Bookselling
- Independent bookstores report strong holiday sales but delayed shipments. Publishers and Ingram alike had problems fulfilling orders quickly; one bookseller said it was the worst season for shipping in his 25 years of bookselling—worse than even the COVID years. Read Claire Kirch at Publishers Weekly.
AI
- Will interactive AI features for books be imposed by platforms or negotiated with rightsholders? That question is becoming more central as Amazon launches interactive chatbots for digital books and ElevenLabs offers something similar for audiobooks but with rightsholder permission. Read Ed Nawotka at Publishers Weekly.
- A step-by-step guide to writing a romance novel with AI. Someone from outside the publishing industry has outlined how anyone can use AI to generate a romance novel from scratch. Read Christopher S. Penn at Almost Timely News.
- OpenAI might buy Pinterest. That’s a prediction from The Information, a high-quality source for tech industry news. Read Nekuda at Unlocking Agentic Commerce.
Culture & Politics
- Trump books aren’t selling anymore. Partly it’s reader fatigue, but also Trump’s second term has been marked by more unity inside his team, with fewer juicy disclosures. Read Paul Farhi at The Atlantic.
- Katie Couric puts out feelers about starting a book club. A little late to the game? See her Instagram post.
- The dream of the universal library. A librarian proposes licensing reforms to unlock millions of out-of-print books currently accessible to machines but not humans. Read Monica Westin at Asterisk.
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.