Tom Mayer

Turns out the smell of money is very specific, and you know it when you smell it.

And what we were scratching and sniffing here was not it.

Some of them weren't expensive.

Some of them were like, well, that's going to add a quarter to the unit cost.

And some of them were like, that's going to add a dollar to the unit cost.

And that would have major downstream effects on what the actual cost to the customer would be.

That could negatively impact how many people are going to buy the book.

So you have to really weigh those things.

Parkinson's Law is as ubiquitous in publishing as gravity is to Earth.

Every book could eat all the time in the world because every book is a big, gigantic, bespoke intellectual project that you could spend years working on.

Authors do spend years writing them, and the editor could spend many, many, many hours editing every word and making sure everything was as strong as possible.

Yes, I have developed a toolkit of ways of encouraging authors to get them to write.

I have told authors to open up an email and to type their chapter in an email to me.

Because for some people, it's a lot easier to write a long email than it is to open up a blank Google Doc or a blank Word document and try to write there.

I have had authors speak their chapters aloud to voice recognition software.

Alexi, all of my deadlines are real.

I think the authors of America need to understand deterrence.

There are red lines you cannot cross.

You're playing game theory here.

You can't possibly devalue your own deadlines on the record.