He’s possibly correct about publishers not being able to afford the rumored $150 million that Amazon paid for Goodreads, but they probably could have afforded it when it was smaller. It was a riskier proposal back then, I’ll admit, and one that I couldn’t put a price tag on, so I won’t claim that I pushed hard or that the publisher was foolish not to take my advice. Let’s say back in 2010, when I first urged one of the Big Five (are there five now?) publishers to buy it. Unless they had seen this coming and had bought it many years ago. The obvious reason is that based on the rumors of a purchase price in the “low eight-figures” as some are confidently whispering, most publishers weren’t really in a position to buy Goodreads. The point is why GoodReads wasn’t snapped up by a publisher years ago. The point isn’t that Amazon bought GoodReads. I have an important question to ask, one that I am stealing from author Nick who wrote this on Twitter the morning after: James McQuivey, writing over at Forbes, laments over the fact that no one in publishing bought Goodreads: Several dozen editorials have been written in the 2 days since Amazon announced plans to buy Goodreads, but one in particular caught my eye today.

There’s A Reason That No One in Publishing Bought Goodreads

Baen vs tor publishing