Mary Ann Naples, 58: Embracing a New World

Do you ever wonder if the industry you love, the world that you have worked in your entire life, may be fading away? Mary Ann was the vice president and publisher at Hachette Books, vice president and publisher at Disney Books, and senior vice president and publisher at Rodale, where she published scores of bestsellers—which, if you are in the book world, is about as high up in that world as one can get. But the world of the written word has transformed.

Mary Ann loves books, the impact they can make and working with new ideas that can change how we see the world and how we can improve our lives. She believes deeply that books—the real kind, that we hold in our hands—are not going away. AI, however, is changing how they’re created, for better and for worse, so Mary Ann moved to embrace the change and started Audacity Strategies as a way to positively engage with AI and help others do so too.

At 58, and with a storied career, Mary Ann could be one of those pining for the past, but that is not how she rolls. Instead, she looks back simply to inform her future, excited to be part of what it holds for her. 

How old are you?
Fifty-eight.

Where are you from and where are you currently based?
I’m originally from Pennington, New Jersey, and I live in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

You’ve worked at the highest levels in some of the most renowned publishing houses. What was that like?
Working in publishing has always been a joy, even when I have taken it for granted, as I have from time to time. I still have my journals from when I was new to publishing, and marveling that I could be in this business that helps create culture, where I could work with both literary writers and icons of entertainment that contains both creativity and business. The perfect combination. Book publishing is filled with people who love books, love ideas, love to work with authors, and share something that is very life-enhancing for many people. When you go outside of publishing, it’s just not guaranteed that people are going to care about books.

So, if you’re that kind of person, publishing is the right environment for you to be in. When we would have our questions in our Office Hours channel, many of them are about the legends of publishing that we’ve worked with, the books we helped bring into the world, funny stories from publishing, or other publishing lore. It’s been fantastic and really a wonderful thing to be able to do work that means something every day. Even when things aren’t going well, you always have that.

Where do you see the future of publishing going?
I believe that publishing as we know it will continue, but growth is a problem and there is ongoing consolidation that will stress the system. As the tools for changing our work change with things like AI, some of the ways we have done things in the past will change, just like how we do meetings has changed due to video technology.

So, I think that there will be new models, and the self-publishing models will continue to rise. There will be some models in between that have the best aspects of traditional publishing or major publishing. Audio, I think, is also going to continue to rise, and we will see new forms for books as well.

What will be the role of physical books?
Physical books are here to stay. There was a moment when e-books first appeared, and people thought they would endanger physical books, but instead, the opposite has been true. There are die-hard e-book readers, and I am one of them, but when I love a book, I need to have it in physical form as well.

Most people, however, now seem to prefer physical copies of books, including my kids and most people’s kids. Nothing really beats, for me, the ability to have all my books with me at all times on my phone, but I also need to have those physical copies in my house. I think that is absolutely going to continue and potentially increase, and it’s likely that there will be more emphasis on the beauty and quality of the physical books.

What are some of the things that you feel an author needs to know about before pitching a book?
The best thing for the author to understand is the right expectations for the process: what they need to do, and what the publisher can and can’t do. Publishers want to partner with authors to create successful books. But authors often have their own ideas of what the publisher does, and those ideas can be outdated. It’s actually hard to sell books, and while the legacy tools like national publicity are great for prestige, the absolute fact is that it does not work as well as it once did.

Now, podcasts have risen in importance (the right podcasts). Social media can be fickle, and even when a book is a huge success, books still have a far smaller market than other creative forms. The book business retail-sales cycle is long, and many things happen behind the scenes to share the book with the sales team and then with booksellers. Often, wide retail distribution doesn’t happen until your book has proven itself in the biggest outlets or appeared on bestseller lists, and the only way a publisher can print enough copies to make those bestseller numbers is if the preorders, driven by the author’s direct audience, are high enough. What really makes sales spike is the author’s own connection with their audience. You really need both—the author has to be a full participant, and the publisher will be counting on that partnership.

What were some of your criteria for green-lighting a book?
Publishers are marketing both to consumers as well as to the retail market, which is a very big part of a publisher’s job. That is, in many cases, somewhat invisible to the author. Our criteria for green-lighting a book is always: Does the author have something important to say, something that is going to help people, and are they a pioneer or a visionary? Is it something new that we haven’t heard before? And then beyond that, it’s amazing if that author has shared their journey with their audience and is professionally set up to be able to take part in the publishing journey, so that their audience is very aware of when the book is coming and how they will find it.

Tell us about your company, Audacity Strategies.
Audacity Strategies is a consultancy dedicated to bold book publishing, growth strategies, creating new models for bringing books into the world in a changing market, and creating community and fostering innovation with new tools and AI in book publishing—with some exciting things coming soon!

Tell us about your interest in community.
During the pandemic, our team at Hachette Books and Hachette Go had a shared experience of extraordinary community. When the lockdown started, and we were suddenly at home and the world was a scary place, as the leader of the team I had to think what would we be missing, and also how could we care for and about each other in this situation. We were already a team that was using at least some of the tools for virtual meetings and team chats, like Teams or Slack, but we had recently started a meeting called Office Hours to handle those ongoing conversations that need to happen each week.

