Andrew Richard Albanese Writes About Words and Money for the Library Market

If you are a librarian, follow the publishing industry, or care about how the big houses are negotiating lending and purchase policies, there is now Words and Money. The newer website and eNewsletter covers the most important issues that face librarians, from laws that affect their institutions to banning books.

Publishing journalist Andrew Richard Albanese founded the website last year to cover libraries across the U.S. and the roles they play both in publishing and in the political and cultural climate as a whole.

“ Libraries are so important to the reading and writing landscape,” Albanese said. “Every author has a library story. You ask an author about their experience with libraries, and you can tell it’s critical to the work that they do.” 

Albanese describes himself as a “publishing lifer.” Like most people in the industry, he has always been a book person. As a kid, he loved to hang out in public libraries; he started his career as an editorial assistant at Dutton Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. But he says his library story didn’t start until he became a journalist, when he started at Library Journal in 1999. 

He had been brought onto the publication to start the Academic Newswire, an email newsletter. “Which is quite regular now,” he said, laughing, “but back in 1999, it was quite a thing.” 

“Getting to meet public librarians and learning about their service and the things that they do and the challenges they face, that’s when it really clicked for me,” he said. “This is such a vibrant part of the book world, and I think most people don’t really know about how it all works.”

Albanese spent nine years at LJ before moving to Publishers Weekly in 2008. He covered some of the industry’s biggest news cycles: Google Books, the Apple E-book price-fixing case, book bans, open access. But his favorite beat to cover was always libraries.

“I just saw them as this essential part of the business that always kind of got shoved to the side a little bit,” he said. “They’re not bookstores. They don’t sell books, they lend them, so the publishers kind of look a little differently at that because they’re not consumer spending.  I just felt like there needed to be a publication in the trades that focused on the library market, so I decided to give up the paycheck.”

In late 2024, Albanese started planning his departure from PW to start his new independent publication. He mentioned the project to Erin L. Cox, a longtime colleague of his on the marketing side. “She got it immediately,” he said. The two formally started the publication in January of 2025, and soft-launched at the London Book Fair. The name, “Words and Money,” was chosen in part as an homage to the eponymous 2010 book by publishing veteran André Schiffrin, a career hero of Albanese’s.

Since then, the publication has continued to grow. 

“ We made the decision over the first year to not do a subscriber push, to just let it grow organically,” Albanese said. “And we told ourselves that we would do the subscriber push when the organic growth started to fall off. But it hasn’t fallen off.”

As of August, Words and Money was averaging between ten and twenty thousand views a month, with nearly a thousand subscribers and email newsletter open rates at the incredibly high range of between sixty and seventy percent—the industry average sits between twenty and forty. Albanese said the publication was planning to do a marketing push in the coming months to help boost its capacity for some of the more complex feature reporting he had in mind.

There has been a growth of independent publications, and generally of an independence movement in publishing and media, over the last few years. As indie books and indie authors get more popular, and as indie bookstores start cropping up around the U.S., an increasing number of people are starting their own publications, from local news to book reviews. 

“ It’s exciting, isn’t it?” Albanese said. “The tools of publishing have gotten so good and so efficient, so there’s so many more ways to get the written word and journalism and all of this stuff out to a wider audience. I think that’s really helped fuel what I see as a golden age for independence right now. I also think it’s a backlash against the sort of conglomeratization that we’re seeing in the world. We are in a publishing and media landscape where you can follow your expertise, no matter how narrow it is, and make a go of it, and I think that’s really important for where we are in the world right now.”

The Words and Money “About” page reads, “Looking to start your own thing? Good for you! The more voices and perspectives the better.”

Of course, running an indie library news publication is not all Albanese has on his plate. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of longtime international publishing outlet Publishing Perspectives, which he has been doing since this past January, after long-time EIC Porter Anderson suddenly passed away. Between those jobs, he’s working 60 to 80-hour weeks.

The grassroots support he has gathered from people in the industry is what he said keeps him going. 

“ I have so much support. I have a family that has supported me in this. I have Erin, my publisher, who supports me in this. I think what has helped me most has been the acceptance and the support of the library community,” Albanese said. “Every week I hear from people saying, ‘This is so helpful to me. Thank you so much for doing this.’ The sponsors we’ve had so far, the people who have stepped up saying, ‘I want to help you grow this.’ Seeing people understand what you’re trying to do, and wanting to be a part of it and wanting to help you along. For all the challenges that we face, there’s no chance that this is going to fail because that support is there.”