Links of Interest: April 26, 2023

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London Book Fair

  • Publishers are evaluating retail prices and increasing them. The average mean retail price of a hardcover novel has increased by 2 pounds since pre-pandemic times, according to one study. Meanwhile, some book buyers are switching to paperbacks or library borrowing. Read Philip Stone in Publishers Weekly.
  • AI is a big topic of conversation at the show. Agents and publishers expect AI to have immediate effects on translation work, marketing, and back-office functions. Read Ed Nawotka and Andrew Albanese in Publishers Weekly.

Literary Magazines

  • Literary magazines and money: genre magazines always pay, but literary magazines often don’t. Why is that? Read Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.
  • A tiny literary magazine has outsized influence. The Stinging Fly has 1,000 subscribers and has launched Ireland’s most prominent authors. (And for a literary magazine, it pays pretty well.) Read Max Ufberg in the New York Times (gift link).

Traditional Publishing

  • New font for HarperCollins, for non-English books: The publisher says the font will not only improve readability but sustainability, since the font will reduce the amount of paper used per title by up to 20 percent. Read Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.

Self-Publishing

  • Findaway Voices shuts down Authors Direct. The program, which required approval and a setup fee, allowed authors to sell audiobooks directly to readers. Findaway is moving readers (and authors) over to Spotify. Read Monica Leonelle at Author Analyst.
  • “We are in the new pulp era.” So says Sean McLachlan, who presented at the 20Books Sevilla conference that took place recently in Spain. Read Ed Nawotka in Publishers Weekly.

Libraries

  • HarperCollins will make high-demand titles available in a special library lending program. As part of a six-month pilot program with OverDrive (the leading library distributor of ebooks), HarperCollins will allow libraries to purchase bundles of up to 100 loans for specific titles for lending concurrently based on patron demand, with no expiration date. Another publisher, Abrams, put their entire catalog (including children’s books) into the program this year. Read the press release.

Barnes & Noble

  • Employees at a Barnes & Noble store intend to unionize. The store is in Hadley, Massachusetts, and it would be the chain’s first store to unionize. The workers are organizing with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1459. Read Scott Merzbach at Daily Hampshire Gazette.

AI

  • A new novella—a collaboration between human author and AI—will publish next month. The book is Death of an Author, produced by Stephen Marche, who used three different AI programs to generate the work. It will be published as an ebook and audiobook by Pushkin Industries, the audio production company co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell. The credited author? Aidan Marchine. Read Elizabeth A. Harris in the New York Times (gift link). Critic Laura Miller at Slate says the book is pretty good, with the prose style better than average.
  • An author has published 40 books at Amazon in 2023, all generated by AI. The books instruct on various topics related to programming and project management. So far, the books all have stellar reviews. See Hacker News for link and comments.
  • The shapes of stories: Someone asked ChatGPT to rate characters’ feelings at different parts of the story in well-known classic works. Then he graphed the answers. Browse at Superb Owl.
  • You can’t regulate what you don’t understand. We all need to know what AI is being told, and that requires mandated disclosures. Read Tim O’Reilly.

Culture & Politics

  • Against the idea of flow: A counterintuitive argument that flow is not necessary for the best performance, and we might do better with a little more unpleasantness. Read Barbara Gail Montero at Aeon.
  • Your ebooks are getting “updated.” Even if you don’t want your Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine, or Agatha Christie to reflect the latest edits by publishers, you’re still getting them if you purchased the ebook. Read Reggie Ugwu in the New York Times (gift link).
  • WGA votes to authorize a strike. If there’s no deal by May 1, the industry is bracing for a shock to the system. TV production will feel the effects first. Read Anthony D’Alessandro at Deadline.
  • A white bestselling novelist struggled to find a publisher for his novel featuring a Black protagonist. Author Richard North Patterson, who has written and published 22 novels, wanted to sell a novel about racial conflict to a Big Five but couldn’t. Read in the Wall Street Journal.
  • PEN report says state legislation is “supercharging” book bans. During the first half of the 2022–23 school year, there was a 28 percent increase in book bans. Mischaracterization of books as pornographic or indecent is increasing. Read Andrew Albanese at Publishers Weekly.
  • Florida remains at the center of the book banning debate. The state government has passed three laws aimed at reading or educational materials. Books removed from circulation in one of Florida’s school districts include Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, among many others. Read Patricia Mazzei, Elizabeth A. Harris, and Alexandra Alter in the New York Times (gift link).