Links of Interest: April 22, 2026

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Traditional Publishing

  • Hachette sales are up. Driven by new releases, sales at Big Five publisher Hachette grew 2 percent in the first quarter. Read Jim Milliot at Publishers Weekly.
  • Manga is a dominant force in the global children’s market. Publishers Weekly rounds up sales trends  from Bologna Children’s Book Fair. Read Emma Kantor, Ed Nawotka, and Joanne O’Sullivan.
    • AI was also a hot-button topic at Bologna Book Fair. One publisher described their approach as “deliberately cautious” and said that younger staffers were more opposed to the technology. Read Ed Nawotka.
  • The role of literary agents in shaping American fiction. Here’s another review of Laura McGrath’s new book on literary agents, dropping another great stat: Between 2000 and 2022, more novels were set in New York City than in the other top 30 most populous cities in the United States combined. Read Dan Piepenbring at Harper’s.

Bookselling

  • BookCon returns to New York’s Javits for the first time since 2019. The show attracted 25,000 people and sold out. Traditional publishers were absent from the main hall; instead, Indie Alley, featuring independent authors, took up residence (among others). Publishing-industry vet Sarah Russo writes, “Publishing professionals used to avoid these aisles at BookExpo, [but] readers had no such aversion to walking through. And they didn’t just speed through. They stopped to talk to authors, read jacket copy, pick up stickers and bookmarks, and buy the occasional book.” Many attending were also author hopefuls. Read at Publishing Perspectives. Publishers Weekly also has a report on the show, looking at attendee frustrations due to poor crowd management. Read Iyana Jones and Sam Spratford.
  • How publishers decide which authors go on book tours. An associate publicist at Penguin Random House says it’s a combination of what kind of investment makes sense for the title along with employee bandwidth. Read Abigail Monti at Unsolicited Manuscript.
  • Bookshop.org sales grew 55 percent in 2025. The increase was driven by ebooks and romance sales. Since its launch in January 2020, Bookshop has distributed $46 million to indie bookstores. Read Ed Nawotka in Publishers Weekly.

Culture & Politics

  • Tradwife fiction: this year’s most talked-about genre. So says UK’s Independent, which focuses on Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, a novel that led to a major auction among publishers, with Amazon optioning a film adaptation. Read Katie Rosseinsky.

AI

  • Which demographics are most anti-AI in the United States? The people with the most negative views of AI are voters ages 18–34, among whom the net favorability rating for AI is −44, and women ages 18–49, who reported a net AI favorability rating of −41. The two groups with the most positive views of AI are men over 50 and upper-class voters. Read Allan Smith at NBC News.
  • Keep track of lawsuits against AI companies. This impressive visual guide is compiled by ChatGPT Is Eating the World. Take a look.
  • The looming AI authorship crisis. NPR has a panel discussion with Alexandra Alter of the New York Times; author Andrea Bartz, who is anti-AI (and the class representative in Bartz v Anthropic); Derek Newton, founder of Verify My Writing; and novelist Coral Hart, who uses AI to write and publish. Listen, or read the transcript.