The bookkeeper: Brian Murray faces another tech-tonic moment in publishing

An engineer with a business degree, Murray entered the publishing world when it was going through a digital shift

Brian Murray never set out to lead one of the world’s largest publishing houses. In fact, the first four years of his career had nothing to do with books at all — he was an engineer at a company that built training simulators for nuclear power plants. 

 

“I was not an English major. I had studied physics and engineering at a university in Washington, DC,” says the tall American. 

 

While the tech job was fascinating, business is where his interest lay, which led him to Columbia Business School in New York, where he found himself drawn to the intersection of media and technology. 

 

It was the mid-1990s, and the internet was just beginning to disrupt traditional industries. Murray joined a consulting firm that advised media companies on navigating this brave new digital world. One of his assignments involved working with the media major Hearst. The publishing industry at the time was still figuring out what to do with CD-ROMs, CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy —much like today, when it is trying to fathom the obscure world of artificial intelligence (AI).

 

“I remember sitting in a meeting in 1994 or 1995 with Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen (who had just developed the Mosaic browser),” he recalls. 

 

“They demonstrated the Rolling Stone magazine in HTML. It was an intriguing glimpse into the future of digital media.”

 

I am meeting Murray on a beautiful spring morning at The Oberoi, New Delhi. It’s early February, and there’s a slight nip in the air. Dressed in a business suit, he comes striding out of 360°, the hotel’s ground-floor restaurant that serves Asian, Indian and European cuisines. It is barely past 9; he’s done with breakfast and is ready to meet the busy day ahead. Next morning, he will head to the Jaipur Literature Festival for his first experience of the mega literary fair. For now, we head to the elevator that will take us a floor below to the business room that has been reserved so that we may talk in peace. We shut spring out, and settle down at the round table that fills this small brown room.

 

I begin by asking Murray about an interview he did with Stanford University over a decade ago where he compared publishers to venture capitalists. At its core, book publishing is after all a high-stakes gamble. He smiles. “Yes, we’re essentially the venture capitalists of culture. We place bets on books that have never been in the market before. Some will become bestsellers, others won’t, but the goal is to make sure each one gets its best shot.”

 

Murray was around 30 or 31 years old when he transitioned into publishing. One of the companies he consulted for was HarperCollins, which was struggling financially. He spent months helping the publisher develop a turnaround strategy — so effectively, in fact, that HarperCollins hired him and his then boss in 1997. “They created a position for me,” he says. “I came in with an outsider’s perspective at a time when publishing was still a cottage industry, run more on tradition than efficiency.” It was a period of consolidation — many family-owned publishers were being acquired by large multimedia conglomerates and merged together.

 

Fast forward to today. HarperCollins is likely the second largest publisher in the world in terms of revenue. Penguin Random House is the largest. “However, we have the broadest global reach — we publish in more countries (25) and languages (15) than anyone else,” says Murray, who grew up in New Jersey, outside of Philadelphia, and now calls New York his home.

 

Another thing that sets HarperCollins apart, he says, is its strong presence in Christian publishing — “we’re a leader in that category, particularly in the US.” The publisher also has a global brand in romance, Harlequin, which owns the hugely popular Mills & Boon.

 

The publishing industry often refers to the “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. “I don’t love the term — it makes us sound like a cartel,” says Murray. “Yes, there are five major publishers, but in every market, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of competitors. Anyone can start a publishing company.” Many authors begin by self-publishing. 

 

“The barriers to entry aren’t insurmountable; what’s required is capital and strong creative vision.”

 

On that note, we pause to ask for coffee and something to nibble alongside. Murray wants his black, with milk on the side, and I go for cappuccino. It takes its own sweet time to arrive.

 

This distraction leads us to discuss other distractions, the kind any publisher would dread: Smartphones and the innumerable entertainment options, all of which have the power to pull people away from books. “Yes, we all get stuck in doom-scrolling on our phones,” Murray says. But he’s optimistic. “Younger readers, especially Gen Z, are spending more time on print books than the equivalent demographic from 10 years ago, which is a very positive sign for the future,” he says. This shift happened during the pandemic, when digital fatigue turned people to physical books. As the world opened up and people started venturing out with a vengeance, reading dipped a bit, “but it has picked up again”.

