The Scribe Media Files

How the biggest hybrid publishing company in the world imploded.

Disclaimers:

I have no interest in any of what is contained in this report being true. I was set to pay Scribe Media nearly $15,000 more for my second book, due to be out in November, and had paid approximately $40,000 to them in the publication of my first book that came out almost a year ago. In pure selfish purposes, I would highly prefer all of these things to be untrue.

However, this report is deliberately designed to be unselfish. Many people have been hurt by this. Almost all of us, it seems, have been lied to. What we thought was true, what we have been told from Scribe Media about Scribe Media, may not have been true at all. The corruption and deceit from top-level leadership over the brand of one of the top up-and-coming alternative publishing companies in the world seems so systematic and totalizing that the very idea of the company itself seems laughable at its kindest and outright fraudulent at its worst. 

The identifier of “top-level leadership” is crucial to distinguish. One of the most painful things about the events of the last few weeks has been the suffering of many people I’ve personally known make my dream of being an author a reality. The former employees of Scribe Media, the so-called “Scribe Tribe”, seem to be mostly blameless in this case. As per the old saying, when the rich catch a cold, the poor die of pneumonia. 

All of my sources, which I can say are greater than 10 individual people I’ve spoken with directly and nearly 50 secondhand over sources to be later cited, chose to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution from Scribe Media. I will, under no circumstances, reveal those sources unless they choose to reveal themselves. These people have a lot to lose. They are very courageous in telling me what they’ve told me, and I ask all of you to respect their anonymity as I will. 

It is quite possible I get things wrong throughout the duration of the Scribe Media Files. I am working with imperfect information, and am doing my best to paint the picture as I see it with the facts I have to work with. I am more than happy to be corrected by anyone who presents new evidence to the contrary. With the current business, financial, and legal proceedings surrounding the current situation of Scribe Media, I understand that some voices could very well be stifled. I want to hear from them, too, if they dare.

But, until that point is reached, we’ve heard enough from the people who have lost little, and the liars who have protected them. Now, we must give our attention to those who have lost a lot, the people who, willingly or (most likely) unwillingly, helped prop up what seems to be one of the biggest business fraud and ponzi schemes that I, and probably many of you, have personally known or heard about.

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On May 24th, 2023, professional publishing behemoth Scribe Media fell apart. 

87 people, comprising nearly 75% of their workforce, were laid off with no continuation of health insurance or pay on a Zoom call at around 3:00 in the afternoon. The army of freelancers that worked for them on a contractual basis were immediately cut off from their pay and projects. All of their technological access, including their emails, Slacks, and building access, were all immediately cut off. Scribe’s authors, their customer base, most of them having paid or being set to pay tens of thousands of dollars to launch books, were told nothing. Being one of those authors, I can confirm personally that we have still been told next to nothing.

Later, it was revealed that Scribe Media is filing for an Article 9 sale, which occurs when a company with such significant outstanding debts is forced to sell their hard assets to make payments to their creditors. According to insiders at the company, they are currently undergoing a sale with “multiple” potential buyers, including former Scribe Media clients. From top-level leadership on down, this is a temporary issue. They plan on hiring everyone they let go back, they say. No deadlines will be missed, they claim. The company is going to get right back on track, they repeat. 

These assertions (with the exception of the potential buyer, of which I do not know for certain) are false.

Not only are they false, but, seemingly, everything surrounding Scribe Media is turning out to be false. The company culture had been lauded as the best in American business by several prominent media outlets. Their since-resigned CEO, JeVon McCormick, was touted as one of the top up-and-coming leadership and management gurus in the country. Their Culture Bible, which contained their 12 values that apparently guided every decision they made, was lavishing polished and held up as a beacon of what every company should strive to be like. 

The more I dug into the Scribe Media implosion, the more I saw things that were similar to Enron, FTX, Theranos, and WeWork rather than Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. The whole enterprise, particularly in the fateful last two years, is built on fraud and lies. The claims that have been made to me in private from insiders are absolutely explosive. The more and more I went down the Rabbit Hole, the more and more I came to discover that I was duped. We all were. Scribe Media was not “the top corporate culture in America”. They did not “treat people first”. They did their exact opposites, and lied about all of them. Here’s how it happened.

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Scribe Media was first founded as Book in a Box in 2014 by author and early Manosphere adopter Tucker Max and serial entrepreneur and current crypto aficionado Zach Obront. Max, a four-time New York Times bestselling author, created Scribe with Obront to create a hybrid model of book publishing between the ends of big box and self-publishing to market to a new type of clientele. They succeeded, and began to scale the company afterwards. Their two most important hires, and the two that would later sink Scribe’s business, culture, and reputation, were JeVon McCormick, their President and CEO, and Meghan McCracken, their Chief Experience Officer. 

