not just in the lower body. The old saying applies here: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

The challenge is that the weak link isn’t always obvious. That’s why, in the book, I lay out a step-by-step system for identifying and fixing those constraints—and for changing habits so joint-damaging issues don’t keep cropping up in the future.

Start healing those achy joints! Built from Broken is available now. Order your copy today at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop, and wherever books are sold.

Let’s face it: it’s all well and good to shake things up, but if we don’t actually sell the books, then… who cares, right?

In one capacity or another, I’ve been working on selling books for a few decades now. It’s rarely easy, and all those stats about fewer people reading books are downright depressing. But part of what I love about what I do at AE is that our focused list means I can really work one-on-one with every single one of our authors to ferret out all the possible nooks and crannies where readers might be found.

Over the whole year, we’ve found lots of those readers, and as we sprint/crawl our way to the holidays, there’s plenty to celebrate. Captain’s Dinner and How to Be Free have been on multiple bookseller best-of lists. The LYX and 831 romances are finding their happily-ever-afters via in-person events and on social. JL Collins is giving us the gift of one more trek to NYC to have a pre-holiday Simple Path to Wealth chat with megapodcaster Steven Bartlett.

And don’t even get me started on Puzzle Mania! The passionate puzzlemaniacs have come out nationwide to make this one of the overall market successes this month, currently #14 on BookScan’s adult hardcover list.

But since I’m the one who gets to have the last word on this year, I can’t end it without giving thanks to the author who’s brought me joy every single week: Joseph Nguyen. His Don’t Believe Everything You Think has just kept going and going week after week, and now it’s sharing space on the bestseller list with sibling The Overthinker’s Guide to Making Decisions. Also thanks to Albert Lee, co-agent with Rebecca Gradinger, for the collection of celebratory gifs that I’ve come to look forward to every Wednesday.

Not only has Don’t Believe won the hearts and saved the minds of hundreds of thousands of my fellow Americans, it’s also done what has always seemed almost impossible for a US edition: it’s hit the bestseller lists in the UK.

In my past lives working for global publishers, I’ve tried hard to get US-published books well distributed overseas. I even worked in London for a year, laser-focused on doing just that. We had some nice successes with major international celebrities and events, like illustrated books featuring Michael Jordan and the making of the Titanic movie (just to be clear, these were separate books). But if you weren’t the GOAT or an ocean liner, it could be a struggle.

Well, it turns out the struggle to achieve inner peace needs no translation. Our distribution partners at Simon & Schuster UK, Ireland, and Australia joined the party right away, and eventually their booksellers and readers did, too.

Since the UK release in January, Don’t Believe Everything You Think has racked up a cluster of coveted retail spots: the Waterstones Non-fiction Book of the Month, the Foyles Book of the Month, and WHSmith’s Deal of the Week. It’s appeared on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and it is currently on the shortlist for Foyles Book of the Year. We’ve sold tens of thousands of copies there already and, just like in the US, it just keeps going.

When one publisher sublicenses rights to another publisher and then pays traditional royalties, the resulting income can be pretty disappointing for authors. But because we went the distribution route instead of selling the rights, Joseph (and Authors Equity) retains a far greater share of the sales revenue. That’s obviously great news for our little startup and for our author.

To all the booksellers out there, both here at home and around the world, thank you for being such great and enthusiastic partners to us this year. I hope you all get to end the year with a healthy dose of joy and rest. Come January, I’ve got a whole new list to sell you!

Like many of you, I’ve been playing New York Times Games for years—Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee (in that order). I texted my scores. I dunked on my family. I thought I was pretty smart.

I thought wrong.

On Monday night, our team went to the Barnes & Noble launch event for Puzzle Mania! in NYC and saw true puzzle heads in action. People were shouting out “Wordle in One” answers before I even registered the letters on the screen. I thought Swifties were a force to be reckoned with, but that was before I saw the Connections Cult hanging on Wyna Liu’s every word.

Puzzle Mania! (the book) is here, but Puzzle Mania (the movement) has been with us for a long, long time.

The event was supposed to be a casual celebration. Instead, it turned into something closer to a professional sport. What struck us wasn’t just the intensity—though, damn, the intensity—but the community of it all. Hearing NYT Games editor Joel Fagliano talk about getting his start in high school by sending puzzles to legendary Will Shortz. People losing it when someone cracked a tough one. The energy of finding your people.

Book publishers have been making books out of puzzles since shortly after Gutenberg (or so Claude tells me), so when we first started working with Caitlin Roper and Trish Daly at NYT a year ago, the proposition seemed straightforward. But as the design came together, we realized: this book is different.

Monday night showed us just how different. Watching puzzle maniacs meet their heroes and reveling together in gameplay revealed the real magic.

Puzzle Mania! takes something that’s fundamentally solitary and digital—you, alone, with your phone at 6am—and turns it into something else. You can still keep it quiet and solo if you want—just you, the book, and your coffee on a Sunday morning. But it also opens up the chance to engage with all those other humans in your life who love puzzles. And with the holidays coming up, puzzles might be one of the few group activities everyone can actually agree on.

Our friends at B&N locked into the vision from day one. They saw right away that this wasn’t just another book—it’s a reason to gather, a social object, an excuse to actually talk to the people in your life about something that matters (like puzzle streaks).

That’s why we partnered with them on an exclusive edition, with funky designed edges and a bonus Super Mega Crossword (that my comrades from the launch event could probably solve in eight minutes). And apparently, they really meant it when they said they believed in this thing, because they just announced that Puzzle Mania! is a B&N Book of the Year finalist.

This is, of course, very exciting news for our tiny team. But it also feels like confirmation of what we saw Monday night, and what Caitlin saw when she created the original Puzzle Mania as a dedicated print-only section of the paper eight years ago, and what everyone who’s been asking “WHEN CAN I GET IT?” already knew: people are craving this. They want to take their puzzle obsession offline, to gather around a table instead of a phone, to earn bragging rights that don’t require a screenshot.

So what does a book of NYT Games actually look like, you ask?

• Never-before-seen spins on popular digital games like Spelling Bee and Connections

• A Mega Crossword with two sets of clues (easy and hard)

• Joel Fagliano’s hand-picked selection of his favorite-ever NYT Mini Crosswords

• Unique visual brain benders, logic puzzles, and trivia categories

• And so. much. Wordle.

The puzzle maniacs are out there. They’re organized. They’re very, very good. And based on what we saw Monday night, they’re just getting started.

If you were at the event, thank you for showing us what Puzzle Mania! looks like in action (and for absolutely destroying my confidence).

