When the foundation of BBPG began to take shape in the early 1990s, all of the ‘Big Six’ publishers still stood, any mention of Amazon was preceded by ‘the’, and the label ‘disruptor’ was anything but pervasive in corporate vernacular. Yet that’s exactly what I was.

In fact, years before the jargon of disruption reached ubiquity, I secured an unwittingly synonymous first trademark for BBPG with A New Era in Publishing®. Because I believed that’s precisely what we could—and would—achieve through our Relationship Publishing® business model.

As of BBPG’s 1994 debut, the myriad print-on-demand shops enabled by the internet were years away, and royalty-based contracts that captured the majority of an authors’ earnings remained the only option. Though I seemed to be the sole person who thought an industry sea-change was feasible, I was putting in 100-hour weeks (and then some) to build a company that gave authors a better, more profitable way to share their work.

Having just pioneered the first author-first publishing model, I was elated to introduce BBPG at my inaugural industry event since opening our doors. I strolled into the Romance Writers of America Conference ready to change the lives of writers everywhere! And that’s when I discovered that no one but me was eager for publishing to pivot, not even the authors BBPG was designed to benefit.

Circulating into the conference’s social swirl, I shared my ground-breaking concept with anyone who stood still long enough. “Hi, I’m the founder of Brown Books Publishing Group,” I’d begin, noting the recipient’s initial delight at meeting an actual publisher.

“Our new publishing model actually reverses the industry standard,”  I’d continue. “With us, you invest in the production of your book and earn 70 to 90 percent of the sales revenue, versus 10 percent or less with a traditional publisher—and you get to keep the rights to your work if accepted.”

Then, I’d be immediately met with an abjectly mystified look or a condescending insistence that ‘real’ authors don’t pay to publish because ‘real’ publishers pay for their work. Never mind that those publishers would literally pay them pennies on the dollar, and only if or after the advance was recouped.

Nary a writer at that event appeared interested in earning more and getting to be directly involved in the editorial process—something no other house offered. They were exclusively interested in being the next proverbial grist for the publishing mill. I shouldn’t have been so surprised, since I suspect their hopeful expectations had already been severely ground down by current industry practices.

For the would-be originator of a new era, my publishing career looked poised to end before it started. Not only were there no prior case studies or competitors to help articulate our model, the terminology for hybrid publishing hadn’t even entered the nomenclature (and when it did, it was rapidly distorted by misuse).

I felt like a cautionary tale on the dangers of being first to market, until an off-hand chat with fellow executives reaffirmed my course. That conversation revealed an audience who’d been waiting for what BBPG had to offer—founders and C-suite dwellers who understood the returns they could yield by investing in their own work. For them, BBPG’s third trademark was more resonant than our first, as they saw the value proposition behind The Entrepreneurial Publisher for Entrepreneurial Authors™.

So, I hadn’t developed the wrong business model after all. I’d simply been focusing on the wrong pool of potential early adopters. With hard-won advice, careers, and legacies that were inherently book-worthy, thought-leaders and bottom-line thinkers began to submit their manuscripts. As I watched them pile up at an increasing pace, I knew BBPG’s first big hit was already sitting in front of me and ready to be developed.  

I was right, though the journey to our earliest successes was less succinct than imagined. BBPG was barely established before we faced the universally disruptive rise of online retail, market-moving shifts surrounding web content use, industry panic as eBooks emerged, and the costly imperative of bringing a bricks-and-mortar operation to the internet. While many of these were global challenges impacting all businesses, it’s fair to say they were especially problematic for the recently founded—particularly in publishing.

However, BBPG’s survival amid the aforementioned chaos served to revise and crystallize my entrepreneurial ethos. Now, I knew what it really took to build a company from the ground up. Primarily, a very flexible methodology, a rigorously inflexible mission, accepting that any foible will now be public fodder, listening when other founders tell you your inevitable difficulties are not novel, and a work ethic some would call irrational. Until it pays off, that is.

By the close of our first decade, we’d celebrated a Writer’s Digest Grand Prize and a Hollywood Film Festival award, released an international smash in 20-plus countries, and signed our first New York Times bestselling author. Erstwhile, the industry landscape had drastically changed, right alongside the introduction of our radically different approach to publishing. With clients from all genres and most continents now pursuing our services, the business model it once seemed no one wanted had become a standard-bearer for what could only and undeniably be described as . . . you guessed it . . . A New Era in Publishing®.