News
- Publishers Weekly buys The Millions. Established in 2003, The Millions is a literary arts site focused on consumers. Learn more from Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.
- Tate Publishing scammers have to pay up. Two former executives at Tate will have to pay nearly $1 million in restitution to victims after failing to pay and/or publish authors, among other crimes. Read Kaylee Douglas at KFOR.
- A strong holiday finish for independent booksellers. Anecdotally, sales were record-breaking for some stores. Read more in Publishers Weekly.
Trends
- An in-depth look at the Canadian romance market. Romance makes up 13.5 percent of all fiction sales, and the subgenres with the highest unit sales in 2017 were contemporary, suspense, historical, and Western. Learn more at BookNet Canada.
- Instagram is helping indie bookstores—at least anecdotally. This Vox piece looks at the visual appeal of books on Instagram and related benefits for bookstores. Read Nisha Chittal.
- Book cover design trends for 2019. We think most of these trends apply to 2018 as well. Take a look at Meg Reid’s roundup at 99designs.
- Scholarly publishing is seeing accelerated change. There’s considerable consolidation and greater regulation. Read David Crotty in The Scholarly Kitchen.
- How Hollywood gets the publishing industry wrong. An entertaining look at the inaccuracies of film and TV series that involve characters in the book business. Read Sloane Crosley in The New York Times.
Amazon
- Because of Amazon’s draconian suspension policies, a consulting industry has sprung up around reinstatement of seller accounts. Being reinstated often means pleading guilty even if you did nothing wrong. Read exclusive reporting from The Verge by Josh Dzieza.
Audio
- What an author learned from recording 25 of his own audiobooks. While many authors probably shouldn’t narrate their own books, if you want to try, here’s a comprehensive overview of what’s involved (with tech suggestions). Read ML Buchman at the Findaway Voices blog.
- Audiobooks are an art form in their own right. That’s according to a professional narrator of more than 250 titles, including Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Read Matthew Weaver in The Guardian.
- In China, podcasts are a $7 billion industry. That’s because it’s not uncommon for listeners to pay a subscription fee. The top categories for paid content in China are culture, kids and family, and self-growth. Read Jennifer Pak at Marketplace.
Marketing Toolbox
- The best BookBub ads of 2018. Thousands of self-serve ad campaigns run on BookBub each year. Learn what the most successful ones were in 2018. Read Carlyn Robertson at BookBub’s blog.
- Learn how to better advertise on Amazon. Ian Lamont discusses strategies to make your book pop to the top in Amazon searches. Here’s the 30-minute podcast hosted by IBPA.
Opportunities
- StoryGuild, a national mentorship program, rolls out. It’s for new middle grade and YA novelists, and it launches in six US cities this year. Read more from Pamela Brill in Publishers Weekly.
- Apple Books has a new and improved affiliate program. Learn about it from 9 to 5 Mac, and sign up here.
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.