If you’re a fellow puzzle maniac, the book is available now—and like I said, the B&N edition is very cool indeed. So grab one for yourself, and while you’re at it, why not get one for all the puzzle maniacs in your life? (Just sayin’.)

Monday night showed us what this book was always meant to be. We can’t wait to see what you do with it.

—Carly

Puzzle Mania! is available now. Visit puzzlemaniabook.com to order your copy—including the B&N exclusive edition—and download a free Puzzle Mania Game Night Kit so you can dunk on your friends IRL.

This week, we launched our first book in partnership with LYX [pronounced “luxe”], Germany’s #1 New Adult Romance imprint. If you follow the category, you probably already know LYX—they’re the publisher behind Maxton Hall, one of the biggest breakout hits in recent years. Now, beginning with Anywhere by Sarah Sprinz, which hit stores on Tuesday, we’re bringing their proven bestsellers to North America on a publishing schedule designed for how romance readers actually consume content—FAST.

When we first embarked on this partnership, I’ll admit I was anxious. The program is ambitious: four different series launching in the first six months, with new installments releasing every two months thereafter. Add to that the fact that I’m just a few years removed from the New Adult demographic, and you can understand my trepidation.

But then I did what we always do at Authors Equity: I leaned into the model and built the right team around it.

Trusting Your Partners (and Hiring the Right People)

Part of the magic (and fun) of Authors Equity is that we can mold ourselves around the goals, needs, and ambitions of our partners. We bring publishing expertise, deep knowledge of the US market, and a lot of enthusiasm to our projects. But we’re able to wade into different categories because we acknowledge what we don’t know and trust our partners to lead where they have the expertise.

LYX has been publishing romance for nearly two decades. They’ve built a passionate, engaged community of readers in the crucial 17-25 demographic with emotional, high-quality escapist fiction. They’ve achieved extraordinary success with both international and German authors. They know what they’re doing.

In fact, LYX has been influencing how we think about romance publishing for years. Their unparalleled commitment to premium physical products—sprayed edges, standout cover designs, interior art—has set a standard that American publishers are now racing to match.

We were the right partner because we let them be them, but here. They lead on editorial and design; we bring market knowledge and distribution muscle through Simon & Schuster. But we also understood that success here requires more than simple translation—it requires someone who deeply understands this reader and this category.

Enter Danielle Finnegan, who joined us from Little, Brown as Brand Marketing Lead specifically for this partnership. Danielle gets the category, the reader, and how to build community in a crowded market. She’s been essential to figuring out how to launch this program the right way.

Our Comic Con Debut

What’s fascinating to me—from a pure business perspective—is the fan culture. In an environment where capturing and holding attention is increasingly difficult, New Adult readers are deeply engaged. They’re not just buying books; they’re collecting series, participating in online communities, driving TikTok trends, and showing up at conventions hours early. This is the kind of reader engagement that translates to sustainable sales.

Case in point: at New York Comic Con this past weekend, we gave away 1,000 LYX tote bags and 200 early copies of Anywhere. The line wrapped around the convention floor before we even opened at 10am. We had to cap it by 10:30. People were freaking out over the interior character art. That’s the energy we’re building toward.

What to Expect from LYX

Anywhere (Dunbridge Academy #1), which launched this week, is dark academia set at an elite Scottish boarding school—think atmospheric, angsty, and exactly the kind of escapist fiction that keeps you up until 3am. It spent more than 40 weeks on bestseller lists across Europe.

We’re following it up in November with Lessons in Faking by Selina Mae (Hall Beck University #1), a Wattpad sensation now in 11 languages. By spring, we’ll have introduced four series, with new installments dropping bi-monthly across the list.

What We’re Learning

This partnership reinforces one of our core beliefs: publishing magic happens with teams purpose-built for a given opportunity. LYX knows their authors, their readers, and their category. Danielle knows how to authentically speak to this reader in the US. And the rest of us can contribute what we know about making and selling books and building brands in the market at large.

None of us knows everything. But together, we can figure out anything.

—Carly

Anywhere is in stores now. For more information about the LYX partnership and upcoming titles, visit LYXbooks.com or follow @LYXbooks on Instagram.

It's a big week here at Authors Equity. Not only are we officially back in full swing after Publishing Summer Break (though over here in startup land, we never really stopped!), but we celebrated a truly special publication day.

We're thrilled to release How to Be Free: A Proven Guide to Escaping Life's Hidden Prisons by New York Times bestselling author and resilience expert Shaka Senghor—a remarkable book that's achieved what might be the modern media trifecta: endorsements from Joe Rogan, Oprah, and The Breakfast Club. When you can unite that particular constellation of voices, you know you've tapped into something universal.

Shaka's journey is nothing short of extraordinary. After developing his resilience methodology under the most extreme conditions imaginable—19 years in prison, including 7 in solitary confinement—he didn't just rebuild his life; he transformed it entirely, going from solitary to the C-suite. Today, he works with Fortune 500 CEOs, professional athletes, and founders who recognize that his frameworks for breaking through invisible barriers are uniquely proven under pressure. His story is living proof that if he can break free, so can anyone.

Because here's the truth: we all face what Shaka calls "Hidden Prisons"—self-doubt that keeps you from pursuing your dream job, fear of failure that paralyzes you from taking risks, cycles of grief, anger, and shame that keep you stuck. These invisible barriers affect everyone, but they don't have to define us.

In How to Be Free, Shaka shares the roadmap he developed for overcoming these barriers—one that was battle-tested in the harshest conditions imaginable. If he can do it, so can we.

Rather than tell you about this book, I want to let Shaka speak for himself. What follows is the preface to How to Be Free, a story that reveals not just how this book came to be, but why his message of transformation and freedom is one we all need to hear.

— Madeline

Excerpted from the Preface of How to Be Free

I was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1972.

By the time I was a teenager, the streets had become my classroom. Violence was normal. Fear was constant. And in 1991, at nineteen years old, I made a decision that would change my life forever.

I shot and killed a man.

For that, I was sentenced to seventeen to forty years in prison. I ended up serving nineteen—seven of them in solitary confinement.

Prison is designed to break you. The walls, the rules, the routine—it’s all meant to strip you down until you forget who you are. But what I discovered is that the most powerful prisons aren’t the ones made of concrete and steel. They’re the ones we carry with us—built from grief, anger, shame, trauma, and self-doubt. The ones that keep us stuck, even when the door is wide open.

And here’s what I’ve learned: Prisons have doors. And those doors can be opened.

