Anyone who follows publishing knows that it loves to celebrate a disruptor. Disruptor is a label thrown at anything new, and publishing is unusually easy to disrupt because it is particularly slow to change.
Back when I started She Writes Press in 2012, I was called a disruptor. I confess, I liked it. But it wasn't exactly accurate, and whenever I spoke at conferences about what we were doing-which was growing a reputable hybrid model based on the systems of traditional publishing-I let audiences know that legacy publishers had been cutting hybrid deals for years, which was an open secret. If I was doing anything disruptive, it was encouraging the authors we published to be proud of publishing nontraditionally. As I mentioned, it doesn't take much to be considered a disruptor in this space.