Bookselling
- Barnes & Noble plans to open 50 new stores this year. The US chain, led by James Daunt, has seen sales increase since 2021. A market intelligence firm recently released a report showing that foot traffic was up for the store. Read Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly. The same market intelligence firm showed similar, favorable patterns for foot traffic at rival bookstore chains Books-A-Million and Half Price Books.
- Meanwhile, in Australia, online retailer Booktopia collapses. The collapse says more about how this particular business was managed and not the health of the book business. Read Katya Johanson and Bronwyn Reddan at The Conversation.
Romance & Romantasy
- Sales of romantasy nearly doubled during the first five months of 2024. Circana BookScan thinks the category may reach a saturation point in 2025. Read Ella Ceron in Bloomberg (subscription may be required).
- More romance-focused bookstores are opening. And regular bookstores are putting romance front and center. Romance sales broadly have increased from 18 million print copies in 2020 to more than 39 million in 2023, according to Circana BookScan. Read Alexandra Alter in the New York Times (gift link).
- Teens are reading romance in record numbers. Inside this article is a great piece of romance publishing history: Mills and Boon was one of the only publishing houses during World War II to retain its paper ration in Britain on the grounds it raised morale for women in the factories. Read Dimitria Panagiotaros at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
- French publishers are embracing romance, too. If you think romance has been looked down on in the US, have you ever been to France? Things are changing, however. Read Sarah Elzas at RFI.
Trends
- “Femgore” is reinventing horror fiction. The article discusses the origins of this horror subgenre, possibly rooted in a backlash to torture-porn movies. Read AK Blakemore at The Guardian.
- Are sports novels making a comeback for male readers? This is a nice retrospective of the history of sports fiction (not the romantic kind) and where it stands today. Read Andrew Schenker in Esquire.
- Why are readers drawn to cozy fantasy? This distinct subgenre emerged in 2020 as a means of escape. Read Sarah Beth Durst at Reactor.
- Where is all the sad boy literature? This lengthy article (that includes more critical theory than your average Esquire piece) begins by describing how today’s market offers plenty of sad girl lit, such as Sally Rooney, but few young male equivalents. It then discusses transmasculine and queer literature before bringing up sad young straight men and the epidemic of male suicide. “Do we really need more books about them?” Yes, she says. But the article doesn’t really address the elephant in the room, which is that commercial publishing may not want to hear, much less publish, what straight men have to say. Read Katie Tobin at Esquire. Then read this clear and most honest response by Andrew Boryga.
Culture & Politics
- Alice Munro’s daughter reveals in an essay that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child. Yet Munro chose to stay with him. Andrea Robin Skinner’s essay appears in the Toronto Star (subscription required). The New York Times reports on reactions to the news (gift link). Canadian publisher Kenneth Whyte discusses how Munro’s biographer did not include this information in his book even though he knew about the accusations.
- Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual assault. The author denies allegations by two women who had been in consensual relationships with him. Read Rachel Johnson, Katie Gunning, and Paul Caruana Galizia at Tortoise.
AI
- AI can help individuals be creative, but it makes collective work less interesting overall. If you’ve ever read several fantasy books in a row and, in each one, a main character is named Jaxon, then you’ve experienced what this study has found. Read Devin Coldewey at TechCrunch.
- An argument that AI is corporate speech: “The output of an LLM is a corporate product, not just in the sense of having been created to make a profit, but also through the fact that a complex assemblage of people, finance capital, machines, interests, and a large corpus of people’s content are all involved in creating that speech, confusing our natural tendency to interpret speech as coming from a person.” Read Peter Schoppert at AI and Copyright.
- Curating generative AI art: “In this new situation, you become a curator more than a creator. … It’s probably post-curation.” A professor grapples with the meaning of generating and curating the “best” of your AI-generated artwork. Read Lev Manovich at LinkedIn.
- Why did the Atlantic sign a deal with OpenAI? This very insightful podcast episode digs deep into questions that media companies are now asking themselves about how and when to partner with companies like OpenAI and why the Atlantic decided it’s better to strike a deal than pursue a lawsuit like the New York Times. Listen or read the transcript at The Verge.
- A big-picture overview of AI and publishing. Much of this article repeats what Hot Sheet readers likely know (if they’ve been keeping up with AI news), but there is some interesting insight into Galatea and its use of AI. Read Rebecca Ackermann in Esquire. (Jane is quoted.)
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.