First Annual Letter as CEO of Scribe Media: The Year of Surviving
I’ve always liked the practice of an Annual Letter from a founder or CEO to the community around a company. Many of the entrepreneurs and leaders I most admire have this practice, and it is one I’m adopting for Scribe.
My aspiration here is to show you our present progress and our future intentions. To express appreciation for all those who contributed to our success and to acknowledge our own mistakes. We believe we are building an important company to the future of publishing, and welcome you to be a part of the adventure. Here is my first Annual Letter as CEO of Scribe Media.
First Annual Letter as CEO of Scribe Media: The Year of Surviving
Hello friends!
Last summer, we were a fragile baby bird. It was not clear whether we were a hatchling chicken born into a forest fire or… a Phoenix.
A snapshot of where we were in July of 2023:
20 people
Zero revenue
Reputation worse than zero
It was a tough situation, and we all knew it. We knew it was going to be a year of high pressure, and it was. But that pressure was precisely what allowed us to grow stronger and tighter as a team.
I’ve always loved Charlie Munger’s line: “The best advertising is doing well with the work on your desk.”
That is how we approached this year. Our mantra inside Scribe has been “Flawless on the Fundamentals.”
For the first 8 years of the company, Scribe earned an impeccable reputation for excellence. That reputation is why when big names like David Goggins, Tiffany Haddish, Nassim Taleb, and The Nobel Committee chose to self-publish, they chose to work with Scribe.
We knew Scribe’s hard-won reputation had already taken a big hit under the different leadership from Jan 2022 to May 2023. (I won’t belabor this here, but some background if you are unfamiliar.) We knew rebuilding our reputation would require both diligence and patience.
The diligence to deliver excellence at every opportunity. The patience to keep doing it until the pattern was obvious to everyone.
No currency other than performance can buy an enduring reputation. Building trust takes time.
As I write this in December of 2024:
We have published more than 110 books over the past 16 months. We’re proud of every single one.
We have nearly 200 more in progress, and some particularly thrilling launches coming up.
We are a team of 26 people full-time, with dozens of expert freelancers working closely.
We take pride in the fact that over 100 authors who worked with the prior Scribe have chosen to work with us.
To those of you who stood with us in this fragile first year, thank you.
Authors like…
Cameron Herold
Klaus Kleinfeld
Tim Urban
Jennifer Nash
Tanya Sheckley
Alexandra DeVito
Wendy Mangeant
Craig Stanland
Ron Thurston
Will Leach
Matt Shoup
Freelancers like…
Aleks Mendel
John van der Woude
Kelly Teemer
Anna Dorfman
Lawna Oldfield
Greg Likins
Former Scribe team members like…
Zach Obront
Tucker Max
Chris Piper
Miles Rote
Erin Tyler
Supporters like…
John Hall
Michael Huseby
Mitchell Baldridge
It takes grace and character to help others even when you yourself are wounded. You all exhibited these and many other virtues. You are deeply appreciated.
Key Progress in 2024
Even after a year of hard work and great progress, many challenges remain for this new company.
There are still many past authors, employees, and members of the Scribe community who feel confused, conflicted, or angry about the events of 2023. The haze around those events is clearing, but there are more conversations to have, feelings to process, and work to do to rebuild trust.
Adding to the natural confusion, there are competitors misrepresenting Scribe’s recovery. Despite repeated requests and good-faith outreach to them to clear things up, they stay on their chosen course. We carry on.
[Redacted legal issue that we can’t talk about at the moment.]
These challenges are real. But we feel encouraged and empowered by the success we’ve had over the past year in the four core areas we knew we had to focus on:
Stabilizing the business and operations
Doing everything we could do to support authors in transition
Making improvements to our services
Rebuilding the team
None of those things happened overnight. These were a few key events along the way:
Establishing a single point of contact: One huge misstep in Scribe’s past had been diffusing direct relationships with authors across a team instead of keeping one single point of contact. We now have one key point of contact, the Publishing Manager, who guides the author through the entire course of their relationship with us.
Offering at-cost publishing to affected authors: It was a financial impossibility to refund or work for free on all of the books impacted by the bankruptcy last year. However, even as a new company trying to find its footing, we felt the right thing to do was to give affected authors the best treatment we could possibly afford. We have over 100 such projects completed or in progress.
Reducing the price of Scribe Publishing: The price of our Scribe Publishing offering had been increased by prior leadership. We reduced it. Scribe is a premium service and competes on highest quality rather than lowest price, but our prices should always be in line with the value delivered.
Rebuilding Guided Author: This is our service for authors who want to write their own book with the help of an expert editor as a guide. The idea is that they learn as they write, culminating in a great, polished manuscript. In the past, the Guided Author service had been focused on a short in-person workshop. We rebuilt this service to be location-independent and consistent with the Publishing Manager structure.
Hiring Rikki Jump: In January of 2024, Scribe Media veteran Rikki Jump joined our efforts to rebuild. We were beyond thrilled. Her diligence, professionalism, and expertise have been a huge benefit to our team and our authors this year. Rikki has a unique, wonderful touch and her authors love and trust her.
Hiring Travis Stoliker: We were similarly thrilled to have Travis Stoliker join Scribe as our VP of Marketing in March of 2024. With his background as an operator and successful entrepreneur, he is the perfect person to set a ferocious pace at the lead our marketing efforts.
Hiring really strong Publishing Managers (PMs): As the keepers of our author relationships, our Publishing Managers are the face of Scribe. We were fortunate to add four exceptional women to our team this past year. With a variety of backgrounds (often in far more cut-throat industries than publishing) they are unfailingly kind, clear, and organized.
Bundling audiobooks: One clear trend in the world of publishing is the continued growth of audiobooks. This is especially true in non-fiction, which are the majority of our projects. Previously, we had treated audiobooks as an optional add-on. Now, we bundle audiobooks into our services by default, properly honoring their place as a critical format.
Guidance from founders Tucker Max and Zach Obront: While neither has an official role or financial stake in this new version of Scribe, both Tucker and Zach have been publicly and privately supportive of our work to rebuild the company. We are extremely grateful for the groundwork they laid, and for the advice they provide as we work to fulfill their original mission.
Rebuilding trust with authors & ambassadors: Our happy army of alumni authors are the wind in our sails. To connect with them required hundreds of 1-1 conversations, emails, and group calls. These exchanges were not easy. But they had to be done; there are no shortcuts when it comes to rebuilding trust. Ultimately, it was a huge pleasure to charge into hard conversations with so many wonderful people and learn so much about Scribe’s past.
(Please remember none of these are exhaustive lists. It is impossible to fully capture the virtues and victories of dozens of people over a whole year in a few pages.)
In 2025 we will improve our existing services. We will gently expand our services to ensure authors reach their visions of success with their books. We will deepen our alignment within the team and our partners to continue to improve our effectiveness.
Going into 2025, we have a solid foundation to build on and thrive. The team and I are energized to continue our strong recovery and cross the threshold from surviving to thriving.
We all believe Scribe can become a mountain in the publishing landscape of this new era.
Thank you for being a part of this adventure.
Onward,
Eric Jorgenson