The Publishing Times
All the News That’s Fit to Publish
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Why We Built This: One Writer's Frustration With a Fragmented Industry
There was a morning when I tried to do something simple: catch up on publishing industry news in one place.
Why We Built This: One Writer's Frustration With a Fragmented Industry
A note from the editor
There was a morning — not so long ago — when I sat down with a cup of coffee and tried to do something that should have been simple: catch up on what was happening in publishing.
I wanted to know what the Big Five were doing. I wanted to see whether Amazon had quietly changed its KDP royalty structure again. I wanted to find out if there were any new literary agent openings, whether BookFunnel had released a new feature, whether the latest Author Earnings data had dropped, whether Publishers Weekly had covered anything I needed to know about. I wanted, in short, to read the news of my industry the way a financial professional reads Bloomberg or a lawyer reads Above the Law — in one place, with authority, without spending forty-five minutes clicking between a dozen different tabs.
What I found instead was the same thing I had found every morning for years: nothing. Not nothing in the sense that the information did not exist. It existed in abundance. It was scattered across trade publications that required expensive subscriptions, Twitter threads that disappeared into the algorithm, Reddit posts that aged out of relevance within hours, newsletters that arrived on their own schedules, and blog posts from individual authors who wrote when they felt like it. The publishing industry — one of the oldest and most storied industries in the world — had no daily broadsheet. No single place where a writer, publisher, agent, or book marketer could go every morning and simply know what was happening.
That frustration is why this site exists.
The Problem Was Structural, Not Accidental
The fragmentation of publishing industry news is not an accident. It is the product of how the industry evolved. Traditional publishing has always been a relationship business — deals made at lunch, information passed through agents, rights sold at Frankfurt and London Book Fair. The trade press that grew up around it — Publishers Weekly, The Bookseller, Publishers Lunch — was designed for insiders who already knew the landscape. It was not designed for the indie author trying to understand whether KDP Select was still worth it, or the debut novelist trying to figure out which literary agencies were actively acquiring in their genre.
The indie publishing revolution of the 2010s created an entirely new class of publishing professional — the self-published author who needed to understand royalty structures, advertising platforms, cover design trends, keyword strategy, and reader acquisition simultaneously. But the information infrastructure for this new professional never materialized in one place. Instead, it grew organically and chaotically: a Facebook group here, a podcast there, a newsletter from someone who had figured out Amazon ads, a blog from someone who had cracked the Kindle Unlimited algorithm. Valuable, all of it. Findable, almost none of it.
The result was a tax on attention. Every working author was spending hours each week doing what should have taken minutes — assembling a picture of their industry from fragments scattered across the internet.
What We Set Out to Build
The vision for The Publishing Times was straightforward, even if the execution was not: a daily broadsheet for the publishing industry, covering everything from Big Five deal announcements and literary agent moves to indie publishing strategy, Amazon KDP updates, book marketing tools, and the platforms that authors actually use to build their readerships.
The model we had in mind was not a blog. It was a newspaper. Not in the sense of print — obviously — but in the sense of editorial discipline. A newspaper has a front page. It has sections. It has a point of view about what matters and what does not. It aggregates the most important developments from across its beat and presents them in a form that a reader can consume efficiently. It respects the reader's time.
That is what was missing from publishing coverage. Not more content — there was already too much content. What was missing was curation. Someone to read everything so you did not have to. Someone to pull the signal out of the noise and present it in a form that was actually useful.
The Sources That Power This Site
Building that kind of coverage required assembling a source network that spanned the entire publishing ecosystem. The Publishing Times now aggregates from dozens of sources across the industry — trade publications, publisher blogs, literary agency announcements, platform update feeds, and original editorial coverage of the tools and services that authors use every day.
That source network includes the official blogs and announcement feeds of the major publishing platforms — Amazon KDP, Barnes & Noble Press, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital — as well as the trade press that covers the traditional side of the industry. It includes the author-facing platforms that have become essential infrastructure for indie publishing: BookFunnel, StoryOrigin, CraveBooks, NetGalley, Edelweiss+, Prolific Works. It includes the advertising and marketing platforms — Amazon Ads, BookBub — that determine whether a book reaches its readers or disappears into the catalog.
And it includes original editorial coverage: reviews of platforms, guides to tools, and analysis of industry trends written specifically for the working author who needs to understand not just what is happening, but what it means for their career.
The Anonymous Editor
You will notice that this site does not have a named editor-in-chief. That is intentional.
Publishing is a small world. Everyone knows everyone. Editors know agents know publishers know publicists know authors. In that environment, a named editor carries baggage — relationships, obligations, perceived biases. A named editor who covers Amazon KDP is assumed to have a position on Amazon. A named editor who covers a particular literary agency is assumed to have a relationship with it.
The decision to keep the editorial identity anonymous was not about hiding anything. It was about keeping the coverage clean. The Publishing Times covers the industry as it is, not as any particular participant in it would prefer it to be covered. The anonymous editor is not a person with a stake in any particular outcome. The anonymous editor is simply someone who reads everything so you do not have to.
If you have a story tip, a correction, or a suggestion for a source we should be covering, the contact form is always open. We read everything.
What This Site Is Not
A few things worth being clear about, in the interest of editorial transparency.
This site is not affiliated with any publisher, literary agency, or publishing platform. We cover all of them, and we are beholden to none of them. When we write about Amazon KDP, we are not writing on behalf of Amazon. When we cover a tool like BookFunnel or StoryOrigin, we are not being paid by them to do so.
This site is not a substitute for professional advice. Nothing here constitutes legal, financial, or publishing contract advice. If you are negotiating a book deal, hire an agent. If you are structuring a publishing company, hire a lawyer. We cover the industry; we do not practice in it.
This site is not a community forum. We do not have comment sections, and we do not host debates. The internet has no shortage of places to argue about publishing. What it has been short of is a place to simply read the news. That is what we are trying to be.
A Work in Progress
The Publishing Times launched because the frustration of not having it finally outweighed the difficulty of building it. It is not finished — no newspaper ever is. The source network grows every week. The editorial coverage expands. The tools improve.
What it is, already, is the thing that was missing: a single place to go every morning and find out what is happening in publishing. If you are a writer, a publisher, an agent, a book marketer, or simply someone who cares about books and the industry that produces them, this site was built for you.
The coffee is getting cold. There is news to read.
— The Editor
Further Reading
Additional Resources: For the latest updates and official guidance, visit Amazon KDP.