The collapse of one of the most famous and profitable ghost writing companies
By the end of 2021, JeVon McCormick (the CEO), Zach Obront and I (co-founders) got the company to $21 million in gross sales. We’d totally revolutionized the professional book publishing services space, and got famous for publishing the massive bestseller Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins.
This was the peak of the company. We had a great team, everyone was bought in, everyone was working hard, and we had amazing plans to scale to $100m a year and beyond.
If you don’t know the story, in short: Scribe Media was on top of the publishing world in 2021, The founders left in 2022, and by May 2023 was bankrupt and collapsing. Over a hundred full time employees were laid off without warning, almost 500 part time and freelance employees were not paid for work or left in a lurch, and hundreds of authors–many of whom had paid in full–got nothing back, and investors were scammed out of millions.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 8 Oct
I wasn't aware that ghostwriting was so ... visible. I thought it was always done behind closed doors - you were important enough to be approached. Reading the sales page and imagining the target audience is wild: https://scribemedia.com/service/ghostwriting/
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