I walked out of prison in 2010 into a world where people like me were expected to fail. Where 67.8 percent of men who had served time would be back behind bars within three years. But I refused to be a statistic. Instead, I became a student of freedom—not just physical freedom but mental, emotional, and spiritual freedom.

What I learned inside those walls wasn’t just how to survive— I learned how to rebuild, adapt, and overcome. And over the years, I’ve developed a deep understanding of resilience—not just as an idea but as a practice. Today, I teach that practice to others. Executives, founders, athletes, and world-class leaders come to me—not because they’ve been to prison but because they feel trapped.

Some are battling impostor syndrome, questioning whether they truly belong in the rooms in which they’ve earned a seat. Some are entrepreneurs frozen by self-doubt, afraid to take the risks that lead to success. Others are parents trapped by perfectionism, struggling under the weight of expectations.

And that’s when I remind them of the truth:

Everyone has hidden prisons. But every prison has a door.

As a resilience expert, my work is rooted in helping people break free—whether from past mistakes, limiting beliefs, or self-imposed barriers. Over the years, I’ve developed a framework that has helped leaders, creators, and innovators build lives of clarity, purpose, and impact.

This book is about that framework.

Freedom isn’t a destination I reached when I walked out of prison—it’s a path I continue to walk every day.

What I’ve learned is that freedom requires constant renewal. Just when you think you’ve found it, life can shake you to your core, and suddenly those invisible restraints tighten again. The journey I share along with the techniques for reclaiming freedom speak to a universal truth: liberation is a practice we must recommit to daily, especially in our most challenging moments.

Through raw storytelling and hard-won experience, I’ll show you how to design your own freedom ecosystem—using strategic mindfulness, emotional regulation, and purposeful boundary setting to break free from whatever is holding you back.

These aren’t abstract theories. They’re battle-tested tools, forged in the hardest conditions imaginable.

One of my core mantras is simple but powerful: “I don’t have to wait to be free. I am free right now. I am free from the weight of my past. I don’t owe my old mistakes my future.”

This is not just another personal development book. It’s a blueprint—a guide for anyone ready to step into the life they were meant to live.

Let’s get free.
— Shaka

Order your copy of How to Be Free today, at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop, and wherever books are sold. And for more from Shaka, sign up for the Hidden Prisons Newsletter.

And no matter how much you love your work, they call it work for a reason. Even if you happen to be joyfully reveling in breaking the rules via a disruptive startup, and even if you have the best colleagues in the world, and even if you get to work in service to the most delightful collection of artistic collaborators, that doesn't mean you don't need a break sometimes.

Or is it just me?

It's peak summer here, and so I'm here to recommend that for all our sakes, while we're busy trying to do good or do better, we don't forget to revel in what this season is made for. And by that I mean: don't forget to have fun.

Maybe like me you looked for some fun in a summer blockbuster. Popcorn in hand, ready to suspend all disbelief, I found myself settling in for what was supposed to be fun with the latest Mission: Impossible. Mistake. The plot and writing were so preposterously bad I wished I'd just taken a nap.

If you can't count on Hollywood for fun, what's the point?

And that's what brings me to my enthusiastic recommendation of a book going on sale today: Fade In by Kyle Mills.

Many of you know Kyle Mills as the nine-time #1 New York Times bestselling author of the wildly popular Mitch Rapp series, but he's back with his own antihero. This is Mills unleashed—exploring the dark intersections of tech, power, and politics through the eyes of a morally complex operative who makes his own rules.

This is the book that delivers the experience I was looking for in that movie theater. Villainous billionaires who've decided democracy is too slow to save us, and a complicated hero forced back into the game. Writing that flies. An ending that will make you actually laugh with the writer at its audacity.

So if you, too, feel you need a break from all the seriousness—just for a bit, just to restore you until you go back in there to fight again in the fall—my prescription for you is Fade In.

(And if you have your own recommendations for books or other entertainment that fit this same bill, please drop them in the comments!)

Happy summer reading.
Madeline

Order your copy of Fade In today, at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop, and wherever books are sold.

New Bethlehem is as beautiful and safe and perfect a town as exists in the United States, as beautiful and safe and perfect a town as exists anywhere in the world. But no beauty exists without flaws, however hidden. Absolute safety is but an illusion. No matter what we think or see or believe or feel, perfection isn’t real. And beneath the beauty and safety and perfection of New Bethlehem, there are secrets and there are lies, and there is sadness and there is rage, there is failure and there is desperation, betrayal and heartbreak, hate and violence.

And once or twice in a century, there is murder.

About a year ago, I was boarding a flight from LA to New York, bracing for six hours in a middle seat at the back of the plane. My phone pinged with a text flagging a priority submission. I downloaded, put in earphones to tune out seatmates, and settled in for the ride. And what a ride it's been.

I had last encountered a few decades earlier when I was the sales director for the imprint publishing his debut—a spectacular piece of writing that did spectacularly well until it became spectacularly controversial. Many people got very, very angry at the author.

I wasn't one of them. To me, the whole thing seemed tragic and operatically fraught. Looking back on it now, compared to so many other literary controversies, this one makes 2003 feel, to me, like the Victorian age—long ago and far away in its earnest morality.

By the time I got off that plane in New York last spring, I knew I wanted to publish James’ new book.

Next to Heaven is pure fun in the way not many books are these days. It's not trying to teach. It's not trying to preach. It's The White Lotus in Connecticut, starring the contemporary descendants of Capote's Fifth Avenue swans—but with so much more money and so much less class. You may not want to meet any of these characters, but you can't resist peeping through their windows to see up close what makes them tick. The dialogue was so sharp I actually—for real—laughed out loud in that middle seat. I was immediately reminded why I'd fallen in love with James's writing all those years ago. It moves.

And, like Capote amongst the swans, James writes with a verisimilitude that can only, as The Wall Street Journal now puts it, come from living amongst the tribe he’s documenting.

Despite their advantages, rich people were rarely ever cool, though they spent huge amounts of money trying to achieve it. And cool people were rarely rich because they were lazy, and part of being cool is not giving a fuck. But rich people and cool people often interact because each has what the other wants.

My colleagues Robin and Carly felt the same way, so off we went to meet with James and his agent Eric. We approached the encounter with some nerves. We loved the book, but what about this author?

We needn't have worried. I don't know how long the meeting went, but it was long enough that Eric finally had to kick us all out of his office. And it was long enough that we knew we'd be working together and that it would be fun. Our parting words to each other: "Let it rip."