I began starting each day by saying good morning to the whole team and asking a question like this: “Good morning, @officehours! Today I am thinking about family food traditions. My grandmother used to hand-make ravioli, and the days we had that at her house were a highlight of my life. What is a family food tradition you had or have now?” We established that no one was required to participate, that we were there to enjoy each other’s company and be supportive, and we would eventually take turns “hosting” the chat weekly. It turned out that this kind of chat, that happened over the course of the day, gradually helped forge deep bonds that we all fiercely valued. We kept up the daily question tradition every day, and even now we have an independent Slack chat so we can stay connected.

This simple (and free!) method, which I call “Good morning, Office Hours,” was so notable that other groups adopted it, and we eventually created a guide to the process. It is still spreading! Having had this experience motivates me every day to work to create that kind of community in other parts of my life and to help show others what it can bring to a team.

How do you see AI changing publishing?
AI is advancing rapidly, and just like every area, it is going to enable us to do some things far more quickly and efficiently than we have before. Many people in publishing are justly alarmed at the use of author’s work in AI training data, and that aspect of AI will play out over time. We’ll also see an explosion of poor-quality content—in fact we already are. But beyond those things, I believe we will see incredible creativity with AI as well as the ability for people to do exciting things in their roles with AI as a resource and thought partner.

Are you using AI for anything in your personal life?
I am, and I have actually been consulting with others—a literary agent and an educator—sharing how they could use it for their own lives and jobs as well. I’ve noticed that so many people do not use the incredible tools available to them now and, in many cases, are still stuck in email and overwhelmed by that email, maybe even without realizing that there are things you can do to pull all of your information together in context that, yes, may take some time to set up, but then changes your life forever, truly.

I created a custom GPT as a gift for my father’s birthday. It is called “The Wisdom of the Marvelous Mike Naples”—and it has all of my father’s letters and emails of advice to his three daughters that started when we were in college, and you can ask it any question and get a direct quote from his letters as a response. It’s incredible!

What does a weekend in NYC look like for you? Some of your favorite things to do?
I love going to our incredible Brooklyn bookstores, McNally Jackson or Greenlight in Fort Greene. We might have a meal at LaRina, a wonderful Italian restaurant, also in Fort Greene. Or, if we’re going into Manhattan, at Frenchette, which has been a spot of incredible memories over the years. It has a beautiful room, spectacular food, and stunning natural wine. And somewhere in there we will go see a movie at BAM.

I’ve been called an obsessive fan, but I love Life And Trust, the immersive show set in a historic bank building in the financial district. I also loved Sleep No More, which is sadly closing soon after more than a decade. I have never experienced anything else like these two shows—it’s like you are living in a dream. Stunning!

What is your ambition for the next 10 years?
My ambition for the next 10 years is to continue to help shape the future of publishing and continue to find new models to get the word out about books and to help books sell more and be exposed to more people and audiences. I plan to keep building and growing in my work and with my family.

What are a few of your favorite books?
Asking publishing people what their favorite books are is a difficult proposition, but I’ll approach it this way. One of my favorite books that I published is Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is the founder of the mindfulness meditation movement—and just an icon. We had the pleasure of republishing or doing the 30th anniversary edition of that book that still sells 30 years later at Hachette Books.

And then any book by Carleigh Bodrug: PlantYou, PlantYou: Scrappy Cooking, and her upcoming book. She just is so generous with her audience. She knows what she’s doing, and they’re just absolutely great and healthy cookbooks.

A book that’s been very influential to me that I had hoped to publish, but unfortunately did not prevail in the auction, was Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. If you think about how you organize yourself and how you can do it better, you end up building a valuable knowledge base that then you can build so many additional things on top of, and that is also what I’ve been working to teach people. And then you’re also set up to use AI. So it’s very, very satisfying, and I’m not the only one who has been influenced by that.

And last, I also want to say Girls They Write Songs About by Carlene Bauer, which is a gorgeous novel about coming to New York City when you’re young to pursue your calling and trying to figure out your personal life as you go along. Just a great book. I hope everybody reads it.

Do you consume podcasts?
I do listen to podcasts. I don’t always love them, but one that I really love, because it’s both bookish and techie, is AI and I with the host Dan Shipper, who is the head of the media and tech company Every. He’s just really an incredible guide to what is happening in AI and how to use it. Even just listening to him—because he’s such a reader and an intellectual and a writer, but also really understands the tech—I think he is able to bridge the worlds for people who are non-technical but trying to learn in the space. It’s just really enjoyable, so I recommend it.

Thoughts on streaming versus theaters?
We—because my husband is a film producer and I am an absolute movie love—are both theater and streaming fans. One of the biggest sadnesses during the pandemic was missing going to the movies. It took us a while to realize it, but it’s something that we do, maybe even almost once a week, so we missed it. Streaming is great because it expands our choices. So, I’m going to go for both.

What are your three life nonnegotiables?
My three nonnegotiables are: It’s up to you to create the conditions for your happiness. I have left jobs when I’ve been unhappy, and I’ve noticed that people often don’t do that. I don’t know why, but I am incapable of staying in a place where I don’t feel enough belonging or happiness. So that’s important. Second is always keep learning and connecting the dots, and learning how your mind works. This is the key to creating the conditions for your own happiness. And then also related is make sure that you have art in your life. That is books, music, film, paintings, and art in every and any form. I also think that can be other things that you bring art to, but you have to find those things that give you that way of seeing the world, that gives you that. I always think it’s something what makes you sit up and pay attention, that’s what it does for me. And beyond all that, loving my family and my community, working to create good things in the world. That’s the foundation.

Editor’s Note: Some answers may have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Connect with Mary Ann:
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Main photo by David Harry Stewart.