 

HarperCollins has seen a surge in long-form reading, particularly in romance and fantasy. In the US and UK, nonfiction sales have declined, but fiction growth has offset those losses, Murray says. “Interestingly, this trend is mirrored in India.” Social media has made the global book market more interconnected than ever before. “Readers in India, Brazil, Australia, 

 

and Europe are embracing similar trends in reading habits, driven by algorithmic recommendations and globalised marketing.”

 

Today, HarperCollins is seeing rapid growth in markets like India and Brazil. “These are among our fastest-growing regions, and we’re seeing double-digit growth in both, between 10 and 20 per cent annually, making them crucial to our long-term strategy,” he says. In both countries, about 30 per cent of the publisher’s revenue now comes from local authors, “which is a big shift from a decade ago”.

 

The coffee arrives, finally. Milky, frothy, like cappuccino anywhere. I wonder if it has changed at all from the time it was introduced in the late 18th century. There has been some experimentation, I recall, with the coffee being infused with turmeric and ghee. Or was that with latte? Anyway, I am never going to try any of those abominations, so why bother?

 

As he pours milk into his brew, Murray talks about how rapidly technology and social media are changing the world of books. There are butter croissants, cakes and tarts also on the table, but he is too full to try them. “We now market our books directly on social media, working with influencers who share their recommendations,” he says. Platforms like Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and TikTok (in countries where it is not banned) have become essential tools for reaching readers. 

 

Another growth area is audiobooks. Spotify, for example, recently expanded into audiobooks, leveraging its massive base of music and podcast listeners. “This has driven significant growth, particularly among younger audiences who prefer listening to books.”

 

Technology can be both an enabler and a threat. When he entered the business, the internet came presenting innumerable opportunities. Today, the publishing world is adapting to yet another technological shift: AI. “It’s by far the most disruptive technology we’ve faced,” Murray says. “Unlike past shifts — ebooks, audiobooks, digital marketing — AI doesn’t just change distribution; it challenges the very nature of creative ownership.”

 

Ignoring it is not an option. So HarperCollins recently struck a deal with an AI company, but with guardrails. “It’s purely a training deal, not an output deal,” Murray clarifies. “We ensured that our authors’ content is protected, that only up to a certain word limit is used after their consent, and that they’re compensated,” he explains. The biggest concern is AI models using books without permission, which is why he says they’re supporting lawsuits to enforce copyright protections. “We can’t simply take tech companies at their word when they say, ‘Trust us’.”

 

Some startups are developing AI-powered tools using book content to create interactive experiences. “For example, a chatbot built on a renowned management expert’s books could provide strategic advice, essentially allowing users to ‘converse’ with the author’s body of work.” It’s an interesting space, but he’s venturing into it cautiously. “Some authors want to explore it, others don’t, and we respect both viewpoints.” 

 

Respecting viewpoints is critical in his line of work. As he steers HarperCollins at the corporate level, he says he largely leaves creative decisions to his editors, but steps in when major financial investments are on the line. “When we signed Daniel Silva, a bestselling author, we structured a global publishing deal across 15 languages,” he says. “We’ve done the same for Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. These kinds of projects require a high level of coordination across markets.”

 

Looking ahead, Murray sees a publishing landscape that is both more global and more data-driven. “In the past, we made printing decisions based on how many copies we sold of an author’s last book. That was wildly inefficient.” Today, they use real-time consumer sales data, which makes business more sustainable.

 

For someone who spends his days surrounded by books, does Murray ever consider writing one himself? “People tell me I have a book in me, but I don’t think so,” he laughs. “I don't love hearing myself talk or reading what I’ve written. But never say never.”

 

He reads a lot, though, mainly book proposals and manuscripts — mostly just a few chapters, but sometimes an entire book if it’s high-stakes. He says he engages more with non-fiction, political books, and biographies. “Literary fiction is different — it’s highly subjective. My role in those cases is more about asking the right questions rather than making an editorial judgment.” He also reads a “tremendous amount” of news to stay informed. “Given how much I read for work, I rarely get around to leisure reading.”

 

And when he's not making multimillion-dollar publishing deals? “I unwind with my family. I have four kids, and we love to travel. That’s my real escape from work.”

 

From nuclear simulations to global bestsellers, Murray’s journey has been anything but predictable. But then the best stories are often the ones you never see coming.