Announcement: The Book Deal Is a Done Deal!

I’ve signed a contract with Harvard Business Review Press

Aug 12, 2024

Big news here! Last week I signed a contract with Harvard Business Review Press to publish the book on the Transformation Economy.

HBRP is really the only company I wanted to publish the book. (Otherwise I might just build on this Substack and self-publish, as my friends the Category Pirates do so well. I highly recommend them. I guarantee you will learn so very much; you wouldn’t, after all, be reading this today if I didn’t learn the great possibilities of writing a book on Substack from them!)

Harvard has published all but one of my books, and has always been terrific to work with. It has a great marketing machine, including via the Harvard Business Review, the HBR Insider newsletter, a translations department, retail reach, corporate sales, and other means. It also excels in making books better through its editing and peer review processes. And it doesn’t remainder them! (Meaning you never see “your baby” in a bookstore, with a black line on the cover, selling for $3.)

I should mention too that in the modern publishing world where so many books are bought digitally, as an author I have to prove to them I have an independent marketing platform that will help sell the book. And that’s another area where you, my Substack subscribers, have helped. You’re not only making the book better yourselves, you’re not only catalyzing me to write, you are already spreading the word to others, and I will be dependent to you to continue doing so when the book is published! At least, that’s what I promised Harvard….

And that’s another area where you, my Substack subscribers, have helped.

I also wish to thank our Managing Partner at Strategic Horizons LLP, Doug Parker, who is a marketing genius and produced a wonderful plan for the book that we shared with Harvard. Doug also figured out Substack and taught me what I needed to know, and he’s the one that schedules the posts after he adds a great illustration or picture to the top of it. So thank you, Doug! I appreciate you.

Some Details

The book is now officially due at the end of the year. That means HBRP plans on publishing it next fall/winter, depending on a lot of factors (editing, peer review process, global book events, what other books are in the pipeline and when they come in, etc. etc.).

Being due at the end of the year also means I’m officially behind! At least I feel that way. It’s been tougher to write the past six weeks or so with some travel, the start of the summer MBA course I teach (remotely) at Northeastern University, and (not least) the golf season being in full swing…. I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking on the chapters and in particular the ideas and frameworks that go into them. My early writing picked off many of the easiest things to write – much I already knew, or new frameworks I was experimenting with, which made writing them seem less consequential, if you know what I mean. Now I’m more into new thinking, how the ideas relate to each other, and have to figure out how they go into chapters in the book. For real!

So thank you again, dear subscribers, for being here!

So thank you again, dear subscribers, for being here to read my writing, for giving me your feedback, and for all the encouragement you’ve given me inside of Substack and through other means. I’m firmly committed to making this the best book possible, and showing the way for companies to embrace the Transformation Economy through The Transformation Economy.

As a friend closes his emails: Onward!

Joe Pine