Penguin Random House
- Penguin Random House has restructured its leadership. The New York Times offers an overview of the changes made. The Velocity of Content podcast speaks with Publishers Weekly’s Andrew Albanese about what these changes mean.
- Penguin Random House increases entry-level salaries. Following increases at other big houses, Penguin Random House will now pay entry-level employees, whether new or existing, $48,000. Learn more.
Creator Economy
- How much money does Substack make? It recently announced it has 2 million paid subscriptions. One media commentator believes Substack is generating about $18 million per year in net revenue. Read Jacob Cohen Donnelly at A Media Operator.
Marketing and Promotion
- What your publisher’s publicist wishes you knew: This is a helpful Q&A with a university press publicist. Read Laura Portwood-Stacer and Maria Whelan at Princeton University Press’s website.
Self-Publishing
- Harvard explores the history of self-publishing. Harvard’s Houghton Library now has an exhibition that “deconstructs” self-publishing. Read Rebecca Rego Barry at Fine Books & Collections.
Amazon
- The end of Amazon’s newsstand program might hurt SFF magazines. Amazon announced last year that they’re ending their Kindle subscription program and trying to get magazines to switch to Kindle Unlimited. So how’s it going? There’s not much optimism. Read Jason Sanford.
- A (near) post-mortem on Alexa. An executive from Microsoft says voice assistants are all “dumb as a rock” and they don’t work. And efforts to have Alexa blurt out did-you-know offers at inconvenient moments has just annoyed users. Those who work on Alexa and similar devices now hope that tools like ChatGPT might make Alexa “more intelligent” and bring a renaissance for the technology. Read Dave Lee in Financial Times.
- Amazon’s “advertising” business: It’s now generating about $40 billion per year, more than Prime. But is it really advertising? Is it more like rent? Or something else? Read Ben Evans.
Audio
- It’s difficult to turn a profit on podcasting alone. Spotify is reconsidering its investments, as the biggest trends today involve video and video podcasting. Read J. Clara Chan at the Hollywood Reporter.
- Libro.fm will launch in the UK this summer. The audiobook retailer that partners with the independent bookstore community in the US and Canada is expanding to the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Read Nathalie op de Beeck in Publishers Weekly.
Culture and Politics
- Women are now publishing more books than men. In the 1960s, women authored 18 percent of published books. They now author over half. By 2021, books by women sold more on average than those written by men. Read Cassie Werber at Quartz.
- Radical, edgy, older women writers are in “high demand.” One agent claims, “It’s now almost an advantage to be coming into publishing for the first time at a senior age with an amazing story.” Read Amelia Hill in the Guardian.
- Free speech skeptics abandon Salman Rushdie. If The Satanic Verses were written today, would anyone defend it? Read Russell Jacoby in Harper’s (subscription may be required).
- Beware of book blurbs. The practice of blurbing your friends’ books—as well as discussing how pernicious it is while continuing to do it anyway—has always been a feature of publishing. Read GD Dess at the Millions.
- The downfall of Scott Adams: “I shook the box intentionally. I did not realize how hard I shook it,” the cartoonist told the Washington Post. Read Michael Cavna and Samantha Chery.
- Publishers are cynically using sensitivity readers to protect their bottom lines. One writer argues that when you hear about edits to Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and so on, that’s merely publishers trying to “future-proof their toxic investments.” And she believes that using sensitivity readers more generally is “yet another instance of the confused financialization of art.” Read Zoe Dubno in the Guardian.
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.