Todd Sattersten

Todd Sattersten is the founder of BizBookLab, a consultancy that specializes in business books and the business of books. He is an adjunct professor in the publishing program at Portland State University and the author of "Every Book Is a Startup: The New Business of Publishing."

Dangerous ideas from the world of startups

The art of exposing our ideas to the world and listening for their response

Dustin Kurtz, marketing manager at Melville House, wrote a piece last week about the incursion of startup vocabulary in the world of book publishing. He says:

[N]ow the models and the metaphors of the tech industry are, full-throatedly, without embarrassment, being used to talk about not just the methods of publishing books, but the books themselves, and this is a grand and wondrous idiocy, a diminishment of art, a gravity well of stupidity so deep that we cannot even talk about it properly, only study its effects.

As someone who has helped without embarrassment to bring those models and metaphors to the industry, my interest was piqued.

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The paperless book

The paperless book

The problem for publishers is that customers don't know what a book is anymore.

The publishing world needs some new language that describes what happens and, more importantly, what is possible when the words are separated from the paper.