Hybrid Publishing: From Frontier to Mainstream

Why I think hybrid publishing has finally arrived.

This week I had lunch with a local Bay Area traditional publisher who wanted to pick my brain about the hybrid space and model. For the first time in fifty-plus years of existence, they’re not making their numbers, the publisher told me, so they’re thinking about their options—including starting a hybrid arm of the company.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been approached by a traditional publisher who wants to break into hybrid. It makes perfect sense. The book world is changing (and has been) and survival is hardly a given. While acquisitions are never a slam dunk, editors used to be able to predict what books their presses could earn out on based on good instincts and comp titles and the knowledge that the readers were out there. Author platform matters, too—because it’s not easy to sell books, so an author’s built-in audience has long been a leverage point, the thing that could tip the scales for an author seeking a publishing deal, or make them a shoo-in if their platform were large enough.

In our post-pandemic/post-AI world, however, book publishing has reached Code Red. It’s not just that four million books were published in 2025 (a 32.5% increase over 2024, a disturbing level of growth fueled by AI, undoubtedly); it’s also about competition for eyeballs and readers’ attention from podcasts, online courses, Substacks, and of course ChatGPT and Claude. Who’s going to read a book about attachment theory when you have a chatbot who will interact with you about your attachment style, combing the web for everything that’s ever been written on the topic?

I know a lot of traditional publishers, and they’re freaking out. Sales are down. Layoffs have been quietly prevalent for the past two years. Notably, Penguin Random House laid off 60 longtime editors and others in mid-2023, many of whom were offered buyouts. Simon & Schuster eliminated fifteen jobs earlier this year, mostly on the editorial side. Early last year, Hachette laid off staff following its acquisition of Union Square & Co. from Barnes & Noble. In late 2024, Publishers Weekly reported that employment in U.S. book publishing had fallen to 55,000 in 2023, down from over 91,000 in 1997, a 40% decline over less than 30 years. And that was before the surge of AI tools that led to the giant jump in books published in 2025.

So, what’s a publisher to do? Profit-sharing, offloading expenses, and reducing risk all sound like good survival instincts to me.

In the beginning

In 2012, when I started She Writes Press (SWP), the other publishing house I knew doing copublishing was my former employer, North Atlantic Books. I share this here (and always) because I didn’t invent hybrid publishing. But when I started She Writes Press, I did it for all the same reasons other hybrid publishers profess: 1) I wanted to publish excellent books that traditional publishers were passing on because the authors didn’t have established author platforms; 2) I didn’t have deep pockets or financing to start a traditional publishing house; and 3) I didn’t want to have to say no to worthwhile projects that I believed should be published, and if the authors would share the risk and green-light themselves, then together we (co-publishing) could do just that.

The year SWP came onto the scene, there was no such thing as hybrid publishing. The only other publisher doing what we were doing was Greenleaf, who was not yet calling itself hybrid. Then there were traditional publishers who were cutting copublishing deals, but not publicly. In 2014, I wrote a Soapbox piece for Publishers Weekly called “Between Traditional and Self-Publishing, a ‘Third Way.’” I wish the comments were still up because they were scathing. But those comments also launched my advocacy, and led to what I’ll now call a slow revolution, with the hybrid model now not only accepted, but truly embraced. (Though it would take a while!)

Early pushback

The reason I wish those comments to my Soapbox piece hadn’t been deleted was because they sparked in me such a resolute passion. They were ignorant and mean-spirited. Some of them didn’t even understand what I was talking about. I remember one particular nasty commentor who kept coming back at anything I wrote in the comments with “caveat emptor!” Others thought I was talking about “hybrid authors,” which is when an author is both traditionally published and self-published and they quite literally couldn’t understand a middle ground between traditional and self-publishing.

When I received an Innovator Award three years later in 2017 from BISG (Book Industry Study Group) for She Writes Press, I attended a ceremony at The Harvard Club. I was the only hybrid publisher there and I felt like a fish out of water, only worse; it was more like flopping breathless on the deck while everyone watched me gasping for air. A hotshot editor from one of the big houses asked me, “Why not just do hybrid but not talk about it?”

I had worked for nine years at Seal Press, a feminist press that published plenty of books that centered silencing—in every way, shape, and form you can imagine. And while it was clear what his underlying message was—“Why don’t you just shut up about it?”—I found it within myself to meet his gaze and say, “Because I value transparency.”

What I didn’t say but was true then and now was that I also valued people being real about who gets published and why. Traditionally published authors get chosen for sets of reasons that exist outside a book’s worthiness to be published. I desperately wanted to destigmatize paying to publish, but that would turn out to be a long, long, long battle.

Defining it as we went

I delivered a keynote address ten years ago at the Publishing Professionals Network Conference in which I said, “People have said to me that my model is creative, and I said, No, it’s the new old.” She Writes Press was built on Seal Press’s process and North Atlantic’s model. And yet, there were no standards for what a hybrid press was, or how it should do business. In that keynote, and in my book, Green-light Your Book (published in 2016), I talked and wrote about hybrid as everything and anything in the “in between space” between self-publishing and traditional publishing. I couldn’t have foreseen the degree to which hybrid needed to be defined because there weren’t very many of us in the space. It was new and exciting, and I talked about it as the “new frontier.”

Very soon, however, it became clear that hybrid needed parameters. It couldn’t be anything “in between” because people were very quick to co-opt the name. All of a sudden anyone who was helping authors get published was a hybrid, and the dilution and lack of definition was starting to create new tensions. Hybrid publishing was gaining negative attention from self-publishing advocates who basically felt (and not wrongly) that “hybrid” publishers were exploitative and over-charging authors for something authors could do by themselves.

