By Thad McIlroy / www.publishersweekly.com
This report provides an overview of the English-language book publishing startup scene in the United States and around the world as of fall 2022. To the extent that startups capture the innovative spirit of an industry, this report is about publishing innovation.
There are three audiences for the report: the publishing startups themselves, service organizations that support the startup community, and the broad authoring, reading, and publishing communities that follow publishing startups to get insights into the future of publishing.
At the centre of this effort is a spreadsheet of some 1,300 companies, almost all founded since Amazon launched the Kindle in 2007. The spreadsheet is a live document, constantly updated, and hosted online by Publishers Weekly at publishersweekly.com/startups. For the next few months, readers of the report can access the spreadsheet and perform a variety of sorts and searches to drill down on the data and extract insights far beyond what is documented here.
The listings are labelled “book publishing startups.” Some readers may assume that they cover, for example, new book publishing companies or their imprints. But really they are new ventures looking to help readers, authors, and, to a lesser extent, publishers themselves find innovative ways to operate and grow their businesses.
While the majority of these startups (more than 60%) are U.S. based, the study also reveals a great deal of international publishing industry innovation.