UnSelling: The New Customer Experience

Chapter 38The Secret World of Book Publishing

When I was in eleventh grade, I was called down to the special education office for testing. I'd handed in an English project where we needed to put together a newspaper about Shakespeare. Since I had seen newspapers before, I wrote the project in columns, rather than straight across, like you're reading here. My teacher, it seems, didn't understand the columns and believed me to be entirely illiterate and possibly quite dyslexic, since they read the whole thing straight across. Now while I may have hated Shakespeare, and grade 11 English, I could read and write just fine. After explaining to the special education tester that my writing had been in columns, I was sent back to class…a little snarkier from the experience.

If my teacher hadn't been able to see my newspaper columns, I'm very sure he never saw a career path ahead for me that included being a published author.

A lot has changed in the world of writing and publishing since grade 11 English. Today, fewer and fewer people get their news from print newspapers, while online and mobile readership continues to grow.¹ Online readership allows for statistics to be gathered about click-throughs, time spent on different articles and topics, as well as the incorporation of video and links to other resources. News online is much more than a digital copy of the print version. But even with all the options online allows, the news is still the news. The content hasn't changed, just the ...