These days, many people in the book business are taking the proverb “necessity is the mother of invention” more seriously than ever. Buffeted by inflation, flat sales, and consolidation in such areas as distribution and retailing, publishers are looking for different ways to break the traditional publishing mold. As Jonathan Merkh, CEO of hybrid publisher Forefront Books, puts it, “the time is ripe for innovation.”

Since forming Forefront in 2017, Merkh has seen hybrid publishing become an industry fixture after years of skepticism. Under the hybrid business model, publishers offer authors no advances in exchange for higher royalty payments, and in some cases ask authors to help pay for marketing costs. The model has certainly proven fruitful for Forefront. Last month, Merkh teamed with Kurt Brackob of Histria Books to take a majority stake in the U.K.-based hybrid publisher Unicorn Publishing Group, forming the Unified Publishing Group to make the investment. As part of the acquisition, Merkh will take over management of Unicorn, bringing his deep experience in hybrid publishing to the company.

The hybrid model has attracted many traditional publishing veterans, but none who attracted more attention than Madeline McIntosh, former CEO of Penguin Random House US, when she decided to leave the Big Five behind. McIntosh, along with fellow PRH alum Nina von Moltke and former Macmillan CEO Don Weisberg, launched Authors Equity in March 2024 with the financial backing of three authors including James Clear, whose Atomic Habits has sold about 15 million copies.

From the beginning, the three Authors Equity principals talked about the need to work with authors for the long haul, and McIntosh says the strategy has proved successful. “When every single one of us is directly connected to the book and author, we can surface ideas and act on them without having to slow down or waste energy on explanation or persuasion,” she says.

Authors Equity is built on a variation of the hybrid business model that McIntosh calls a profit-sharing model, through which authors are guaranteed 60% of a book’s profits—a percentage that increases for authors with large audiences. “The business model itself turns out to be even more powerful than I’d have thought,” she says. “There’s the obvious aspect of aligned financial incentives, but it also has a direct positive impact on agility. When a sales or marketing opportunity comes up, we don’t have to pause to talk through the impact of format, channel, and territory on the author’s compensation. Every dollar we can make gets divided the same way, and that simplicity means we have more to invest in creative gambits.”

In addition, McIntosh says, authors and agents very much appreciate that Authors Equity’s monthly payment schedule comes with simple statements. “It turns out that providing very well-designed reports that show exactly where every dollar goes is a crowd pleaser,” she says.

After spending years in the corporate world, McIntosh calls it freeing not to have to worry about huge advances earning out. A key advantage of being independent, she says, is “not having to deal with large write-offs and high overheads.”

Clear sees Authors Equity as the best way to bridge the trade-offs authors must make if they want to self-publish rather than go with a traditional publisher. While self-published authors keep most of the money they generate from their book sales, which are predominantly made online through the e-book format, they also often give up the chance to sell through physical retailers. With distribution through Simon & Schuster, Authors Equity allows authors to retain creative control while also receiving physical distribution.

Authors who join Authors Equity can earn up to two and a half times more than they would earn through the traditional publishing model, by Clear’s estimate. For one thing, Clear argues, “advances aren’t as favorable in practice as publishers want you to believe.” He says that since advances are typically paid over the life of the book, it is rare for an author to receive an advance that provides them with the financial means to just focus on writing.

The traditional system, Clear says, “was built in the pre-internet years,” when marketing a book was very different from how things operate now. Back in the day, publishers indeed could “make a book” by using their relationships with different accounts, he says. But with the number of accounts limited today, publishers can’t market a book the way they used to, and must now rely heavily on authors to bring their own audiences and platforms. “It’s a new reality,” he says. “Today, author brands are what is important, so authors should be getting the majority of the profits.”

Clear acknowledges that publishing professionals bring a lot to the table in producing and selling books. Still, he says, that doesn’t override the importance of authors: “The current reality in 2025 is that publishing is now an author-centric business.”

