Alex Kaplo lives, apparently, the life of Riley. The 31-year-old’s website shows him roaring around in a Mercedes, and he boasts of taking ‘extravagant’ holidays and living in a high-end apartment. He has made all his dosh, as it turns out, as a ‘publishing chief executive’. He has caused hundreds of books to be released, none of which he has written.
His story appears, alongside a few others, in a report in yesterday’s Sunday Times about the people who are really getting rich from publishing these days. And, spoiler alert: it isn’t traditional publishers, still less (ha ha) actual authors. It is a new breed of entrepreneur who scours Amazon for popular search terms, identifies undersupplied gaps in the market, and commissions ghostwriters – or, in some cases, AI – to fill them fast and fill them cheap.
Amazon’s direct-to-kindle publishing and print-on-demand facilities mean that anyone, now, can set up as a publisher.
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