A Sustainable Business Model
are lucky enough to encounter a group of two or more independent publishers in the wild—whether in their natural habitat behind the tables at the Brooklyn Book Festival or perhaps gathered furtively at BookExpo America, in the less hospitable terrain of the 5000 section at New York City’s Javits Center, tucked between displays of cat cartoon calendars and book-themed socks—you will find that their conversations often unfurl in a language that is unintelligible to outsiders, a vernacular limited to parsing the inimitable horrors of ONIX metadata feeds, the soul-crushing degradation of Excel pivot tables, or the diabolical expense ratios of company retirement plans. In other words the language of