JeVon McCormick was born in incredibly difficult circumstances in the slums of Dayton, Ohio. His father was a pimp, and his mother was a prostitute. His father was a violent alcoholic and crackhead, who would repeatedly beat his prostitutes, including his mother. He also had more than 20 children, including McCormick. Some of McCormick’s defining life experiences included beatings, molestation, neglect, and starvation.

After relocating to Texas and getting his GED, McCormick worked his way up in the business world at a frantic pace. A natural hustler with a passion for people, McCormick became a monster salesman, rapidly helping build companies while building a life completely separate from his old one. The crown jewel of his career was when he became the CEO and President of software company Headspring Systems in 2013. Under McCormick’s leadership, Headspring was, like Scribe Media would soon be, lauded as a “Best Place to Work” in several categories for several years running. Eventually, McCormick was found and recruited by Max and Obront to run their expanding hybrid publishing business. McCormick accepted, and took on the role of President and CEO in March of 2016. 

In November of that year, Meghan McCracken was brought in as a freelancer and then was appointed as the Director of People by Max, McCormick, and Obront. Initially beginning her career as a freelancer, McCracken became a favorite of the founders and McCormick and quickly rose through the ranks, even replacing their old Editor-in-Chief who, unlike McCracken, actually had experience at doing the job in that capacity. Soon, she was universally found to be a rising star and McCormick’s de facto Number Two inside the Scribe hierarchy. Eventually, McCracken took a lateral move back towards her initial expertise in writing, eventually rising to become the company’s Chief Experience Officer in September of 2021, cementing her place as the second-in-command under McCormick. 

Scribe Media achieved enormous success inside of that five-year stretch. The biggest crown achievement was the biggest achievement that non-big box publishing has ever had- the publication of David Goggins’ memoir, Can’t Hurt Me, in December of 2018. Goggins’ memoir, which has been lauded as potentially the greatest self-help memoir ever written, launched Scribe’s publicity into the stratosphere. Goggins went on to become one of the biggest self-improvement influencers in the world, and used Scribe’s business model to make himself greater than $25 million off of pure book sales, a number that is unheard of in any domain.

After the success of Can’t Hurt Me, the floodgates started to swing open. Tiffany Haddish published her memoir with Scribe shortly afterwards. Others, including Saifedean Ammous, Graham Allen, Mike Saraille, and Nicholas Nassim Taleb, came running through as well. To the tune of greater than 2,000 books, Scribe Media was now the biggest and most well-respected publishing company in the world. 

So, then, the question must be asked- how could they possibly have fumbled the bag? Goggins came back and wrote the sequel to his initial memoir, Never Finished, and shouted out the company again for their work on the project. They were attracting more notable clientele. Their prices were raised and paid for by people who wanted to become authors. They were, from the outside, a rocketship. But, on the inside, a completely different story was being told. 

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The fallout, as described to me by my sources and by a very well-developed Glassdoor review and Reddit thread that have both blown up since Scribe did, began in December of 2021. That month, Max and Obront, the initial founders, exited the company. They both sold their ownership of the company and parted ways. Obront began to delve more into blockchain technology, while Max stayed on and helped with workshops and various projects, including a rumored future partnership with Jordan Peterson due to his friendship with his daughter, Mikhaila. As much as he has claimed on social media that he has “nothing to do” with Scribe Media, I can confirm personally that he is still has active accounts on our messaging systems and was referenced repeatedly in my author workshop for my planned second book that was set to launch later this year. He may not be running the show, but to claim his involvement as nonexistent is disingenuous at its most generous. 

This begs a question- to whom were the shares of the company sold to? I cannot confirm as to where all of it went, but what I can tell you is that, as of today, the biggest shareholder of Scribe Media is none other than JeVon McCormick. Max and Obront, it seemed, had so much faith in the leadership of McCormick, and McCracken by proxy, that they were willing to give him the keys to their burgeoning kingdom. 

Which, also, begs another question- why, if Scribe Media was a booming business, would Max and Obront dump their shares onto McCormick’s shoulders? According to the person who wrote the initial Reddit piece, the last profitable month of Scribe’s existence was in March of 2021, nine months before Max and Obront exited the company. As mentioned, profits on books are hard to come by, and your business model needs to always be looking for ways to bolster those as much as possible. My proposition is that Max and Obront had felt that Scribe had run its course, and wisely got out when the company was at its peak. 

