What Cormac McCarthy’s Success Teaches You About Publishing

You’d need a seismograph to chart all the earthquakes that have struck book publishing since the launch of Amazon in 1995. The rise in online piracy. The consolidation of U.S. publishing houses into the Big Five. The shock waves caused by the sudden boom in AI use. These and other upheavals have shaken the industry to its core. And because the changes have been as broad as they are deep, their effects on individual authors can be hard to see. A lot of them may fly under the radar unless you’re an editor, a literary agent, or a journalist who’s covered the industry for years, as I have. But sometimes you stumble on a detail that throws the changes into relief, the way a small red circle digitally superimposed on part of a painting can show what made it unique. That happened recently when I was scrolling through the catalog at my library, saw a listing for Vanity Fair’s Writers on Writers (Penguin, 2016), and took the book home. It was collection of profiles of authors first published in the magazine under the much-missed editor Graydon Carter. <a href="https://medium.com/the-pub/what-cormac-mccarthys-success-teaches-you-about-publishing-ee951e0bf026">Website</a>