In 2011, when The Elements of Content Strategy came out, there were a handful of books on the subject, most of them either heavy on marketing tactics or on technical practices. Since then, the field’s reference library has deepened and broadened enormously, and you won’t need my recommendations to find a dozen potential branches for further exploration. Instead, here’s a handful of the books published since 2011 that I reach for and recommend most frequently.
For getting your head around the complexity of publishing on the modern internet of one trillion devices:
- Content Strategy for Mobile, by Karen McGrane (A Book Apart, 2012)
- Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure For Future-Ready Content, by Sara Wachter-Boettcher (Rosenfeld Media, 2012)
For wrestling with the process (aka human) problems of governance at the heart of all large-scale editorial work online:
- Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, by Lisa Welchman (Rosenfeld Media, 2015)
For doing excellent work without actively making the world worse:
- Nicely Said, by Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer-Lee (New Riders, 2014)
- Design for Real Life, by Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer (A Book Apart, 2016)
- Accessibility for Everyone, by Laura Kalbag (A Book Apart, 2017)
- Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, by Sara Wachter-Boettcher (W.W. Norton, 2018)