Here's what's been normal about publishing James Frey: pretty much everything. Author and editor immediately settled in together. We quickly found the right publicist and the right designer. We presented the book to the sales reps and booksellers. Everyone got to work doing all the many things you have to do to publish any book.

Of course there's some drama. Some people are still mad about AMLP, and some others are so ready to renew their anger they'll jump at shadows, like the rumor that Next to Heaven was written with AI (it wasn't).

Nobody wants to party with you.
Nobody?
Sorry, Dude.
Not even you?
Sorry, Dude.
Charlie was shocked, speechless. It didn't make any sense. Everybody had always wanted to party with Charlie. And his truck had always been the center of the party. The loudest, the rowdiest, the most fun. The coldest beer and the steamiest hot dogs. The spiciest mustard and the tastiest relish. The Best Time Ever. And now nobody wanted to party with him. He couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe he was being shunned.

I can't know what the impact of all that hostility was on the James of five, ten, fifteen years ago, but the James we've been working with has metabolized it in such a way that he's not interested in playing it safe. While everyone else I know is constantly self-editing in public, conscious and wary of any of the many ways our own words can come back to haunt us, James is going the other way. He says all the quiet parts out loud.

Not surprisingly, that makes him fun to write about, and that colorful coverage in turn makes him even more interesting to half the people who read it and even more enraging to the other half.

There are more important things in life than money.
And I said
Yeah, what?
And in some bullshit, fake-sincere, bullshit voice, she said
Love and happiness, Billy. Love and happiness.
And I laughed, because I know and everybody with half a fucking brain knows that money buys you love and happiness.

Those who know James personally are like us: fiercely loyal and enthusiastically supportive. He’s warm and generous. He works hard and appreciates that everyone else does, too. He’s curious and game. And he just happens to be a fantastic storyteller.

A little more than a year after first reading the manuscript, pub date is finally here. For everyone looking for a vacation from all the seriousness and self-righteousness and darkness out there, we hope you'll enjoy this exuberantly entertaining, joyfully unapologetic skewering of some terrible people in their beautiful houses.

No book is for everyone, but for those this is right for, the escape offered between its lurid covers is a little slice of heaven indeed.

You going to tell me where we're going?
I think you already know.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Tell me.
We're going all the way. You and me. All the way.

Order your copy of Next to Heaven today, at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop, Book of the Month, and wherever books are sold.

And James is newly on Substack. Check him out at .

Hi all.

I know that telling you I love authors sounds like I'm stating the obvious, but most people say they got into publishing for the books. For me, when I think about why I've stayed in this business, it's not so much the books as the people who write them.

Why? Are they happy, sunny, easy personalities? Rarely! Instead, they're smart, funny, critical of themselves, and discerning about others. As I heard one say this week: authors have a unique way of moving through the world, and I like the way they do it.

When you go to a lot of events for authors, you come across other attendees who think they'd like to be published themselves. I'm sure many of those who'd like to switch seats with the person on stage have compelling ideas and stories of their own, but I also know that a lot of the author envy comes from a wild misunderstanding of what authors do all day.

In an idealized vision, the job of the author looks cushy: they can lounge around, not going to an office, getting paid just to put some thoughts down on paper, and then get celebrated. I know a lot of authors, but I don't know any for whom that's true. Yes, many get to skip the hassles of office life, and they get to spend their days in the company of characters and narratives they create. But even for those who revel in the "pure" part of the writing life, that's only one part of the job.

There may have been a time in the distant past when writers could be successfully published authors just by doing the writing part. But if that idyllic vision ever existed, it certainly doesn't now.

Every working author realizes early on that the other half of their job may be the harder one. As hard as writing books is, it's what they set out to do. Selling books, on the other hand, is not only hard but also often uncomfortable and frustrating. While an author can control what they put inside the books, no one can control the number of people who read it. In a time when there are more books published than ever before (6,000 new ones a day), capturing the attention of a substantial audience is tough.

Most authors are willing to do whatever it takes to promote their book. They will dutifully invest their time and wits in fulfilling any request, going to any venue, posting any post that seems like it might help. But it can be Sisyphean. It's one thing to do hard work for a defined result—press this button, get this outcome—but it's much more frustrating when no one (and I mean no one) really knows which combination of buttons is going to get the book to sell. What worked last year/month/week might or might not work this time. Or maybe there's a great result (sales!) but no one's all that sure why.

But the authors keep at it, year after year, book after book. And many, if not most, are keeping at it while also hustling their way through day jobs—teaching, writing-for-hire, or, God forbid, going to offices.

You might think by this description that authors would be a cranky bunch to steer clear of, but those of us who work with them see it as the greatest privilege and wouldn't (or couldn't?) work in service to any other kind of humans. Even when it's tough, even when things don't go exactly as planned, the best of them are simply the best, full stop: warm and engaging and sharp and wise. Good partners in thinking about the "what ifs."

Springtime brings a burst of book events, as the weather encourages actual readers out into the wild. That means we at AE have had the pleasure these last few weeks of seeing many of our authors in action. A few highlights:

• Events at NYC bookstores Word Up and Books Are Magic for Sing the Truth with the Kweli Journal and book editor Laura Pegram and contributors JP Infante, Naima Coster, and Nicole Dennis-Benn.

• The Gold Coast Book Fair, in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where We Hold These “Truths” author Casey Burgat was in conversation with contributor and Theodore’s Books proprietor Hon. Steve Israel. Bonus for me: the day was a two-fer, since the author I'm actually married to, Chris Pavone, was there speaking about his fantastic new novel, The Doorman, published by our friends at FSG/MCD. And it was a two-fer weekend for both Casey and Chris, who had also participated in the Gaithersburg Book Festival the day before!

And the cherry-on-top this week: the author we’ve come to think of as “Uncle JL”—JL Collins, whose The Simple Path to Wealth has quietly sold more than a million copies over the last decade—made the trek to NYC from his idyllic and remote cabin on the shores of Lake Michigan. We lured him with a podcast booking with his pal Hasan Minhaj and a home-cooked meal. It was his first trip to New York in decades, so we were a little nervous about how he'd feel about it. Happy to report: a good time was had by all.

Of course, the month's not over yet. Believe it or not, it was just a year ago that our current president became a convicted felon. Our author, New York Times reporter Jonah Bromwich, was present in court every day during the historic trial, witness to developments that were formative for Trump 2.0. Dragon on Centre Street: New York vs. Donald J. Trump is coming to stores on Tuesday.

