Traditional Publishing
- Penguin Random House sees profits decline due to rising costs. The US is PRH’s largest market and accounts for more than 57 percent of its overall revenue. Revenue from print books fell slightly in the US, while ebook sales were stable and digital audiobook sales grew slightly. Read Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.
- Meanwhile, PRH UK enjoys increased fiction sales. Fiction was up 9 percent last year, and nonfiction was down 3 percent. In the children’s market, PRH UK reported growth of 6 percent despite a flat overall market. Read Lauren Brown at The Bookseller (sub may be required).
- Do publishers or bookstores care if authors are on Substack? A Barnes & Noble rep let it slip that they are more likely to stock and support a cookbook author with a following on Substack rather than Instagram or TikTok, which surprises me (not least because of this interview I did a couple years ago). But this article explains why and also asks: Is the same true for other nonfiction categories? Read Abigail Monti at Unsolicited Manuscript.
Culture & Politics
- How Spotify deals with impersonation on its platform. Artists who leave Spotify find that their tracks and albums reappear on the app. So it has started assigning artists a unique code, called an artist key, which they can include when submitting music to Spotify so that it is automatically approved to show up on their profile. But the issue remains complicated. Read Casey Newton at Platformer.
- Canadian print book sales increase partly because of anti-American sentiment. Books by Canadian authors accounted for 14 percent of unit print sales in 2025, up from 12 percent in prior years. Read Ed Nawotka in Publishers Weekly.
- Learn about the publisher behind RFK Jr.’s empire. Tony Lyons, the founder of Skyhorse Publishing, is deeply involved in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. His daughter is autistic, and his ex-wife has written books about “how their family navigated the condition.” Read Tal Kopan at the Boston Globe (sub required).
- Celebrity book club cheat sheet. In case you’re having a hard time keeping track. You’ll be generously alerted to Alta’s own book club in a pop-up. Read Robert Ito at Alta.
- How the Iran war is affecting publishing’s global supply chain. Profits are being squeezed, partly due to rising fuel and freight costs, and some new titles are being delayed. Book festivals in the Middle East are also being postponed. Read Ed Nawotka at Publishers Weekly.
- The most popular narrator in romantasy. Anthony Palmini often plays centuries-old faeries who tower over their love interests. He says readers often expect to find a “burly grown man” but instead find “a scrawny, nerdy teenage boy.” Read Vanessa Romo at NPR.
AI
- An interview with the CEO of Superhuman, the company formerly known as Grammarly. Shishir Mehrotra admits that their Expert Review feature—the feature that inspired outrage and a lawsuit—was not good and says that’s why they pulled it. The CEO also says, “Respectfully, we believe the [legal] claims are without merit. The idea that the feature is impersonation is quite a big stretch. Every mention was very clearly, ‘This is inspired not only by this person, but also inspired by a specific work from this specific person, with a clear attributed link to get back to them. … We should not be able to impersonate you, period. We did not.’” To Patel’s credit, he confronts him on this feature repeatedly. Read Nilay Patel’s interview at The Verge.
- Important court ruling on piracy with implications for publishing. In March, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that internet service providers are not liable for copyright infringement of their users—unless the service is designed for illegal activity or actively induces infringement. Publishers and their attorneys are now wondering if the same logic applies to large language models: “The question is whether training on copyrighted text and optimizing for human-quality creative output constitutes, in legal terms, a service ‘tailored for’ infringement or, at minimum, one that induces it.” Read Ed Nawotka at Publishers Weekly.
- Someone is generating 5,000 novels about our AI future going well. The goal: that this might help ensure our AI era will go better than usual once AI trains on these optimistic projections. The project just received a $5,000 grant, and the grantee would appreciate plot ideas you could offer as prompts. Take a look at Hyperstition. Sounds far-fetched? A paper released in January said that pretraining with such data dramatically reduced misalignment. H/t AI Sidequest
- Penguin Random House Germany sues OpenAI in Munich. The publisher claims that ChatGPT reproduces images and text that are recognizable and in some cases nearly identical to those within Ingo Siegner’s the Little Dragon Coconut series. Learn more.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.