In 2017, in my role on the Board of the Independent Book Publishers Association, I worked with a stellar group of publishers (two hybrids and two traditional publishers) and then CEO Angela Bole to establish the Hybrid Publisher Criteria, which stands today as the best benchmark for the model that we have.

Looking back at how I talked about hybrid then and how I talk about it now, I’m saddened by the shift, really. I thought hybrid could be a wide-open landscape of people engaging in creative publishing models, but no. Simply put, I hadn’t anticipated the degree to which authors could or would be targets of predatory actors.

Division and predatory publishing

Sometimes I wish I could go back ten years to a time when my biggest complaint was that hybrid wasn’t getting the acknowledgment it was due. In that Publishing Professional Network keynote, I called out Michael Pietsch for being blind to the impact of hybrid or self-publishing in a 2015 WSJ article he’d penned about the future of publishing.

Of course, people were paying attention to hybrid, and jumping into the pool with us. Lots of companies that were previously self-publishing services started calling themselves hybrids. Some of these were well intentioned, and some were sharks. In 2022, when things felt like they were reaching a fever pitch with a lot of backlash against hybrid, I wrote a piece for Jane Friedman’s blog called “We All Need to Be Defended Against Predatory Publishing Practices.” From this point forward, I’ve added “predatory publishing” on the publishing continuum, in part because I do think hybrid publishing gave predatory publishers language to use, a disguise to wear.

But, authors are smart, and predatory publishers won’t last because this industry is built on reputation and word of mouth. I’m not saying these companies aren’t still out there, but the worst of them have either folded or been publicly outed, and the reputable hybrids at the top have not only proven success, they’ve also stood the test of time: She Writes Press (2012); Page Two (2013), Atmosphere Press (2015), Forefront Books (2018), The Collective Book Studio (defines itself as partnership publishing, 2019).

Celebrating and distancing

I was heartened recently to see an author celebrating signing her memoir with Atmosphere Press in the Binders Full of Memoirists Facebook Group, which actively talks about publishing and celebrates its community of authors finding their way to publication. In the past, I’d come across these kinds of posts and almost invariably see someone dumping on hybrid, undermining the author in some way for not having gotten a traditional deal. No such thing here. The poster was roundly congratulated, and when a question came up about whether Atmosphere was hybrid, the more seasoned authors in the group talked about hybrid’s benefits, and suggested it was a good way to go.

With layoffs at the big houses, a handful of high-profile legacy publishing professionals have entered the hybrid space. Some of them want to distance themselves from hybrid completely, while others are calling themselves rare or unique or disruptive. At this point, I think we’re past disruption, however; hybrid is a mainstream way to publish, and nothing makes me happier.

Hybrid publishing won’t escape the fact that some people don’t and will never like the term itself. The last time I tackled this topic (in 2023) was in a thought piece for Publishers Weekly called “What’s in a Label?” I wrote this article because the gains I felt hybrid had made in the late 2010s were being undermined by the predatory publishers, and in the aftermath of a 2022 Society of Authors (UK) report that was a public takedown of hybrid.

Three years later, things have settled. Hybrid-published authors are successful, and many of them are happy. Hybrid presses are among the fastest-growing publishers, both in terms of sales and profits, and authors are making money and selling books. Authors understand that they have choices, and the consolidation of the traditional industry means that there are more and more opportunities in the middle space, regardless of what label publishers choose to adopt.

What really matters

At the end of the day, what matters is the books and the authors. Those of us who do the work of publishing with care invest all our energy, attention, expertise, and resources into our authors and their work. Yes, sales matter, too. But the measure of a good hybrid publisher is not whether or not their books earn out. Part of the reason hybrid publishing is thriving is because publishing is a gamble and always has been.

This is why publishers like “sure bets” in the form of proven authors with big platforms and celebrities. But some publishers, like She Writes Press, exist because we aren’t interested in the sure bets. We explicitly exist to serve authors who might not have an author platform at all, but who have a great book, and are ready to use their book to build a platform. Some hybrid publishers, like my friends at Forefront and Collective Book Studio, are signing ever more famous authors because authors want more equity. They want more creative control and better royalties. And copublishing is more creative and expansive, and frankly, exciting.

People who have a bone to pick with hybrid publishing suggest that hybrids aren’t invested in their books because of the business model, that somehow they’re not “all in.” As a publisher who’s been in this space for as long as I have, two thousand authors in and also with my time at North Atlantic informing my experience, I find this critique truly uninformed. Hybrid publishing is as much for underdogs who deserve to get published as it is for entrepreneurial authors who see the value of breaking a traditional model that no longer serves them. And a publisher will not survive if they don’t care about their authors, the books they publish, or their own brand. Your reputation hinges on the authors’ experience, which starts with editorial and production and extends to distribution and sales, and the book you bring to the marketplace.

For all its ups and downs, I feel grateful to have been on this rollercoaster ride that is advocacy of hybrid publishing. We’ve weathered a lot of storms, and the next chapter should be interesting to say the least. I think we’ll see more and more independents bringing hybrid into their programs, cutting traditional deals when they think they can earn out, and asking authors to shoulder more of the risk when it’s not a sure bet. This is just smart business, by the way, and for the authors who do recoup their expenses, they end up on the winning side for having doubled down on themselves.

Jesse Finkelstein (Publisher of Page Two Books) and I are sitting on a panel together at this year’s PPN conference on April 24 (and Jane Friedman is keynoting). If you happen to be in the Bay Area that day, come see us!