And on Wednesday, Jonah will take the stage at P&T Knitwear, along with his New York Times colleague Maggie Haberman, to talk about it all. Time to pop the popcorn and place your preorder here.

So thank you to our authors for showing up every day in service of your craft—and for making all of our lives a little bit better along the way.

See you out there!

Madeline

Dear Friends,

You are readers who understand the power of books to change us. You know bone deep how certain books—through their voices, their truths—compel us to listen, and inspire us to share them with others. These are the special books of our lives. They gather us into community. Deeply moving, compelling, sometimes raw, always compassionate, Sing the Truth, on sale today, is just that kind of book.

Curated by visionary artist and writer Laura Pegram, and introduced by the globally acclaimed, beloved writer Edwidge Danticat, this landmark anthology brings together powerful voices from the Kweli Journal, which Laura founded and kept strong across a transformative period in America. Kweli, which means "truth" in Swahili, is a NYC-based literary foundation that has, through workshops and its quarterly publications, nurtured BIPOC writers, championing the stories they have shared with the world.

Sing the Truth commemorates fifteen years of Kweli's community and literary work, bringing its Journal's most remarkable stories together for the first time. Each piece in this astonishingly powerful collection illuminates the depths of human experience through the beauty and urgency of pure storytelling. From Naima Coster to Nicole Dennis-Benn, from Daphne Palasi Andreades to Susan Muaddi Darraj, and from JP Infante to Laura's own story of how she founded Kweli and why, these writers remind us that words have the power to shape culture, to reclaim narratives, and perhaps above all, to resist erasure.

We are at a moment where the future of literary spaces like Kweli cannot be taken for granted. But we are also at a moment where we—readers, lovers of language—can make a difference. By supporting Sing the Truth, and experiencing its power and beauty—its truths—you are investing in a movement, in a legacy, in the voices that will shape tomorrow.

All proceeds from this anthology directly benefit Kweli Journal, supporting its mission to nurture emerging writers of color and foster a vibrant literary community.

Together with Kweli Journal, we’ve also launched an initiative that benefits underserved voices. You can donate copies of Sing the Truth to classrooms and communities losing institutional support. Each $20 donation sends a copy to where it's needed most.

Do come, then, and listen to the music in Sing the Truth. If you're moved, as I am certain you will be, please help ensure that these voices are, and will continue to be, deeply, widely heard.

With gratitude,

Robin Desser

Order your copy of Sing the Truth today, at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop, and wherever books are sold. Or make a donation.

+ You can learn more and get tickets to Kweli’s NYC events here.

Today, bestselling author Seth Godin published his 10,000th blog post. This milestone marks 25 years of daily writing that has generated 2 billion views and 3 million words. It's the embodiment of the Permission Marketing revolution he introduced in 1999 that transformed how creators and businesses connect with audiences.

Seth didn't just write about permission marketing – he lives it. His blog and corresponding newsletter represent perhaps the longest-running and most successful demonstration of the very strategy he introduced to the world 25 years ago.

When Seth began his blog in 1999, email newsletters were still a novelty for most businesses. The internet was young, social media didn't exist, and marketing was still primarily about interruption – TV commercials, telemarketing calls, and print ads designed to grab your attention whether you wanted them or not.

Seth saw a different path.

The strategy of permission

In his groundbreaking book Permission Marketing, Seth introduced a radical concept: what if, instead of interrupting people, marketers created value so compelling that audiences would ask to hear from them?

While this approach may seem obvious today – especially to many of you Substackers reading this – it's easy to forget how revolutionary it once was. Seth didn't just predict the future of marketing: he helped create it by demonstrating its effectiveness day after day, one post at a time.

The power of strategic consistency

We’ve had the great fortune of partnering with Seth on his latest book This is Strategy. During the launch process last fall, we got to see for ourselves how his strategic thinking plays out. While it's easy for most of us to get caught up in the task-of-the-moment, Seth is always looking around the next corner, making sure we're all clear where we're heading and why.

This is exactly what he's been doing all along. He's measured success not by viral reach, or fleeting attention, or even by the sales of a given product, but instead by the degree to which he has been able to earn trust and add real value to his readers' lives, day after day.

The result? While others have been vulnerable to the vagaries of search algorithms, social media trends, and rising acquisition costs, Seth has slowly but surely built an intensely loyal audience that he has been able to engage for years in ways other authors are just starting to recognize.

Strategy in action

For This is Strategy, Seth proposed something that seemed counterintuitive: offer a bundle of seven copies to his most dedicated readers. Who would want seven copies of the same book, we asked? Even with the bonus of a really good chocolate bar?

We bundled 1,000 sets, expecting a modest response.

They sold out in a day.

This is what happens when you invest in depth rather than breadth: you have a long-term relationship with individual readers who don't just want to keep your ideas for themselves, they also want to share those ideas with friends and coworkers. The book isn't just a book, it's a tool for initiating great conversations (and of course, always better with great chocolate).

Seth's 10,000th post marks the moment when the world has finally caught up to what he's been practicing all along.

You can see the fruits of the revolution Seth started everywhere today – from authors building platforms through newsletters to businesses cultivating loyal customer communities. In each case, the permission-based approach that Seth pioneered has become the foundation of sustainable success. Those who thrive in today's landscape are those who, like Seth, focus on earning trust first and selling second.

In a world that increasingly rewards short-term thinking, Seth's 25-year commitment to showing up daily stands as both inspiration and challenge. It's living proof that the best strategy isn't about quick wins, but about consistent contribution that compounds over time.

Congratulations, Seth. Here’s to 10,000 more.

To celebrate this milestone, comment on this post OR share your favorite Godinism on social using #godin25 for a chance to win one of five Godin25 bundles. Each includes This Is Strategy, Permission Marketing, and "The 10,000 Deck" — 25-years of inspiration in 52 cards. Winners selected from posts between April 8, 2025-April 15, 2025, will be notified via DM. No purchase necessary.

Note: As we were deploying this newsletter, we learned about a $3.99 Kindle price drop on This is Strategy this week. If you were thinking about getting a copy, there's no better deal!

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.

Birthdays are important, for family, friends, pets, and companies. I wish we could celebrate by all of us taking a nice long break, but…we don’t really seem to do that, despite our unlimited vacation policy.

