Marketing and Promotion
- How do you get a speaking agent? Literary agent Alia Habib interviews a speaking agent and offers insight into whether and when you might be able to secure one. Read at Delivery & Acceptance.
- How does NPR cover books? NPR does a bit of reflection and reporting on itself. Read Kelly McBride at NPR.
- The challenge of getting attention for a book, even when you write for The Atlantic: A staff writer and journalist at The Atlantic discusses how a fragmented media landscape has “nuked” traditional book marketing—and how the problem is not unique to books. Read Helen Lewis at The Bluestocking.
- Related to the above: A media analyst says the public relations industry is “already cooked.” Adam Mendelsohn writes, “For decades, PR operated in a relatively stable media environment. Influence was concentrated. If you landed coverage in the New York Times, CNN, and a few key trade outlets, you could assume your message reached your customers, employees, investors, and regulators. It was a game of managing relationships with a few powerful institutions. Today, influence is fractured, ambient, and often invisible to those still clinging to legacy distribution models. AI will accelerate that fragmentation. The channels of mass distribution are losing their power, while truly influential voices are self-selecting into smaller, more engaged communities. Peak social is over. Engagement is now the premium KPI, and influence is defined by who you reach—not how many. This runs counter to how most of the PR industry is constructed.” Read at The Rebooting.
Trends
- The changing shape of the nonfiction market: Nielsen UK looks at the format share of nonfiction purchases (it’s mostly print, but audio is growing) and what categories perform best. Read at Nielsen.
- Independent bookstores are selling a lot of copies of On Tyranny and other politically salient titles. Some stores have put On Tyranny next to the cash register. Read Claire Kirch at Publishers Weekly.
- There’s a new generation of children’s magazines. While the magazine industry continues to shrink, this small, print niche is experiencing a revival. Listen to Kai Ryssdal and Sarah Leeson at Marketplace.
Culture & Politics
- What are the new NEH grants supporting? Many of them relate to the Trump administration’s goal of celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States. Learn more in Publishers Weekly.
AI
- The next stage of AI search results. Soon, Google won’t merely include an overview at the top of your Google search results. It will organize and summarize all results. Read Austin Wu at Google’s The Keyword.
- How much will generative AI disrupt books? The thrust of the piece is this: The tech world arrogantly and confidently assumes that it understands the desires of readers better than they do themselves—but history has shown that they don’t understand readers at all. I’d certainly be skeptical of startups that say they’re going to disrupt publishing through initiatives like Character.ai, mentioned in the article. But that doesn’t mean that AI won’t be disruptive or transformational to writers and publishing. Read Elizabeth Minkel at Wired (subscription may be required).
- Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini app will generate AI storybooks on demand: “Simply describe any story you can imagine, and Gemini generates a unique 10-page book with custom art and audio. For a truly personal touch, you can ask Gemini to draw inspiration from your own photos and files. Bring your vision to life in any style imaginable: from pixel art and comics to claymation, crochet, and even coloring books, in more than 45 languages.” Read Joël Yawili at The Keyword.
- Amazon, among others, blocks AI shopping agents. AI agents perform tasks with a degree of independence; for example, you might have an AI agent book your travel or buy things on your shopping list for delivery. The technology remains in its early stages, but ChatGPT unveiled its agent in July. Some have observed that Amazon has blocked Google’s shopping agent, presumably because it plans on building its own AI agents to shop on other websites. Shopify has also blocked AI bots from checking out. Thanks to reader Ian Lamont for the tip.
- Now Canadian authors are suing AI companies. Canadian author J.B. MacKinnon has filed four proposed class-action lawsuits against Nvidia, Meta, Anthropic, and Databricks. Read Ed Nawotka in Publishers Weekly.
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.