Links of Interest: June 22, 2022

by

Traditional Publishing

  • The New York Times Magazine looks at big publishers’ efforts to diversify. Lisa Lucas at Pantheon, featured prominently in this long feature article, says, “People misunderstand how long change takes. They want change right now.” But the publishing industry operates on slow time, and authors need time to hit their artistic stride. Read Marcela Valdes.
  • A new BookExpo on the horizon? No. The investment required has become too great for most publishers outside the biggest.
    Read Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.

Amazon

  • The merging of Comixology and Kindle is frustrating readers. Comixology is the biggest digital marketplace for comics. It does not pair well with Kindle. Read Alex Cranz in The Verge.

James Patterson

  • How James Patterson became the world’s bestselling author. Patterson is getting a lot of media attention this summer—including a profile in The New Yorker—because of the release of his autobiography. Read Laura Miller.
  • James Patterson told an interviewer it’s tough right now for white men in media and publishing. Unsurprisingly, he issued an apology not long after his comments. Read Michael Levenson in The New York Times.
  • Jared Kushner learns to write from James Patterson. After the 2020 US presidential election, Kushner watched Patterson’s MasterClass before churning out a 40,000-word draft about his Middle East peacekeeping role. His memoir is due to publish in August. Read Peter Baker in The New York Times.

Self-Publishing

  • Learn to optimize metadata for the Google Play store. A product manager at Google Play Books offers tips during a Draft2Digital conversation with Mark Leslie Lefebvre. Read Monica Leonelle at Aggressively Wide.

Trends

  • Must-watch, must-read: The Maid effect. BookNet Canada studies the sales and library lending of The Maid before, during, and after The Maid was released as a TV series. Read Aline Zara.
  • Librarians seek more humor in YA literature. Kids love series like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, but once they hit high school, the humorous reading options die out. Librarians think this is a mistake. Read Emily Mroczeck-Bayci at School Library Journal.
  • Prophecy books multiply from Christian publishers. In short, believers feel like it’s time to properly prepare for the end times: “We seem to be closer to the end than ever before,” says an editor. Read Ann Byle at Publishers Weekly.
  • The trend that’s taken over women’s fiction: Read about “the protagonist does a thing” formula. Read Heather Schwedel at Slate.

Substack

  • Why David Kushner is serializing his next book on Substack. An author with a very limited online presence is going the Substack route to publish a sequel to his bestselling debut. Read Simon Owens.
  • Substack novel serialization lands a book deal. Toby Litt has been posting a new entry on Substack every day since January; his novel has reached the top 15 of the platform’s fiction rankings. Read Ruth Comerford at The Bookseller.

TikTok

  • Teenagers take control of publishing. A bookseller says they used to rely on millennials. Now the majority of their customers are teenagers. James Daunt, head of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, says, “We’ve generally found that the people with blue hair do better than the people with sensible haircuts.” Read Claire Armitstead at The Guardian.
  • Is this the future for authors? Musicians are complaining about the music industry’s overall reliance on TikTok and pressure from record labels to do lots of TikTok promotion. Read Andrew R. Chow at Time.

Legal

  • A closely watched copyright case may be decided this fall. The standoff between the Internet Archive and major publishers will be decided by the court without a full trial. Read Andrew Albanese in Publishers Weekly.
  • Maryland’s ebook law is ruled unconstitutional. Laws advanced by library advocates to mandate that publishers offer ebook licenses on reasonable terms continue to be struck down. Read Andrew Albanese in Publishers Weekly.

Culture & Politics

  • When will novels fix society? One author argues that is not the novel’s job. “Complaints that literary fiction novels are not doing enough to address the complexity of society’s problems strike me as the flipside of another popular literary discourse: that fiction has a duty toward moral purity and ambiguity-free politics. That fiction should be a series of Goofus and Gallant lessons.” Read Lincoln Michel.
  • So what is literary fiction all about today? A host of authors weigh in on the state of the genre. Read at The Drift.
  • Find books set in your zip code. Using data pulled from Goodreads, the folks at Crossword Solver have identified (among other fun facts) the prevalence of specific settings by genre. Take a look.