Ami Greko is leaving her job at Macmillan/Tor Books; she has been their Digital Marketing Manager. But effective 18 January, she’ll be the director of business development for AdaptativeBlue, “a New York-based startup, focused on utilizing semantic technologies to create a better web browsing experience.”
Announcing the move on her blog, Greko says she’ll be “working with a product you may already be using: Glue.
“Glue provides an entirely new of way of connecting authors and books directly to readers… You know all that discussion about the need for curation and how authors and publishers must build direct-to-consumer relationships? Glue has enormous implications for both.
“Before taking this new gig, I thought a lot about what it meant to leave big-house publishing (or ‘legacy publishing,’ as we’ve taken to calling it around here). Since it’s the only field I’ve ever worked in, it was a particularly hard decision to make. True, the challenges facing the industry now are serious, but it’s clear to me that publishing is chock-full of smart people who are all doing their best to keep things afloat. I love this business, and I have no doubt that it will find its way.
“But I’ve realized that at least for the next few years, changes that affect the issues most important to me and to readers—DRM, rights, pricing—are going to be coming from the top down, not the bottom up. As much as I’d like to be able to say I’ve been in a position to impact decisions in these areas, a lot of them, by necessity, are made way outside of my pay grade and without any input from this peanut gallery.
“As someone looking to fool around with the way that publishing works, this has been hard for me. One of the things I admire about tech companies is their willingness to try experiments quickly, evaluate the data, and then decide what’s worth pursuing and what should be ditched. Legacy publishers are learning to do this, but for the time being, it can be slow going. AdaptiveBlue offers me an opportunity to find a new way to connect readers and books. And man, does that make me excited.”