Thank you, Taylor Swift

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“Diane’s last blog, ‘The Purpose of Purpose,’ was brilliant as always!”

-Rosie Palacz

On the day after Thanksgiving, November 29, which is also known as Black Friday, Taylor Swift will likely once again make history.

That’s the day The Official Eras Tour Book, a 259-page commemorative memoir/coffee table book she wrote and self-published about her insanely successful Eras Tour, will be available for sale exclusively at Target. The big deal about this is she’s once again bending and breaking the norms of standard business practice—in this case in the book publishing industry—by completely bypassing the use of a traditional book publisher.

She followed a similar path and created a comparable stir with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, a concert film she produced and released last year. After negotiations with major film studios fell through, she landed an unprecedented distribution agreement with AMC Theatres and Cinemark Theatres. Emphasis on unprecedented.

This time, she is cutting out the middleman by curating, writing, producing, printing, fulfilling, and distributing her book through her own publishing company, Taylor Swift Publications. Thanks to her seemingly unstoppable popularity and follower loyalty, she won’t need to go on book promotion tours or set up a desk at the local Barnes and Noble bookstore to sign and sell copies. Thus, there’s no need for publicists or much of the traditional publicity hoopla that goes into a typical book launch.

Since her own back office will handle all the logistical details, she will pocket more of her book’s proceeds instead of sharing them with a publisher. AND she’ll have complete control over the book’s content.

All this is causing the book publishing industry to do an about-face. I applaud Taylor Swift’s move to self-publish her new book because I follow a similar business model for the books I write. Granted, I’m nowhere close to being on the scale she is business-wise, but I am an independent, self-published author for similar reasons.

There’s more to explain about the differences between self, hybrid, and traditional book publishing, but I’ll spare those details and share a quick story.

In the early days of lockdown for COVID-19, I was contacted multiple times by a hybrid book publisher that wanted to publish my future books. After several conversations, they sent me a draft publishing contract to review, and I immediately turned them down.

Essentially, they wanted me to pay them upfront fees, then guarantee a certain number of my books would sell. If that number of books didn’t sell by a certain date, I would have to pay the hybrid publisher for the unsold inventory. Plus, I would have to give the publisher my email list of followers (that they would then own and could freely use as they wished), plan and pay for all my own marketing and publicity activities, and STILL have to split book royalties with them.

What a racket. Yet, every day I read social media posts from book authors who sign on with these types of companies and lose thousands of dollars. Plus, they end up with boxes of unsold books that take up space in their basements and garages. Caveat emptor, indeed.

Taylor Swift has made her presence known in the music, social media, literary, film, fashion, and other industries, but I respect her most for her business prowess. On October 15, when I read about her intention to publish an Eras Tour book and how she was going to go about doing it, my heart rate sped up.

She doesn’t break any rules. She doesn’t have to. Instead, she exercises her right to artistic freedom and maintains ownership and control over the content she creates. It’s a lesson she learned from the music side of her business interests.