Try Things

On Anniversaries, Experimenting, and Sustainability

This week I’ll be in Portland talking to the IBPA Publishing University on the topic of starting your own publishing business. I am giving a four-hour workshop, which sounds pretty substantial but which is still a capsule version of the far more substantial program I’m developing on this subject, which will be a big new addition to Agate Publishing Academy’s line of courses later this year.

A major theme of my workshop will be staying open to unconventional approaches to building your business. In that spirit, the post below is about Agate Development, the arm of my company that produces learning materials, and how it has helped Agate stay sustainable over the past 20 years.

Agate is celebrating a big anniversary this year. Not the founding of the company, though we have our big 25^th coming up next year, in 2027. This year we’re celebrating the 20^th anniversary of our Agate Development business, the second line of business I launched under the Agate umbrella. I’ve started a few other lines of business since then, all under the larger entity that is Agate (though “larger” is not very accurate there, considering how little Agate is overall), but in general all related if somewhat divergent from Agate’s main trade publishing business.

Agate Development evolved out of work I’d been doing immediately before starting Agate in 2002, when I spent three-plus years at an online education dotcom. In the early days of Agate, I was contacted by a couple of my former colleagues who’d gone on to work at other companies. They remembered me as “the publishing guy,” and were reaching out for help with creating educational resources for their new employers. After a couple of those apples fell on my head, I realized there might be an opportunity there.

I had worked really hard at that dotcom and burned many brain cells exploring new developments in education and learning, and after leaving I felt wistful about the prospect of everything I’d learned going to waste. It was really gratifying to find new ways to use and expand on what I’d encountered there—and it didn’t hurt that doing this created revenue badly needed by fledgling Agate, which was struggling to stay solvent. (Although struggling to stay solvent is pretty much the baseline state for most small publishing concerns.)

Two decades later and our Agate Development arm produces all kinds of learning materials for all kinds of organizations, including schools, educational publishers, corporations, associations, and more. These materials range all the way from reading and math supports for kids as young as four, to continuing professional education courses for people in financial and medical fields. We’ve flourished as generalists: we do online courses and full curricula; textbooks and textbook ancillary materials; high-stakes assessment questions and practice guides; reference materials, translations, workforce certification programs…the works. If people need it, we’re pretty sure we can make it; chances are we’ve already made something a lot like it for someone else.

Agate is still fairly small, but thanks to Agate Development, we’re probably more stable than similarly sized publishers that, like us, have never managed to find a million-selling book or a deep-pocketed patron or both. While our trade publishing business is more high-profile, I can’t say I prefer it to our learning business, which uses different muscles and yields different kinds of opportunities for us. I find them equally worthwhile, interesting, and challenging. Both are relatively low-margin businesses, but their different revenue models—one is a contract business and one is a license business—bolster each other in meaningful ways.

The success I’ve found with Agate Development, modest as it is, has played a big role in the ongoing sustainability of Agate as a whole. It’s a big reason why I believe more independent publishers should be open to experimenting with different kinds of businesses and business models. My longtime colleague Richard Hunt has done that with his independent publishing company, AdventureKEEN, in the Cincinnati area. Richard runs a few bookstores, too, and has also bought a few other companies along the way, all toward the end of keeping his operation vital.

In addition to Agate Development, I found more ways to diversify into other fields or activities I already knew something about. I’d been a food writer before starting Agate, and a few years after startup, I was able to partner with a local cookbook publisher, Surrey Books, to structure an acquisition with the help of its retiring owner. We struck a mutually beneficial deal that took us a couple of years to figure out, but which opened up a whole new way to think about what kind of publisher Agate could be. Something similar happened when I started our children’s book line a decade later. It took a few years to get it off the ground—and it was all too short-lived—but it yielded the best-selling book in Agate’s history.

Different approaches will work for different publishers. I think the bookstore/publisher model is perennially appealing, and it’s been fascinating to watch the evolution of McNally Editions in New York, one of several bookstores now publishing. And a newer New York operation, Hagfish, has earned high-profile attention for how it’s pursued a very worthy publishing operation based on reissues while also functioning, at different times and in different ways, as both an editorial services shop and a literary agency. And that’s just a sampling of a few with which I have more first-hand familiarity. Even as I wrote this, I’ve been seeing news break about how Pine State Publicity is diversifying into agenting and manuscript consultation.

It’s never not hard down here at this level of the industry. Creativity, adaptability, and open-mindedness can help companies figure out ways forward that might be as effective as they are unconventional. When I started Agate Development, a very big part of my motivation was figuring out other ways to use what skills and know-how I’d accumulated to that point and turn them toward producing more revenue. There was some desperation involved, I can’t deny. I was lucky the different parts of the business proved so complementary. But I’ve come to believe it can’t be a bad idea for people in book-related businesses to open their minds to other ways to use their various individual skills or passions to diversify their operations. It can be healthy and productive in emotional and psychological terms as well as financially.