So, instead I asked our team for their reflections on the year past. What jumped out is that this is a group that loves to learn. I know: who doesn’t? Everyone at work says they love to learn – or why would corporate “learning and development” exist? But Team AE is high on it, with all of us earnestly and joyfully figuring out how to do things that would be nowhere near our job descriptions in traditional structures. Finance procuring translators; ops making acquisitions; marketer designing back-ads. Everyone takes turns teaching and learning, with even our authors getting in on the game: Joseph Nguyen teaching us to TikTok, James Clear workshopping titles, Seth Godin leveling up our marketing.

From Sarah: “I’ve learned new tips every single day from authors and experts who are doing cutting edge work in this industry. The amount of wisdom we’ve gotten in marketing, advertising, and audience building is mind-blowing.”

After a lifetime in sales, Deb is learning how all the other pieces come together, has launched her own newsletter, and has even become the most likely teammate to bring up Instagram. Rose has learned not only how to compress production schedules, but also how to manage mapmakers, art researchers, and fact checkers. Craig has learned to his relief that there’s more access to the marketplace than ever before: “Bookstores and distributors judge our books on their merits, not on how many years we’ve been in business.”

Carly has learned to trust her instincts. Ilana is learning to break rules. Nina has discovered just how much she enjoys working directly with authors. Diana learned how happy authors and agents are when you apply transparency and common sense to accounting statements.

The youngest member of our squad, Joli has discovered the joys of "being a part of something in literature that is bigger than myself." And Don happily realized that even after fifty years in this business, he still had more to learn – including new vocab words like "bougie" and "bestie."

Not all lessons are fun. Andrea loves to create order out of the chaos some of the rest of us concoct, but I don’t totally believe she loves slogging through media liability insurance setup or Library of Congress copyright registrations. Nina wasn’t yearning to understand international tax withholdings. And even though I can only blame myself, I really did not enjoy the multiple bike trips to Rock Center required to teach me that it’s actually not possible for a civilian to make a personal delivery to a show producer working there.

Do we miss parts of our past lives? Of course we miss the people we used to see every day at work and the easy access to so many extraordinary experts. (And, yes, I really, really miss the corporate repro and delivery services.)

But, so far anyway, one year in, the theory we started off with is turning out to be true. When the whole company is the size of a small committee, you don’t need committees. When you make decisions on the fly, you don’t need to have meetings about meetings (ok, actually, we did, once). When you don’t have to take time to build consensus, there’s a whole lot more time to build things. And SO MUCH LESS POWERPOINT.

Most important of all, when you get rid of the silos and tap into everyone’s ideas, most especially the authors’, it’s amazing how many more good ones there are, and how much more fun it is to bring them to life.

We have many people to thank for getting us through year one, but, just like the profit share, the largest share of gratitude goes to the authors. We’re not 100% sure they knew they were joining a cult when they signed on to publish with us, but so far they seem ok with it. We’re very proud of the nine whose books we’ve already brought to market, and we’re very excited for those still to come.

All the best,
Madeline

This is my first appearance on Substack, but since I've been at Authors Equity from the beginning, I'd like to share a bit about a book we’re publishing today that was one of our first acquisitions.

When Madeline reached out to me about creating a new publishing venture, one of our first conversations was about the list we'd try to build. If you've been following along with us, you've probably noticed that we've got a bit of everything, and that reflects the breadth of our interests as readers and publishers.

But there was one category we agreed to stay away from, even though it's one of my favorites: politics.

Two weeks later, we received a proposal from Casey Burgat, a former congressional staffer turned graduate school professor who was trying to change the conversation around politics in America. Seemed like an easy "no," based on our just-formed rule.

But then we met Casey.

A couple days later we signed our first political book.

So much for that.

One of the many reasons I love publishing is getting to meet incredibly talented people who are brilliant and passionate about what they do, and who want nothing more than to share that knowledge with the world. That's Casey. We met him and fell in publishing love.

We were about to enter one of the most important election cycles of our lifetime, and anyone could see it was going to get ugly. Casey convinced us that the country needed a better foundation for the conversations that were about to happen. We knew we wouldn't have the book out in time for the election, but we also knew we’d still have a problem long-term, whatever the results. Left, right, center – everyone can see something's broken, but we just keep talking past each other.

We Hold These "Truths" goes on sale today, and I believe in this book and its author even more than I did when we acquired it.

Adam Grant called it "the crash course in civics America needs," and he's absolutely right. Right now, three-quarters of Americans can’t name the three branches of government, and politicians are counting on that ignorance. But this book is the antidote.

Casey teamed up with an incredible group of experts on both sides of the aisle – from members of Congress to White House staffers to leading academics – to give us an insiders’ view and to challenge what we think we know about how the government actually works. Each chapter tackles a different political myth – from the limits of presidential power to the "death" of bipartisanship and the influence of money in politics – and breaks it down in a way that helps us understand what’s really going on behind the headlines.

I am not a historian, nor am I a scholar. I love our country and want to have and to listen to intelligent conversations that move us forward – especially at a time when we seem to disagree about everything. When I read Casey's proposal, I immediately felt its urgency and significance because I needed it. We all need it.

I've been keeping it on my desk for those moments when the political headlines make absolutely no sense – something that seems to be happening more and more these days.

The chapters in this book can be read in any order, and since we're heading into the Super Bowl this weekend, I'll leave you with a note on one of my favorites – one that tackles the common refrain to "keep politics out of sports." I had recently visited the Coliseum in Rome when I read it, and the chapter made me think about it in a whole different way. I won't spoil it, but let's just say these arguments didn't start when Colin Kaepernick took a knee. Plus some things to look out for this weekend...

Authors Equity has grown a lot since that first conversation Madeline and I had about political books. I'm so glad we broke our own rule when we acquired We Hold These "Truths". We're better for our partnership with Casey, and his book's readers will be, too.

After all, the best publishing happens when you're passionate about something. Always has, always will.

- Don

Order your copy of We Hold These “Truths” today, at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop, and wherever books are sold.

And for a weekly dose of civics, head over to Crash Course with Casey Burgat on Substack.

Chapter Preview:

• Introduction from Casey Burgat

• Rep. Steve Israel on the real influence of money in politics.

• Alyssa Farah Griffin on the limits of presidential power.

• Lindsay Chervinsky on the Constitution’s imperfections.

• Rep. Derek Kilmer on what members of Congress actually do.

• Quardricos Driskell on why lobbyists are so powerful.

• Casey Burgat on congressional term limits.

• Rep. Bill Pascrell on why compromise has become irrational.

• James Curry and Frances Lee on bipartisan legislating.

• Adam Jentleson on the Senate filibuster.

• Liliana Mason on “the rational voter.”

• Steve Vladeck on why we need more politics in the courts.

