Links of Interest: December 7, 2022

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Traditional Publishing

  • Canongate launches its own Mastodon instance. The server, called Bookish.Community, is for independent publishers and booksellers. Read Ruth Comerford in the Bookseller.
  • Book publishing jobs have dipped 1.7 percent since 2010. However, book publishers generated more economic output for New York City than periodical publishers, internet publishers, or newspaper publishers. Employment in periodicals fell by 45 percent during the same time 10-year period, with a 20 percent decline in newspaper employment. Read Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.
  • Astra Magazine closes, predictably. Everyone knows literary magazines have a precarious business model; they have to be gifted into existence and granted money to survive. The New York Times looks at the closure of Astra Magazine after two issues, yet fails to ask any questions about why it was closed when it wasn’t expected to make money in the first place and it sold out every issue. Read Kate Dwyer (gift link).

Supply Chain & Inflation

  • HarperCollins UK CEO discusses the increased costs of publishing. Energy costs have gone up by 250 percent as book prices have remained fairly stagnant. That said, in the UK, some independent booksellers have complained about rising book retail prices driving away some readers or making it harder for them to compete with discounters like Amazon and supermarkets. Read Porter Anderson in Publishing Perspectives.
  • Can US printers make a comeback? The capacity crunch is easing up in the US, but publishers need to be flexible about the type of paper they use. Read Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.

Bookselling

  • Indigo is Canada’s biggest bookstore chain, but general merchandise now makes up 40 percent of sales. The stores feature home decor for every room, as well as a wide range of gifts. Read Kenneth Whyte in SHuSH.
  • Bookstores seek to expand their Spanish-language offerings. What sells isn’t translated editions of Colleen Hoover. Stores instead seek out Latin American originals as well as bilingual books. Read Nathalie op de Beeck at Publishers Weekly.
  • Many authors confess on Twitter that no one (or very few) attended their book events. It all started when author Chelsea Banning tweeted that only two people came to her book signing earlier this month. And thousands responded with equivalent stories—or even worse. Neil Gaiman: “Terry Pratchett and I did a signing in Manhattan for Good Omens that nobody came to at all.” Author Rebecca Solnit rounded up a summary of the responses on her Facebook page. NPR has a roundup, too.

TikTok

  • An author benefits from unexpected enthusiasm for her book on BookTok. The book is from a small independent publisher and is now going into its fourth printing. While she received great reviews from mainstream media, it wasn’t until BookTok started talking about her book that sales took off. Read Chelsea G. Summers at Vulture.
  • It’s very difficult to play to trends on BookTok. Authors find it challenging to predict what will perform well, but they say the chances of winning increase the more you play. Read Chelsea Apple at Publishers Weekly.

Audio

  • BookBeat abandons unlimited subscriptions in the UK. Customers must now choose from three subscription tiers based on total listening time per month. BookBeat’s CEO says, “Only 5 percent of the users listen more than 100 hours per month, but they contribute to 25 percent of the listened hours. To make the model work in the long term, either the price that a service pays its publishers must go down or the price for users goes up.” Read Porter Anderson in Publishing Perspectives.

The Future

  • As AI models take off, the legal questions stack up. AI systems are trained on massive amounts of data scraped from the web, much of it protected by copyright. An expert tells the Verge, “Anyone who says they know confidently how this will play out in court is wrong.” Two key questions: Can you copyright the output of a generative AI model (and who owns it, if so)? If you own copyright to works used to train an AI, does that give you any legal claim over the model or content produced? Read James Vincent.
  • AI for bedtime stories: Two new tools help parents use just a few prompts to create stories that can feature their child or a favorite character. Check out StoriesForKids.ai and Storywizard.ai.
  • Sell your worthless NFT. And save on taxes! See how. (This offer may read as a blast from the past for fans of Gogol’s Dead Souls.)

Amazon

  • A class-action lawsuit against Amazon is revived. It still doesn’t look like it will go anywhere. Read Andrew Albanese at Publishers Weekly.
  • Voice assistants like Alexa are losing their luster. People use such devices for simple tasks, like playing music, and not for buying products—making it hard to monetize the devices. Axios reports that Amazon insiders have deemed it a “colossal failure of imagination” and a “wasted opportunity.” Maybe one day Alexa and Siri will not answer back. Read Peter Allen Clark.

Culture & Politics

  • A look at a Holocaust memoir that’s become an iconic self-help book. Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning has been a bestseller for years and now fuels countless quote-images on Instagram and Pinterest. What has been lost in the process? Read Mattie Kahn at Vox.
  • Ron DeSantis gets his book deal. The publisher will be the conservative Broadside Books imprint at HarperCollins. Read Caroline Vakil at the Hill.
  • The teen romance novel that Russian politicians can’t bear. The story of two young boys falling in love, Summer in a Pioneer Tie released in 2021 and has sold more than 200,000 copies. Now, a Russian law bans all “LGBT propaganda” and criminalizes the portrayal of homosexuality in public and online, including in books. Read Elisabeth Schimpfössl and Felix Sandalov in the New York Times (gift link).