This meant another thing- Scribe Media needed to take on additional capital to support their growth model. On its face, there is no problem in doing this as long as the money comes in. Uber went most of its existence without making a single cent of profit, for example. But, nonetheless, the key part of the phrase is “taking on additional capital” to support their growth model. In other words, to keep on the trajectory they were, Scribe needed two things- a consistent stream of outside investment, and a consistent diligence with inside financial management. 

It is here that, according to my sources, the business failings of Scribe began to spiral out of control. McCormick, stunningly, never hired a CFO to oversee Scribe’s financial position. He insisted that Scribe “didn’t need one”. At the same time that Scribe was losing profitability, they continued to expand internally. Payroll at Scribe reportedly doubled from 2021 to 2023, including vastly ramping up hourly freelancer payments. Additionally, McCormick bought out the rest of their building in their Austin headquarters, outfitting it with luxurious work stations, recording studios, and free catering to all employees every Friday. 

Even after the COVID pandemic waned, Scribe maintained a remote-first culture. Whenever I came in to talk with the team, hardly any of the space was being used. Perhaps most stunningly of all, McCormick never bought the building. Instead, he rented it for an astounding price of over $100,000 per month. Paying $1.2 million per year for office space in which that office space isn’t being used is a bad strategy, it turns out. By the end of 2022, Scribe Media had lost a collective $3 million, and were losing a jaw-dropping $800,000 a month in March of 2023. 

However, the ignorance to McCormick’s responsibility didn’t truly begin to bear fruit until the publishing of his second book, Modern Leader, on July 3rd, 2022. McCormick, who had made a good side living as a motivational speaker, was slowly becoming recognized as and up-and-coming thought leader. He was on the Board of Directors for the Conscious Capitalism organization and was an early adopter of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion playbook. McCormick was a leading advocate for a “new way” of conducting business. Modern Leader was going to be used as his trampoline. 

As a reader of McCormick’s book myself, my observation was drastically different than the first. McCormick’s first book was distinct, inspirational, and deeply moving. His second was condescending, incoherent, and completely nonsensical. It was nothing more than twists of age-old platitudes, moralizing, and rubbing the noses of business leaders who he felt didn’t measure up to his level of unearned moral superiority and virtue. It was truly a terrible book. But, due to his brand, and the Foreword being written by David Goggins, it topped the charts on both Amazon and The Wall Street Journal. 

And McCormick didn’t stop there. As he was prepping to release Modern Leader, McCormick and the leadership team were in the process of revising their enhanced marketing package they sold to authors by pivoting it from primarily written content to short-form video and social media marketing. They’re old package was terribly overpriced, and not worth it (believe me, I bought it). McCormick was set to be the guinea pig for what he and Scribe hoped to be a revamped source of revenue. 

It is at this point, in my estimation, that the Scribe culture started to truly show its true colors. In the marketing for his new book, in his lofty desires to create “modern” leadership, McCormick took his hands off the wheel at Scribe Media. He began to not only create content for the launch of the book, as per the package that Scribe offered, but eventually made over 400 posts on his LinkedIn alone. As one commenter aptly put it, he apparently had switched from being the CEO of Scribe Media to the CEO of JeVon McCormick, Inc. 

Worse still, it was Scribe Media, already going down the toilet financially, that was footing the bill for all of McCormick’s personal branding. Scribe’s budget became his personal slush fund, propping up his fraudulent leadership style as the face of the Scribe Media franchise which, ironically, had very little to do with his success as the CEO of a publishing company. He wasn’t one. He had no room to talk. But talk he did, and lead he did not. 

Simultaneously to McCormick’s rise in ego and fall in overall business acumen, the culture of Scribe Media, their calling card and claim to fame, was in shambles. The primary person responsible for this was the person who McCormick outsourced the day-to-day operations to, the person who he, Max, and Obront all had helped to elevate ever since she had come into the fold- Meghan McCracken. 

Coinciding almost perfectly with McCormick’s taking ownership of the company via checking out and Max and Obront’s exit, McCracken began to amp up her control inside of the company via its culture. The key to McCracken’s reign was Scribe’s “Culture Bible”, a stated list of values that Scribe apparently swore to with all adherence. It was what they showed to every single journalist, bragged about with every reporter, and flaunted constantly to new employees who didn’t know any better. 

