Strategic publishing, AI, and the battle for heart and minds

Posted on 10 June 2026 by Arthur Attwell

Strategic publishers have to make an impact – our books are in a battle for hearts and minds. That battle is increasingly won or lost in AI chat windows. How do we ensure that our ideas are in those conversations?

The answer is simple, but it’s not cheap: we have to publish writing that is great for humans – clearly and creatively written, well-structured, carefully edited, cleanly presented, interesting, novel, accessible, and trustworthy. And we need to publish it on the open web as well-constructed HTML pages.

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AI companies have stopped at nothing, least of all the law, to hoover up every bit of good writing they can find, because that’s what makes AI worth anything at all. They’ve triaged and ingested it all to feed their magnificent robots. And they absolutely can’t afford to stop now. They also can’t afford to feed AI’s own writing back to itself over and over: the models will collapse. They need fresh content, rich with human ingenuity, to keep their models alive.

Read my new post on the Electric Book Works website or on LinkedIn, where you can also leave your thoughts in the comments.

Who chooses your book, and who reads it? The crucial distinction for strategic publishers

Posted on 27 May 2026 by Arthur Attwell

While working on a publishing strategy for a new project recently, I was reminded how important it is to distinguish between who selects your book and who actually reads it. That distinction has implications for almost every downstream editorial, design, and distribution decision.

‘Who chooses your book, and who reads it?’ is an essay about this.

As writers and publishers, it’s crucial that we know who will select our books and who will read them, and whether or not that’s the same person. It will inform many of our decisions about the book, from writing and style through editing and design, to formats, marketing, and distribution.

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selectors and readers are motivated differently. They are looking for different things when they pay their costs. That’s easier to cater for when they are the same human, but if they are not, and especially if they are very different, we have to prioritise one or the other. In parts of our work selectors will matter most, and in other parts readers will. We have a difficult balance to strike, and we have to be very deliberate about where we spend time and money.

Read the full post on the EBW website or on LinkedIn.

On the rising costs of publishing technology

Posted on 5 February 2025 by Arthur Attwell

We love and hate the Internet mainly because it’s been so cheap to use. But perhaps, like me, your tech costs have shot up, or your tech keeps breaking. Perhaps you feel more and more disappointed that technology always over-promises and under-delivers. We’re reckoning with the fact that we get what we pay for.

On the Electric Book Works website, I have a new post on the rising costs of publishing technology, in which I unpack what happened, and what it means for publishing decision-makers.

I explain the main reasons we’ve seen a surge in technology costs in recent years:

Investors need a return
Open-source dependencies demand attention
Platforms evolve
As regulation evolves, the paperwork comes due
Social costs demand an ethical response
User expectations keep getting higher
Anxiety about IP requires legal expertise
The content flood is infinite

And I say more about what this means for how we invest in tech in publishing. Head over to the EBW site to read the post, and find my thread on it on LinkedIn, where I’d love to hear what you think about these issues.

Making the most of your publishing budget

Posted on 31 October 2024 by Arthur Attwell

In my job, I get to talk to many different people about their publishing projects – big and small. And the biggest concern is always: what can we achieve with our budget?

The first step is always to ask: what is your book’s job?

Second, we make sure that all their bases are covered: expertise, development, distribution, and promotion.

Third, we get brutally honest about cost-and-quality trade-offs.

I’ve written about these three steps in a series of articles on LinkedIn (at the links above) and also published on the Electric Book Works website. I hope they are useful if you are planning a publishing project.

And do get in touch if you’d like a friendly conversation about your project. I have no-obligations calls with people planning new publishing initiatives all the time, and would be happy to chat about yours, too.

What to do about AI, and The Great Asymmetry

Posted on 15 April 2024 by Arthur Attwell

Tim O’Reilly’s compelling post on regulating AI, ‘To understand the risks posed by AI, follow the money‘ is a must-read. O’Reilly is one of my publishing role models, the founder of O’Reilly Media and a key figure in the early conceptualisation of open-source software. Among the hundred articles you’ll see on AI today, his credibility should jump the queue.

A key takeaway is that, in trying to mitigate the potential harms of AI, rather than focusing on the technology itself and what it might be capable of, we should focus on sensible regulation. And, more importantly, that that regulation is feasible and has good precedents. We really can influence what people – and people as corporate decision-makers – are able or likely to do with their technology:

So perhaps it is time to turn our regulatory gaze away from attempting to predict the specific risks that might arise as specific technologies develop. After all, even Einstein couldn’t do that.

Instead, we should try to recalibrate the economic incentives underpinning today’s innovations, away from risky uses of AI technology and towards open, accountable, AI algorithms that support and disperse value equitably.

This emphasis on what people do with technology, rather than on the technology itself, reminded me of Stephen J. Gould’s wonderful essay, ‘The Great Asymmetry‘. In describing the great asymmetry, Gould explains:

We can only reach our pinnacles by laborious steps, but destruction can occur in a minute fraction of the building time, and can often be truly catastrophic. […] We perform 10,000 acts of small and unrecorded kindness for each surpassingly rare, but sadly balancing, moment of cruelty.’

Gould argues that we obsess too easily over whether a particular scientific development is helpful or harmful, and we should focus rather on the great asymmetry. What science does is exacerbate the great asymmetry, because science makes it easier for people to destroy: ‘our particular modern tragedy resides in the great asymmetry, and the consequential but unintended power of science to enhance its effect.’

Whether or not we’re working with AI, what matters is what our work does for the great asymmetry. I find it grimly motivating to know that the daily slog – let’s not sugarcoat it, it can be a slog – of building things properly, of being kind, and of telling stories that make people better, is the steady work of shoring up the right side of the great asymmetry.