You can't hand-deliver books to Rock Center.

And other lessons from our first year.

Hi, all.

A year ago today, I was part of a tiny sleep-deprived band setting out on the streets of midtown Manhattan to test a theory. The theory was simply this: after chasing scale for most of our corporate careers, we thought we could get further faster by running the other way.

You can run faster when running in branded track jackets.

Instead of getting big, we’d go deep. Deep into a small list of books with a small list of authors. Instead of leaning on organizational heft, we’d see how far organizational agility would get us.

We met with a host of literary agencies all around town and basically said: trust us, we can do this, really. It’s a miracle anyone said yes — but enough of them did that it let us take our first steps, make our first books, sell our first books, achieve our first bestsellers.

We’ve added a few colleagues, but we can still all fit on a zoom screen and around the table in our one-room office. Still small by any normal definition of company size. But when you add the authors who’ve embraced us and the partners of all kinds who’ve helped us, we feel big indeed.

Birthdays are important, for family, friends, pets, and companies. I wish we could celebrate by all of us taking a nice long break, but…we don’t really seem to do that, despite our unlimited vacation policy.

Our first summit.

So, instead I asked our team for their reflections on the year past. What jumped out is that this is a group that loves to learn. I know: who doesn’t? Everyone at work says they love to learn – or why would corporate “learning and development” exist? But Team AE is high on it, with all of us earnestly and joyfully figuring out how to do things that would be nowhere near our job descriptions in traditional structures. Finance procuring translators; ops making acquisitions; marketer designing back-ads. Everyone takes turns teaching and learning, with even our authors getting in on the game: Joseph Nguyen teaching us to TikTok, James Clear workshopping titles, Seth Godin leveling up our marketing.

From Sarah: “I’ve learned new tips every single day from authors and experts who are doing cutting edge work in this industry. The amount of wisdom we’ve gotten in marketing, advertising, and audience building is mind-blowing.”

October author dinner with James Frey.

After a lifetime in sales, Deb is learning how all the other pieces come together, has launched her own newsletter, and has even become the most likely teammate to bring up Instagram. Rose has learned not only how to compress production schedules, but also how to manage mapmakers, art researchers, and fact checkers. Craig has learned to his relief that there’s more access to the marketplace than ever before: “Bookstores and distributors judge our books on their merits, not on how many years we’ve been in business.”

Carly has learned to trust her instincts. Ilana is learning to break rules. Nina has discovered just how much she enjoys working directly with authors. Diana learned how happy authors and agents are when you apply transparency and common sense to accounting statements.

The youngest member of our squad, Joli has discovered the joys of "being a part of something in literature that is bigger than myself." And Don happily realized that even after fifty years in this business, he still had more to learn – including new vocab words like "bougie" and "bestie."

Not all lessons are fun. Andrea loves to create order out of the chaos some of the rest of us concoct, but I don’t totally believe she loves slogging through media liability insurance setup or Library of Congress copyright registrations. Nina wasn’t yearning to understand international tax withholdings. And even though I can only blame myself, I really did not enjoy the multiple bike trips to Rock Center required to teach me that it’s actually not possible for a civilian to make a personal delivery to a show producer working there.

Do we miss parts of our past lives? Of course we miss the people we used to see every day at work and the easy access to so many extraordinary experts. (And, yes, I really, really miss the corporate repro and delivery services.)

But, so far anyway, one year in, the theory we started off with is turning out to be true. When the whole company is the size of a small committee, you don’t need committees. When you make decisions on the fly, you don’t need to have meetings about meetings (ok, actually, we did, once). When you don’t have to take time to build consensus, there’s a whole lot more time to build things. And SO MUCH LESS POWERPOINT.

Most important of all, when you get rid of the silos and tap into everyone’s ideas, most especially the authors’, it’s amazing how many more good ones there are, and how much more fun it is to bring them to life.

We have many people to thank for getting us through year one, but, just like the profit share, the largest share of gratitude goes to the authors. We’re not 100% sure they knew they were joining a cult when they signed on to publish with us, but so far they seem ok with it. We’re very proud of the nine whose books we’ve already brought to market, and we’re very excited for those still to come.

All the best,
Madeline

The starting lineup, drawn by Rose.