Trends
- Authors are playing a more meaningful role in page-to-screen adaptations. Devoted literary fan bases seek authenticity in the film or TV version. Read Seija Rankin at The Hollywood Reporter.
- Kids’ graphic novels are a hot genre. That opinion was expressed on a recent US Book Show panel featuring authors in the category. Read Siân Gaetano in Shelf Awareness.
- Why is every cookbook a memoir now? Cookbooks have shifted away from being instruction manuals and now include personal essays and political writing. Read Tori Latham in Bon Appétit.
Online Media
- What’s next for Wattpad? About 80 percent of Wattpad users are Gen Z. The company has paid $3 million to writers from the paid stories program over the past 2.5 years. Read Ed Nawotka in Publishers Weekly.
- Substack drops fundraising efforts for now. Investors have been “preaching austerity and halting new deals,” fearing a market downturn. Substack has told investors it saw revenue of about $9 million in 2021. Read Benjamin Mullin at The New York Times.
Contracts
- Bad contract alert at Stary (owned by Dreame): Victoria Strauss looks at the contract being issued by one of the serial reading/writing apps. Read at Writer Beware.
Traditional Publishing
- University presses confront incorrect assumptions about their business. Namely, they argue they now operate much like trade publishers. Read Nathalie op de Beeck at Publishers Weekly.
Culture & Politics
- Self-publishing romance author found guilty of murdering husband. She once wrote an essay, “How to Murder Your Husband.” Read the AP report at NPR.
- An argument for doing away with letters of recommendation. A writer says the requirement gets in the way of diversity efforts and such letters are difficult for marginalized people to secure. Read Erin Somers at Gawker.
Amazon
- What Ingram learned from tracking 150,000 titles on Amazon for three years. We offered an early and partial look at this study in November 2021. You can now review all findings in this comprehensive post from Ingram.
- How Amazon surrendered in its war on bookshops. Some of the points made in this piece align with what you’ll find in the Ingram report. Amazon doesn’t discount books as much as it once did. Read Katharine Swindells at The New Statesman.
- Amazon will soon surpass Walmart as the largest US retailer. The company now has more than 200 million Prime subscribers. Read Annie Palmer at CNBC.
- You can no longer buy Amazon ebooks through the Kindle Android app. Google wants a 15 percent cut of digital content purchases, so Amazon is telling Kindle customers to purchase ebooks through the Amazon website. They have long done the same on the Apple Kindle app to avoid giving Apple a cut of ebook sales. Read Laura Hautala at CNET.
- Someone is very cranky about literary festivals. One author describes them as “sheer hell in a tent” and says they reward authors who are showboating types. Read Alexander Larman at The Critic.
- The problem with book reviewing isn’t a surfeit of positivity or negativity. According to one writer, it’s the insidery-ness. Read Antonio J. Ferraro in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Audiobooks
- Free educational series hosted by Findaway Voices and Draft2Digital. In celebration of National Audiobook Month, authors will share their secrets to building a successful career. Learn more and register.
- How do you adapt comics or graphic novels into audio? An executive producer at Penguin Random House Audio discusses the considerations. Read Betsy Bird at School Library Journal.
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.