Links of Interest: July 7, 2021

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Amazon

  • The Amazon that customers don’t see. According to The New York Times, Amazon doesn’t want hourly workers to stick around for too long, as it views a large, disgruntled work force as a threat. “Company data showed that most employees became less eager over time, and Mr. Bezos believed that people were inherently lazy.” Read the interactive piece by Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, and Grace Ashford.
  • Amazon advertising rates jumped 50 percent in May. The cost per click for Amazon search advertising was $1.16 in May, up from 75 cents a year earlier. Amazon’s advertising revenue in the US alone will surpass $20 billion this year. Read Juozas Kaziukenas at Marketplace Pulse.
  • Amazon will be the UK’s largest retailer by 2025. That will make it bigger than the popular supermarket Tesco. Read Lizzy Hillier at Econsultancy.
  • There’s a new head of Amazon Publishing. Mikyla Bruder takes the place of Jeff Belle, who has headed the operation since it began in 2009. This is Bruder’s 10th year with Amazon Publishing. Read Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.

Audio

  • How podcasts and audiobooks differ, and where they might meet. An executive at Edison Research discusses the convergence of the formats and what each industry has to learn from the other. Read Tom Webster.
  • Spotify launches a Clubhouse rival that turns live conversations into podcasts. As previously planned, Spotify now offers a live audio chat feature, Spotify Greenroom. It’s a standalone mobile app that allows Spotify users to join or host live audio rooms and optionally turn those conversations into podcasts. Read Sarah Perez at TechCrunch.
  • Facebook also launches podcasts and live audio as planned. Right now, public figures with verified accounts can start live audio rooms and invite anyone else to speak. Read Barbara Ortutay at AP.

Business Trends

  • Book publishing company stock is doing remarkably well. Publishers have outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial average during the first half of 2021—by a very wide margin. Read Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.
  • Comics sales are up by 6 percent over 2019. Sales in the bookstore channel increased dramatically over comics shops, and the popularity of graphic novels continued to grow. Read Calvin Reid in Publishers Weekly.
  • The future of in-person events. A/V is now critical, and there will be new forms of networking. Read Brian Morrissey at The Rebooting.
  • Indie author Joanna Penn has released her latest annual earnings report, with a comparison against 2019. She earns just a little over six figures from book sales (in British pounds); books make up 34 percent of her income. Read at her site.

Creator Economy

  • Facebook’s Bulletin launches. Bulletin is a Substack competitor but not yet available to everyone. It has launched with already famous writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Mitch Albom. So far, Facebook isn’t taking a cut of subscription revenue. Read Monojoy Bhattacharjee at What’s New in Publishing.
  • Are we about to see the first nuclear winter for creators? Traffic to social media sites is down, and creator ad revenue is down. Plus there’s burnout. Read John Hu’s Twitter thread.
  • A long, sometimes understandable explainer on the difference between fungible tokens and NFTs. They each have a distinct purpose, and examples are offered that make some sense. But it’s still a tough article to get through and fully comprehend, with copious amounts of tech babble. Read Patrick Rivera at Future.
  • What do NFTs mean for the literary writer? This one is more understandable, also quite long, and still puzzling. Read Walker Caplan at Lit Hub.

Marketing Toolbox

  • When’s the best time to publish [x]? The Alliance of Independent Authors has put a guide to seasonal publishing. Read at their site.
  • Instagram explains their algorithm. The most important signals include information about the post (e.g., popularity, time of posting), information about the person who posted, your activity, and your history of interacting with someone. Read Adam Mosseri at Instagram.

TikTok

  • Meet the teen TikTok influencers pushing books up the charts. A marketing and brand consultant says that TikTok offers “snapshot” visual trailers that make books cinematic in a way that publishers have been trying to do with book trailers. Read Alison Flood at The Guardian.
  • Even NBC News is covering the BookTok phenomenon. Videos with the BookTok hashtag have been viewed a collective 12.6 billion times. Read Conor Murray.
  • Do you use Instagram? Be prepared for it to become more like TikTok. The platform plans to start showing users full-screen recommended videos in their feeds. “We’re no longer a photo-sharing app or a square photo-sharing app,” an Instagram executive said. Read Salvador Rodriguez at CNBC.
  • If you’re going to post on BookTok, you’ll need authenticity (of course). Author Chelsea Apple offers advice to anyone who’s interested in trying the hottest platform for book PR today. Read at Publishers Weekly.

Culture & Politics

  • The soft radicalism of erotic fiction. Sophie Gilbert examines the work of Jackie Collins and argues she’s never gotten her due. Read at The Atlantic. And, by the way, there’s a new documentary (subscription required) about Jackie Collins, examining whether she’s queen of trash or feminist icon.
  • A brief history of the book blurb. It’s a grubby business that pretty much no one likes, but the practice goes back hundreds of years. Read James Riding in Prospect.
  • SCBWI’s diversity chief resigns. April Powers, who stepped into her role about one year ago, resigned after she made comments in an official capacity condemning anti-Semitism without being (according to critics) sensitive to Palestinians. Read a full accounting—with lots of social media screenshots—at Jewish Journal by Aaron Bandler.
  • The first wave of post-Trump books is here. You’ll find lots of behind-closed-doors details, such as how ill Trump was with COVID. Read Danielle Kurtzleben at NPR.
  • A look back at the controversy surrounding “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter.” The sci-fi story drew a tsunami of online criticism, and the publisher took the story down. Here’s what happened next. Read Emily VanDerWerff at Vox.
  • Publishers grapple with generational conflict. Young members of publishing staff, emboldened by social justice campaigns and their own sense of responsibility and power, are pushing for symbolic stands. Read Andrew Anthony in The Guardian.

Bookselling

  • Brexit makes EU book sales a nightmare for small, independent UK publishers. Now that the UK is no longer part of the EU, if businesses sell to customers in the EU, they must register for VAT, a tax applied on sales of all goods. VAT tax rates are based on the customer’s country and are not fixed, making for an administrative headache. Some independent publishers have decided to stop selling to the EU, at least for now. Read Ruth Comerford and Sian Bayley at The Bookseller (subscription required).
  • An interview with Andy Hunter on the rise of Bookshop. Guy LeCharles Gonzalez commented in his newsletter, “Hunter rightfully criticizes major publishers’ aggressive shifting of advertising budgets away from the media partners who organically promote their books through reviews, interviews, and softball news coverage, giving that money instead to Facebook, Google, and Amazon to build email lists and, theoretically, drive sales they can’t directly measure but will most likely attribute to Amazon.” Listen to the BookSmarts podcast.