Bookselling
- Book Depository is closing. Amazon’s UK online bookselling arm, Book Depository, will close on April 26, a victim of Amazon’s broad cost-cutting and layoffs. Amazon acquired Book Depository in 2011, but it has not been profitable. It is an unfortunate loss for the international community, as many authors and publishers relied on it for worldwide free shipping of books to more than 170 countries. Perhaps that’s why it was unprofitable? Read Monica Miller at BBC News. Carolina Ciucci helpfully lists alternatives to Book Depository at Book Riot.
- ABA and Bookshop partner on ebook retailing. The American Booksellers Association wants indie bookstore customers to be able “to click on a link on an indie bookstore’s e-commerce site to connect with Bookshop and make an ebook purchase.” It’s being compared to how Libro.fm serves indie bookstores by selling digital audiobooks. Bookstores will earn 30 percent of the ebook retail price. Learn more in Shelf Awareness.
- A profile of Bookshop’s founder, Andy Hunter. There aren’t any big reveals here about the Bookshop business if you’ve been following it since 2020, but it is a comprehensive look at Hunter’s life story and career—and the circuitous route that took him into online bookselling. Read Kate Knibbs in Wired.
Trends
- Where have all the 13- to 15-year-old protagonists gone? A middle school librarian laments the plethora of 12-year-old characters in middle-grade books, with little or nothing for early teenagers who aren’t ready for the YA section. Read Rachel Grover at Publishers Weekly.
- Where do you draw the line when revising classic novels? There is a danger in altering a text, which could “remake the literary and historical record by deleting evidence of an author’s racial and cultural prejudices and eroding literature’s ability to reflect the place and time in which it was created.” Read Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris in The New York Times (gift link).
- Where are Substack’s 2022 financials? They’re not saying, and you can probably guess the reason why. One media analyst does back-of-the-napkin math and argues we should be concerned about the company’s valuation. Read Jacob Donnelly at A Media Operator.
Audio
- Selling audiobooks without Audible. Brandon Sanderson has managed it, partly due to a partnership with Spotify. Cory Doctorow is routing around Audible as well. Read about his experience in Publishers Weekly.
- Resurrecting dead narrators through AI: DeepZen, a company that specializes in AI narration, was given access to Edward Hermann’s past recordings with his family’s permission. Read Brian O’Connell in TheStreet.
Culture & Politics
- When upmarket fiction doesn’t work: Book critic John Warner offers a detailed explanation of why upmarket fiction doesn’t win the day for him. He prefers either distinctly commercial fiction or literary fiction rather than a blend. Read at the Biblioracle Recommends.
- There’s another Brandon Sanderson profile, this time in Esquire. It is very different in tone and approach than the Wired profile, and reveals that, to fulfill his record-breaking Kickstarter, Sanderson had to double his staff. While he enjoys working with traditional publishers, he doesn’t like how they avoid bundling together formats. “One thing I think publishing is poorly equipped to deal with right now is letting people pick their price point,” he says. Read Adam Morgan.
- A US-based novelist succeeds in Italy but not in the US. Why? The book didn’t get any reviews in the US, aside from one in Publishers Weekly. But in Italy, after the translation was published, the author is getting interview requests and glowing reviews in prestigious magazines. Read Erik Hoel at the Intrinsic Perspective.
- Why you should care about the Hollywood writer strike: More writers are working for minimum wage today than a decade ago. Writers Guild of America members are voting right now on whether to authorize a walkout. Read Laura Bradley at the Daily Beast.
Serialization
- Wattpad lays off 15 percent of its workforce. This puts the company right in line with other tech and media companies doing the same thing. The company had added 100 employees in the past two years, nearly doubling its staff. Read Ed Nawotka at Publishers Weekly.
- Kindle Vella is adding reader comments to stories. Monica Leonelle takes a quick look at where we’re at now with Vella. Read at the Productive Serialist.
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.