• Jane McManus on sports and politics.

• Matt Fuller on the root causes of polarization in the media.

While we didn't intend to publish a new post every time we released a new book, that's the groove we've settled into. The nice thing is that it gives us a chance to reflect on the ways that working with each of these very different authors allows us to address a different aspect of the business we're building.

This week’s post celebrates Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future by Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato, and so it feels like the right time to talk about technology and the publishing process.

Background: While Superagency wasn't the first book we signed, it was the first one we started working on in earnest, with an initial schedule that would have had the book ready before we were even public as a company. Part of our commitment to authors is that we'll get the book out based on what's right for the book, even if it means breaking all the usual rules of production and selling schedules.

Contemplating an inevitable deluge of books about AI, we signed on to hustle hard and fast and, appropriate to the subject matter, use AI wherever we could to accelerate the path to market.

How did that work out? You'll note that today, January 28, 2025, is significantly after our company announcement nearly eleven months ago. And the whole cycle (about a year) is many times longer than it took Reid and his team to self-publish Impromptu, his first book on AI, and it's longer than what we've pulled off for the four other books we've published.

So, what gives? Well, as much as speed was a priority, we all agreed that quality was even more important. Not to knock AI (because, as someone who uses it every day, I can't), but, left to their own devices, none of the AI tools would have produced a book nearly as good as the one the humans did.

That's not to say we didn't lean heavily on those tools. At each stage – writing, title/subtitle creation, design, audio, marketing – everyone from across Team Reid and Team Authors Equity squeezed as much out of AI as we could. No one was shy in looking to AI for worthwhile shortcuts and powerful boosts.

But at the end of the day, it was human authorship, creativity, and discernment that made this a book we can all be proud of and which we believe will stand the test of time.

For those of you who read it, you'll know that this is exactly the point. AI is not here to replace us. When it's at its best (and that best is obviously getting better every day), it's here to help us all do some things faster and better than we could on our own.

As a startup, AI assistance has been invaluable. It was ChatGPT that helped make sense of the hopelessly complex set of health insurance options available to a tiny company (and it's not to blame that those options are still pretty lame). A whole array of tools came to my rescue over holidays, providing research assistance so my human colleagues could have well-deserved rests.

But: did it write Superagency? No. Greg Beato is the one who pulled more than a few all-nighters to get that done.

Did it design the jacket? No. That was Pete Garceau, the incredibly talented and lovely-to-work-with human designer. (But it is designing these personalized covers available as a gift-with-purchase, which, I must say, are pretty damn cool.)

Did it "record" the audio? This was the area of closest machine-human collaboration, in which human professional narrator Scott Donaldson teamed up with an AI trained with Reid's voice to create a listening experience that you'll actually enjoy, all without breaking Reid's vocal cords.

At every stage, the humans were in charge, but the AI allowed us to achieve more, better, faster than we could have on our own.

That's Superagency (or, at least our scaled-down version of it): The state of empowerment that occurs when millions (or in our case, tens) of people get simultaneous access to a breakthrough technology. With hands-on, self-directed AI, we benefit from our own new superpowers – and everyone else's on the team too.

There's always a lot to fear about technological change, but I for one am choosing to subscribe to the Reid Hoffman vision: optimistic and circumspect at the same time. Confident and hopeful that it can help all of us do and be better.

In Reid’s case, that means setting out to cure cancer. Me? I think I’ll stick to this publishing thing. Different strokes!

Best,
Madeline

Order your copy of Superagency today, wherever books are sold.

For more, check out Reid's interview on Armchair Expert, his op-ed in The New York Times, and the review of Superagency in The Wall Street Journal.

Dear Readers,

In her bestselling books and probing podcast interviews, Rachel Hollis has always given us the answers we need to navigate life's ups and downs. She dives in feet first—she cartwheels, falls down, and picks herself up—offering laugh-out-loud humor and stories from her own life along with advice. Throughout, she shows how 150% scary all of it can feel.

Rachel's breakthrough book Girl, Wash Your Face sold so well because of the refreshing, unapologetically honest way it shared truths from her life. It worked through how she—and therefore we—could do better, toward others but even more, toward ourselves.

Like so many of us during these last topsy-turvy years, Rachel found herself at a crossroads—balancing life as a mother of four, managing a growing business, and navigating an evolving world.

Now, at the top of a shiny new year, Rachel offers a revelatory book that feels different—and just right for right now. In What If YOU Are the Answer, she poses 26 questions that, as the subtitle suggests, just might change your life.

Reading this book feels like having a heart-to-heart with your wisest and funniest friend—one who shares what she knows, and who has your back.

And editing this book took me into wonderfully unexpected territory. I found myself drawing on a new part of my editorial brain—one that delighted in Rachel's directness while appreciating the depth of reflection these questions inspire. The process showed me that sometimes the most profound truths emerge simply by asking the right questions. And I laughed—a lot. This book reminded me why I love what I do: there's always something new a writer can lead you to discover, both on the page and within ourselves.

Here's one conversation from What If YOU Are the Answer—a sneak peek into how Rachel, with her signature blend of warmth and wisdom, poses questions that can help unlock your potential. With wit, honesty, and insight, Rachel guides you through the tunnels of life and toward the light.

- Robin Desser

Excerpt from What If YOU Are the Answer by Rachel Hollis

Good questions are powerful. As powerful as the moon controlling oceans from two hundred thousand miles away and turning perfectly upstanding citizens into werewolves against their will. Good questions are influential. As compelling as Julia Roberts’s crying in a movie—why do I immediately start crying too?

Good questions are like that—they force the point.

At least they do with me.

Sometimes good questions knock me sideways with a perspective I’ve never seen before. Sometimes they work their way into the deep crevices of my mind, a surprise to unearth later—a forgotten piece of hard candy at the bottom of grandma’s purse.

Good questions won’t let go until I’ve given them time and attention. Good questions can be a catalyst for change, directions at a crossroads, or the swift kick in the butt we need to push us out of our comfort zone.

Six years ago, someone asked me a good question, and it changed the course of my life. If you could write a book about anything at all, and readers would actually retain what you share, what would you tell them?

Before the prompt, I hadn’t even known I had an answer to that question. It must have been bubbling in my subconscious along with the dialogue to any Disney movie made before 1998 because just like The Lion King soundtrack, when prompted, it all came spilling out of me.

What would I share with people if I could share anything? The hard truths and life lessons it had taken me decades to learn. I wrote the book I wish I could have read when I was twenty-five. I wrote a love letter to imaginary readers, the kind of things I wished someone would have said to me.

