Publishers are having to take in a lot right now. They’re told to act like software businesses, innovate like startups, think like the music industry, learn from railroad and car companies, reskill, upskill, change suppliers, build distributed workflows, and reinvent their content models and revenue streams. And as they get more and more overwhelmed by all this pressure, a kind of paralysis can set in. Or an expensive kind of writhing in quicksand.

Stop a second. Publishers have wicked entrepreneurial skills. Perhaps they know everything they need to know already, and just need to recognise it.

A publisher is an investor. The publisher is the one who puts up the money. Publishers are the angel investors of the reading world. They’ve been angel investing for hundreds of years in countless tiny businesses, whose founders are their authors – and whom, in the case of responsible investors, they nurture and support.

Not only are publishing companies angel investors, but they’re startup incubators for each of these little businesses, assigning mentors and advisors (usually as editors) and marketing teams to each investment, and pooling administrative overheads to allow founders to focus on their core genius. Incubators believe that helping founders focus on their core genius is critical to success.

As a publisher I know: often we lose on our investments. For most publishers, a minority of successes fund the majority of failures. But that’s the game. We’re ego-driven risk-takers.

It’s a harrowing job, investing. Investments have to follow customer needs, which shift with fashion, the economy, social change, and other environmental pressures. Publishers who’ve stayed successful have done so because they’ve been responsive to these factors, balancing passion and gut-feel with brutal honesty and uncompromising financial decision-making. They’ve become lay-experts in their authors’ fields. They’ve sought out user feedback and acted on it. They’ve turned seemingly unworkable investments into million-dollar successes, and left hard-working authors by the wayside for hard-nosed business reasons.

That’s exactly the nous they can turn to their own businesses now. As a publisher, if your company were a book and you its author, what would you do?

You’d want you to focus on your core genius: finding talent and investing in it. Nurture your founder self. Pool and outsource admin, coding and distribution to people who love doing that stuff, because you don’t. Embrace risk and brace for losses. Celebrate every tiny success. In other words, nothing you haven’t done already for others, a thousand times over.