But Scribe Media, particularly in that later days, did not live up to anything they said at all. The churn of employees, both freelance and full-time, was staggering. There was active encouragement of drug use inside of the office for “therapeutic” purposes. Most importantly, despite the “People First” mantra that came to define the company, Scribe did everything they could internally to destroy that reputation. 

All of this ran primarily through McCracken, giving her a ton of power in the most powerful area of the company. Soon, according to multiple sources, she was given near-absolute control and veto power over every issue, being described as “autocratic” by some. On top of her accumulation of power, she avoided delegating tasks, didn’t listen to any people doing any of the groundwork, and browbeat anyone with the Culture Bible when they “stepped out of line”. 

When employees did “step out of line” the consequences were swift and severe. One source publicly stated on Glassdoor that verbal beratings were guaranteed to happen weekly, often with employees being reduced to tears as a result. During performance reviews, employees were not asked to self-evaluate on the merits of their work, but on how they adhered to the Culture Bible on a scale of Green, Yellow, or Red. If any member of leadership felt you were disloyal, you were called into a one-on-one and branded as “toxic”. 

The worst example, by far, was how employees were treated after they left the company, which, as mentioned, was a regular occurrence. After an employee’s firing, company leadership would take to the internal Slack channels to publicly announce it. They would mock the former employee, usually for speaking up about the obviously-bad leadership practices, and say something to the effect of “only the Elite work here, and this person clearly was not”. All of this was condoned by McCracken, who was also the most regular person to dish out the verbal lashings. Having near-total control as evidenced by nearly all of my sources testimonies, she likely felt untouchable. 

McCormick and Max were far from removed from these confrontations. In one particularly brutal instance, a woman in McCormick’s LinkedIn post stated that she was “verbally abused” by Max and McCormick. When she was fired, McCormick apparently took an hour to do so by attacking her personally on the grounds of her being not only a “bad employee”, but also a bad mother and person. This was done despite her claims that she had done her job as expected and demanded. 

But there is another element to this that must not go unmentioned. The brutal incompetence of leadership at any organization, particularly one like Scribe Media, is too complicated and systematic to be simply directed towards two people. McCormick and McCracken may have been the head of the snake, but they weren’t all of it. The entire Scribe Media leadership team was in on the game too. 

In line with enabling the behaviors of McCormick and McCracken that were sinking the company both culturally and financially, they also had very little reasoning behind the things that they did. They constantly reshuffled departments, blew up Standard Operating Procedures, and moved people from jobs at a minimum of every six months. No one knew what to do, because no one knew what their jobs were. Any dissent, per usual, was met with the usual negligence or punishment. 

A key point of evidence for this, as noted by the earlier source in the Glassdoor review, showed what the Scribe Media leadership really thought of the people that worked for them. In the notes for their quarterly review (which they forgot to turn off), three major points that were hit on among leadership towards their employees were as follows:

1. “If people are unhappy or morale is low, it is because they are toxic and refusing to conform to the culture. 

2. All of the complaints people have about poor processes and no support is a cover for their true complaint: They want more money.

3. If everyone quits tomorrow, we’ll survive.”

This elitist behavior inside of Scribe Media was extended to pay and hours as well. I am not of the opinion that everyone in a company should be paid equally for unequal status and work- I’m an unapologetic capitalist and meritocrat. But, when every one of my sources has told me that there is little to no opportunity for career growth, that any questioning of that is cause for public humiliation, and at one point all members of the leadership inner circle were rewarded for their incompetence with a $20,000 raise publicly, this is a cause for a raising of the eyebrows. 

Some common retorts to questions about pay or promotion would elicit responses like “It doesn’t seem like you’re approaching this from the value of optimism” or “If you were truly thinking about your work from a frame of abundance, a raise wouldn’t be so important to you”. If these issues continue to be raised, you are told that you’re operating from a “victim mindset”. McCormick himself, speaking of the relationship he had with leadership, has said before that “he loves nepotism”. 

All of this leads to the biggest question of all- how was Scribe Media able to fool us all? How were they able to win so many awards? How was their reputation so impeccably pristine? And, especially given the employee testimonials, how come no one said anything? 

The answer is twofold- the genesis of how these awards are given, and in Scribe Media’s employee exit strategy. As for the first factor, what most people don’t know is that these prestigious “awards” are “earned” in two primary ways- games and money. The game is people banding together to unnaturally boost a company’s rating, much like one does any social media algorithm. The New York Times does this with their bestseller lists, for example. The way Scribe Media did it was, when their new hires were fully drunk on the Kool-Aid, they were mandated to post a review. Any and all reviews from employees, on any site, were tracked internally by company management. Any bad posts were cause for shaming, any good were for reward. Whenever employees were fired, most to all of them were forced to sign an NDA about their experience. Several sources have personally told me that anything bad said about the company would result in a ruination of their reputation by company leadership. As for the second factor, the reality is that many companies pay for publicity, as any good company should. I personally have no details on whether Scribe Media did this or not, but it certainly is a possibility. 