Authors Equity’s biggest success to date has come through self-published author Joseph Nguyen. The house worked with Nguyen to revise and repackage Don’t Believe Everything You Think into a hardcover edition that has sold very well in bricks-and-mortar stores. With the bookstore boost, Don’t Believe has now sold more than two million copies across all formats. Authors Equity will publish Nguyen’s The Overthinkers Guide to Making Decisions this fall.

Authors Equity is not the only publisher to take on an author who has been self-published, usually in a digital format, and republish the book in print; that approach has also been used to great success by Sourcebooks, and other publishers have followed suit. One such house is Zando, formed by another PRH veteran, Molly Stern. Her original vision was to partner with well-known people and organizations on imprints whose name recognition would help promote their books. While Zando has developed several lists headed by well-known names, the company has found its biggest success with Slowburn, an imprint focused on publishing romance authors who got their start as independent authors.

The Ruinous Love series by Brynne Weaver was Slowburn’s first multimillion-copy success, and the publisher has followed that up with Navessa Allen’s Into Darkness series, which has produced two bestsellers this year. Stern credited Slowburn’s leaders, Hayley Wagreich and Sierra Stovall, with “recognizing what was possible” with both series. While at PRH, Stern was best known for working with such authors as Gillian Flynn and Michelle Obama, and by her own account wasn’t an expert in the romance field—but, she notes, “I am now.”

That rapid pivot would not have been possible if Stern had stayed at PRH. Flexibility, the ability to build communities around authors, and speed to market are among the characteristics that Stern says sets indies apart from corporate publishing. That model even allowed Stern to modify her goals for Zando’s partner-led imprints to publishing six to 10 titles a year. It is that agility that made her realize that, as she puts it, “once you get involved in independent publishing, it is the only way to go.”

San Francisco–based company Bindery has put its own spin on increasing book discoverability through celebrity partnerships by building a platform that connects book influencers with publishing opportunities. Matt Kaye, cofounder and CEO of Bindery, says the company now has about 75 creators using the platform and 12 active publishing imprints. The model allows social media influencers and content creators to acquire and publish books for their established audiences, with Bindery handling production, distribution, and marketing support.

“Our whole model is built around a direct relationship to readers,” Kaye says. “We’re trying to find a way to have a platform that doesn’t need authors to have any platform at all.”

Under Bindery’s model, authors receive 50% of net royalties, creators who acquire books receive 25%, and Bindery retains the remaining 25%. The company provides $10,000 advances. Ingram’s Two Rivers division is handling distribution, and sales through bricks-and-mortar outlets account for 60%–70% of sales. The company has seen early success with several titles. House of Frank, acquired by influencer Jaysen Headley for his Ezeekat Press imprint, has sold more than 20,000 copies, while Of Monsters and Mainframes has sold about 20,000 copies.

To help underwrite the publishing process, Bindery operates a tiered membership model through which basic access to a tastemaker’s community costs $5 monthly and includes digital copies of published books. A $12 tier provides early physical copies and credit in published books. Tastemakers who work with Bindery take home 50% of their monthly subscription revenue. The other 50% goes to Bindery, which uses the revenue to underwrite book production. The platform currently has 50,000 total followers. Looking ahead, Kaye says the company plans to publish more than 20 books in 2025 as it continues adding publishing imprints to the platform.

Bindery has had an encouraging start, and Zando, at five years old, is an unqualified success, but the disrupter world is littered with broken dreams. The most recent high-profile startup to flame out was 8th Note Press, the publisher launched with great fanfare by TikTok owner ByteDance in the spring of 2023. The company promised to use its knowledge about what type of books the BookTok community wanted to publish titles to meet demand. It eventually teamed with Zando to help get its books into stores, but after releasing only a handful of titles, ByteDance quickly and quietly closed 8th Note’s doors this spring. It seems that building a nimble startup publisher was not something executives at a company as huge as ByteDance had the patience to see through.

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