Mike Shatzkin
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
A Career Spent Critiquing the Publishing Industry
Among the best known faces and voices in the American book business, Mike Shatzkin has died this morning (November 7) at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital with what Michael Cader reports was a rare cancer. Shatzkin was 77.
During the Sharjah Publishers Conference in the United Arab Emirates this past weekend, several of the US industry leadership figures there spoke quietly among each other of having heard that Shatzkin was ill. Several were hoping to drop him a note. It was understood that the prognosis looked difficult.
Publishers Lunch’s Cader was Shatzkin’s partner in co-producing Publishers Launch Conferences, which staged many BookExpo America events and the first seven iterations of the Digital Book World series. And today Cader captures his former colleague at Publishers Lunch, calling Shatzkin, “beautiful, brilliant, boisterous, kind, generous, optimistic, unconventional, and wholly original.”
A go-to source for members of the press covering publishing, Shatzkin exuded the best kind of irascibility: always with a wink. When you found him on the exhibition floor at Frankfurt, he’d grin, shake your hand, answer your question about how the turnout looked to him and what was the big story of the trade show—in a sandpaper voice so loud that your biggest fear was he’d be overheard by other journalists: we all wanted an exclusive comment from Shatzkin.
Once, when he detected some skepticism on the part of a journalist about whether a given book would sell, he said, “Yeah? So how do you make your money?”
Consulting and Comment Combat
Mike Shatzkin, left, interviews Ingram Content Group’s John Ingram at Digital Book World in 2016. Image: Publishing Perspectives
Shatzkin opened his consultancy, Idea Logical Company, in 1979 to deploy his long years of experience in the business.
He loved the comment-combat of Idea Logical’s blog pages, “The Shatzkin Files,” where he’d joyously reply to comment after comment, easily flicking aside belligerence and putting neophytes in their places. In one column from 2016, In an Indie-Dominant World, What Happens to the High-Cost Nonfiction? he discusses introducing in 2013 the Wool trilogy author (“The Silo Series”) Hugh Howey and agent Kristin Nelson to Digital Book World in 2013. At the end of that blog post, goes on to joust and parry in 78 comments.
One of his colleagues later remarked in a conversation at BookExpo America on how Shatzkin churned out so much reader response on his blog posts: “He’s the fastest typist I’ve ever met.”
Shatzkin rode the Amazonian arrival and digital transition like a kid on a carousel, as Cader points out “unafraid of being bold in his predictions and proclamations—of which he made many.”
He drew on, and talked about, his entry into the world of books in 1962, when he held a summer job at Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue. His 2019 book, The Book Business: What Everyone needs To Know (Oxford University Press) was co-written with the late Robert P. Riger.
You can learn more about Shatzkin’s publishing-family background in posts like this one from 2009 on his father, Len Shatzkin, who took “great pride at having hired the first two Black office workers at Doubleday in the 1950s. This was particularly cheeky for the guy who was the only Jew in top management ranks. The way I always understood the story from him was that after the second one was hired, Doubleday management said, ‘OK, Len. That’s enough.’”
Politically engaged and prone to worry aloud about New York City (“Too many empty stores in Manhattan. Look at that, see?” he’d say as he walked a block with you), Shatzkin was a man who liked the fact that he had a lot to share and was ready to do just that. Cader captures this today in his line, “Mike provided valued counsel, analysis and perspective to countless people and companies—whether you were a client or not.”
And yet, he had his priorities in place, too, and would set you straight on those, once telling a reporter who probably was fretting too much about the latest book-retail controversy, “Never forget: baseball über alles.”
More from Publishing Perspectives referencing Mike Shatzkin is here, and more international publishing obituaries from us can be found here.
About the Author