Which all leads up to the grand finale. Scribe Media’s problems continued to multiply, which caused their business to continue to falter more dangerously than it ever had before. The employees began to see the writing on the wall. They continually asked for updates about how Scribe was continuing operations. They were given no answers. As for their “open financials” policy, that item on the agenda was reportedly scrubbed numerous times when the rubber met the road. They began to notice inconsistencies in paychecks, if they got them at all. In August of 2022, McCormick put a freeze on their hiring, saying that he was “expecting” a “temporary dip in profit”. He “knew what he was doing”. 

McCormick’s apparent solution to this was the one that he had used ever since Max and Obront’s exit- throw more gas on the fire via more outside funding. The crazy thing was, the offers that were thrown at McCormick to buy Scribe Media were huge, some claiming as high as $60 million. But, according to one source, McCormick turned them all down because of the attached fine print that he would stay on as CEO. He had been checked out for a long time, and wanted to leave and start a hedge fund. 

Early on in 2023, the Scribe team got word that an unnamed investor had officially come on board and was going to work to stabilize the sinking company. The crew was relieved, and things finally started to calm down both from an anxiety and company culture standpoint. The crew finally thought that actual modern leadership was coming on.

And then the unthinkable happened- the investor pulled out. The money was officially dried up, and did so so fast that Scribe couldn’t make payroll the week that it happened. Employees constantly pinging leadership asking questions. They never got answers. 

Then, on May 24th, two internal calls were scheduled- one with the employees, one with McCracken’s inner circle of company leadership. The ax fell shortly after 3:00 in the afternoon. Nearly 90 full-time employees lost their jobs, and hundreds of freelancers, the real workhorses of the company, did as well. All company emails, Slacks, and technology were shut down immediately. Their IT guy, who was also fired, was required to be paid hourly to come in the next day and make sure of it. No severance packages. No benefits. No health insurance. No owed money on back payments. But, to give Scribe some grace, they don’t have much left. They don’t own anything- not the intellectual property on their books, not any non-service-related goods or services, not even the building they used to operate out of. 

It took a week after the initial leak of the news for an official statement to be put out. In what originally was an email from her to the authors and the 30-some employees that are still left, McCracken put out a social media post saying that this was a temporary transition. McCormick put out a statement a week later, blaming his mother’s death that happened over a year ago for his inability to be a Modern Leader, and resigned. Max has denied all involvement, despite him still being deeply enmeshed in some of the company’s most important cultural narratives, platforms, and tools. Obront has said nothing. All of the statements, including the hilariously automated one that went out the morning of June 8th by McCormick talking about how important responsibility was, were skewered mercilessly. 

Since the fallout, McCormick has been made, perhaps rightly so, as the scapegoat, including by McCracken, who now seems to be the de facto head of Scribe Media going into whatever future awaits them. We’ve heard nothing from anyone else. What we have heard, as authors, is that everything is fine. They plan to rehire everyone they let go back, even though their WARN notices say the exact opposite. They don’t expect to miss any deadlines on book releases or projects, despite being frozen in time for going on three weeks. They expect to continue business as usual, despite having to sell their hard assets to pay back the money they don’t have. As for the leadership, there have been reports that McCormick, even though he has said the opposite, is apparently still reaching out to reassure authors as the CEO of Scribe Media. Max and Obront are still claiming their uninvolvement. McCracken has taken the helm of what remains of what was once the most revered hybrid publishing company in the world. 

There still remains much to be answered. The number of authors, myself included, that had active book projects hovers somewhere around 300. Many of them have paid their fees in full, several claiming to have spent over $100,000. Even though Scribe has stated the opposite, I see absolutely no way where they can provide a viable service to their customers with 30 people when it took hundreds at its peak. I think there are very likely to be serious legal repercussions for things we both are and aren’t privy to at the moment. Finally, perhaps most damaging of all, Scribe Media’s reputation, once immaculate, has been thrown through a woodchipper. That will, by far, be the hardest thing to replace. However, perhaps a good place to begin salvaging their brand, if they actually believe in it, would be to start with, finally,  putting People First.