Like, no matter how small you sometimes feel, you are powerful beyond measure. I shared what Epictetus said, that we can’t control what happens to us in life, but we can control our response to it.

Ancient Stoics knew what was up.

I wrote about surviving pain and trauma, how it can weaken us—make us bitter or terrified or mean. But it can also make us the strongest kind of warrior, able to lead ourselves and others with compassion and grit. I wrote about hardship and how the single determining factor in who you become on the other side of it is the meaning you place on the experience.

I was so passionate about sharing all I had learned that I’d written the first chapter of what would later become Girl, Wash Your Face within the hour.

I remember someone telling me, “Enjoy this process. You’ll likely only ever have enough ideas for one book like this.” As if at thirty-four, I’d acquired all the wisdom I ever would.

Back when I wrote that first personal development book, I was so excited to share every idea that I thought might be helpful. Do this, or try that, or consider this ... here are three different things that helped me, and maybe they’ll help you too! I’m so proud of those pages and the two self-work books that have followed it up. I’m proud that people have gotten something out of lines I wrote and still fairly shocked that anyone listens to my thoughts on the regular. But in the last eight years, you know what I’ve learned?

I don’t actually know anything.

Or really, I suppose that’s not accurate.

I know lots of things. I’m a veritable treasure trove of ideas for self-improvement and random bits of pop trivia and historical facts and lines from movies and the lyrics to just about every song I’ve ever heard, especially jingles from radio commercials for small local businesses from my childhood. Marine parts are so easy to buy ... at Galey’s Marine Supply. Toot Toot. That one has lived rent-free in my brain for thirty-five years.

But what I don’t know are the answers that will be most helpful for you.

The capital-T truths I believe today with all my might? Time has taught me that they might potentially be swept away at a moment’s notice.

I wrote the chapters of this book, in no particular order, over four of the most challenging years of my life. I wrote through disillusionment and divorce. I wrote while my business, built around live events, burned down in the pandemic. I wrote while navigating new love. I wrote while recovering from a miscarriage. I wrote while parenting my four children through the grief of losing their father. I wrote while moving back across the country, starting where we once began, a fresh chapter after so many years of absolute shit.

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Mike Tyson, the prophet.

Life has punched me—and I’m sure you too—in the face many times, and in those moments of shock that immediately follow something hard or the months (OK, but really, it’s years) of overthinking I do in the aftermath, I often have a prospective shift about whole parts of my worldview. What I’ve learned is that, at any moment, I’m one life experience away from having a totally different belief about how the world works. All I know—all any of us can ever know—is what’s real and true for us, in this moment, today.

But I had no idea that was the case when I began my self-work. How could I? When you’re starting to work on any part of your life for the first time (health, mental well-being, business, relation- ships), it’s pretty damn scary.

Chances are you weren’t raised with a ton of resources or guides. You likely don’t have a lot of tools for emotional evolution in your toolbox, which is why you start looking for help. In the beginning, you’re not working on yourself because you’re great at it. I wish! You’re working on yourself because you’ve experienced a catalyst of such acute pain, you vowed you’d never find yourself there again. In those moments, we don’t even know where the hell we’re going—we just know we don’t want to be where we are.

Enter: someone with ideas!

No, not ideas. They’ve got answers.

And they’ve got the charisma to propose those answers to you in a way that changes your whole perspective. Now you have a guide to help you down the road you started walking without any clear indication of where the path leads. This can be wildly supportive when you’re starting out. Nobody knows what they’re doing when they’re new to it, so it helps to have someone there gently reminding us what to do next. Like when you’re little, and you finally start using the toilet on your own, and every time you go, some older, wiser person has to remind you, Hey, buddy, great job. Don’t forget to wipe your butt.

Sage advice.

But just like with wiping your butt, if you’re truly evolving, then the guidance you start any journey with will have a natural plateau. The excitement and energy you had at the beginning of the marathon will be long gone when you’re at mile twenty-two and there’s no gas left in your tank. The swagger you possess as a small business owner with your first customer is MIA three years later when the economy is in a nosedive and you’re not sure how you’ll make payroll. The euphoria you experience as a first-time parent holding your newborn to your chest is hard to tap into when you’re trying to calm a threenager in a temper tantrum or a fifteen-year-old who’s struggling with anxiety.

As our lives change, as the journey takes new twists and turns on the trail, we need new skills, new knowledge, and new perspectives. And that’s where I find myself . . . both as a student of life and as a sharer of ideas.

Once upon a time, I thought I needed to have all the answers, both for myself and for anyone who might read what I wrote or listen to me speak or watch something I create. But the older I get, the more I understand that if you’re looking to someone else for your answers, you run the risk of getting a watered-down version of a truth that only applies to you in some areas. Worse still, we’ll raise up subsequent generations without the ability to think critically, utilize common sense, and hold space for the magic and mystery of a universe so vast, we’ll never be able to understand it all.

And if we’ll never be able to understand it all, why would we assume we can ever really, truly have capital-T truths about any of it?

So, my friend, I’m no longer looking for answers; I’m looking for wisdom.

I’m collecting stories and ideas and thoughts and experiences like a little girl catching fireflies, and I’m doing it with a similar sense of wonder.

My core value in life is growth, and I spent the early part of my adulthood believing that growth looked like rising up. But now I think growth might actually be growing out.

And down.

And sideways.

Growth is a stretch in every direction—even directions you didn’t know existed.

That kind of growth happens when we learn, yes, from others, but most especially when we learn ourselves.

The single greatest thing I can do in this life and with this work is not try to teach you what I think is true but potentially to ask you questions that help you discover your own truth.

And so this isn’t a book of answers because only you have those; this is a book of questions.

Because the right question can change everything.

That’s what questions do ... they teach us about ourselves, they make us think, and if we’re honest in the reply, questions have the ability to give us our own answers.

That’s my intention with this work. It’s a collection of questions that I’ve learned to ask myself—a firefly in my jar. Might I suggest that as you read each chapter, you sit with the question for a moment (or a week?) before you ever read my take on it? After all, it doesn’t really matter what I think about it; it only matters what you think about it. The answers to these questions have had such a profound effect on my life that it changed something for me instantly. I hope these questions, and the pondering they produce, might have a profound effect on you too.

But if not, that’s OK. We’ve established that I may not really know anything. I’ve just got some ideas that have been real and true and good for me . . . at least until I get punched in the face again.

xo, Rach

Order your copy of What If YOU Are the Answer today, wherever books are sold.