Long, Winding Story about the Origins of StreetLib Market
Why self-publishing is a bit of a misnomer, Part I
I’ve resisted posting on Medium for over five years. When it launched in 2012, I was getting tired of people telling me I should be excited because some tech pros or Arianna Huffington wannabes had built a shiny new platform where I could write for free. I was tired of hearing that writing for free was great for writing careers. If I had been younger, or lived in a less stupidly expensive city, I might have succumbed to the pressure. As it was, I wrote less and edited more, because my editorial services company reliably paid the bills. Plus I enjoyed helping authors with their book projects. I dabbled in content development, some consulting, and I stayed off Medium and frowned whenever anyone mentioned it.
So it’s both fitting and ironic that my first Medium post is about StreetLib Market, a shiny new book publishing professionals marketplace. If you’ve never heard of StreetLib, you’re like me three months ago.
I was up late researching to complete a pitch deck that described my vision for a marketplace that would help independent editors, writers, and other publishing professionals, and came across a post on blockchain for books. One link led to another, and I liked what I saw of this scrappy Italian company, and so I took Giacomo D’Angelo, their only US-based employee, up on his offer to email him. I wrote him saying I like what you’re doing, and asked if I could help in any way, and by Friday we’re sitting across from each other at La Colombe Torrefaction on Vandam St.
Half the coffee drinkers the La Colombe on Vandam give off software developer vibes and half have the glossy, parted hair that always brings marketing / PR / event planning to my mind. Everyone appears to have thought hard about what shoes to wear. In their company I am hyper-aware of how far away I am from venture capital, and also how fortunate we all were to even be having these daydreams, feeling virtuous about passing on the pastries in the counter display case.
Giacomo doesn’t quite fit in either because he’s more clean-cut and polished than most of the men present, but couples that with a refreshingly low tolerance for meaning-lite corporate creative-class guff. He was disarmingly earnest and direct. At this point all I know of StreetLib is that they are based in Loreto, Italy, are better-known in Europe, have been building digital book-related tools since 2006. I had also read that when Giacomo first came to New York mid-2016, he worked out of an Italian foods importer’s warehouse in The Bronx.
All Giacomo knows of me is that I’m somebody with experience in New York book publishing who wrote him out of the blue. My hair is not neatly parted.
Giacomo tells me they’re building a publishing professionals platform to launch in early 2018. Oh that’s interesting, I say…because I was just going to….
Long story short: I shelved my fundraising plans. I decided to help StreetLib get their initiative jumpstarted.
Here’s why platforms like Market are important: Self-publishing is a bit of a misnomer. Or call it a category error. Authors need teams surrounding them and their projects. It used to be — for decades — that assembling such a team was contingent on you getting a nice book deal. Now that’s not the case. Now so much publishing talent has left the Big 5 that hundreds of highly-skilled, dedicated people at the top of their game are ready and willing to work with authors of all stripes.
The way Market works: No overpriced packages! Everything’s a la carte. No paying someone who’ll farm out the editing job you’ve hired them for and take a huge cut! Any editing / design / marketing professional you hire is only charged 10% of the project fee — and in exchange for that they receive payment protection, highly responsive and personable support, a profile page showcasing their portfolio that’s pretty good now but will get better, and there are many more features in the works.
Here again is that link.
