Mike Shatzkin
Founder & CEO
Mike Shatzkin is the Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and a widely-acknowledged thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry. In his nearly 50 years in publishing, he has played almost all the roles: bookseller, author, agent, production director, sales and marketing director, and, for the past 30 years, consultant. His insights about how the industry functions and how it accommodates digital change form the basis of all of the company’s consulting efforts.
More About Mike
Founder & CEO, The Idea Logical Company
Co-Founder & Partner, Publishers Launch Conferences
Co-Founder & Partner, Logical Marketing
Mike Shatzkin has been involved in the publishing business for nearly 50 years. He has written or co-authored six books that have been published by established companies and just issued his first self-published ebook, a collection of two years of his blog posts called “The Shatzkin Files, Volume 1.”
For the past two decades, he has been a thought leader and among the most prominent observers of the industry’s transition to the digital era. He founded and leads The Idea Logical Company, a consulting firm working on strategic issues for publishers and their trading partners and he is co-founder, with Michael Cader, of Publishers Launch Conferences. PLC stages industry education events exploring digital change from a global perspective.
Mike organized many industry conferences before PLC was organized and has spoken at industry gatherings across the globe. His work has appeared regularly in trade journals for decades. The client list of The Idea Logical Company has included all the top publishers in the US, many in the UK and elsewhere, leading wholesalers including Ingram, leading retailers including Barnes & Noble, and numerous suppliers of technology and other services to publishers including big systems providers (Klopotek and Publishing Technologies), specialized digital services (netGalley and Vook), and industry services and not-for-profits (BookScan, Copyright Clearance Center, and Book Industry Study Group.)
Mike’s experience in publishing is as varied as it is long. Aside from his author credentials, he has been an editor, a production manager, a sales director, and has sold rights in many venues, including for Hollywood development. His early experience, including a stint as sales and marketing director for a distributor, was with lots of small publishers. Since he was engaged for several years by John Wiley starting in the mid-1980s, Mike has worked primarily with the world’s largest houses as clients or on behalf of clients.
Mike’s specialty is “change”, particularly as it relates to digital strategy and the publishing supply chain.