Traditional Publishing
- Bookshop ebook sales already constitute 5 percent of overall sales. Bookshop founder Andy Hunter was recently interviewed on the Open Book podcast, where he reported that ebook sales now constitute 5 percent of all Bookshop sales after launching the option just a few months ago. Publishers Lunch reports (sub required) that Bookshop sales are up 65 percent versus 2024. Hunter attributes the growth not to any internal initiative but to dislike of Jeff Bezos, among other tech billionaires.
- The founder of Chill Subs looks at the rise of journal submissions fees and what might be done about it. He writes, “Writers are nearly twice as likely to submit to a fee-based magazine than a free one. Not because they want to, but because that’s where the attention is. Considering the average piece takes 20 or so submissions to land somewhere, the cost to publish just one story adds up fast.” Read Benjamin Davis at Lit Hub.
- Circana BookScan remains optimistic about book sales. In a recent Future of Books report from BookScan, analyst Brenna Connor says the book market represents a bright spot among other merchandise categories: “During times of economic stress, consumers are more likely to pull back spend on higher-ticket items, like technology and apparel, and favor items that they see as having a high perceived value, like books.” Learn more.
Audiobooks
- Spotify now offers the ability to purchase audiobooks through its app. Just as Amazon Kindle now offers a button to get the book inside the Kindle app, Spotify too is giving US users the ability to buy audiobooks à la carte or to purchase top-up hours directly through its app. That’s because, due to a recent court ruling, Apple can no longer extract its 30 percent commission on in-app purchases. Read the press release.
AI
- Attention journalists and publicists: Here’s a potential silver lining regarding AI (for now). If you are an individual or brand hoping to be mentioned or cited by AI tools, it turns out that being quoted in a media outlet or getting media coverage helps immensely. Read Ben Smith at Semafor.
- It’s increasingly common to hear arguments, especially from literary snobs, that genre fiction authorship—especially romance—will be taken over by AI. In fact, romance is the exact example used by the US Copyright Office in its latest report on AI and copyright to discuss the risks of market dilution. But one writer and editor offers a long, nuanced defense of romance and why human involvement will remain important. She writes, “Critics [believe AI can] take over romance because they think the genre is highly replicable, that it doesn’t involve higher-order thinking, but they don’t engage with how or why women interact with the genre. It ignores, too, that even art made for entertainment requires fine-tuning; it’s not so easy to write a bestselling romance novel.” Read Brianna Di Monda at Verso.
Newsletters
- Is the next Great American Novel being published on Substack? This article by Peter C. Baker offers a laundry list of people publishing fiction on Substack but no markers of success for any of them—no subscriber figures, no earnings. However, he does explore the case of one author who, after serializing on Substack, self-published on Amazon, got some positive attention from another Substacker, then signed a deal for that book with Belt Publishing. (Baker is mixed on the merits of the book.) He concludes, “Perhaps Substack [could become] a place where people gather for an accessible twenty-first-century version of literary community, collaborate on the formation of new readerly sensibilities, and share their own experiments at high speed and low cost. Or perhaps, when we look at Substack a few years from now, the main thing we’ll see is yet another digital space where authors felt the vague obligation to maintain a presence.” Substack is already both things, Baker is a little late to the party. Read at the New Yorker (sub required).
- Should your newsletter be a podcast? This article personally interested me, since I’m exploring audio options for this newsletter. Based on survey responses from the last issue—and what I discovered at this link—if there is any podcast in my future, it will not be an audio replica of what you’re reading now. Read Katie Clark Gray at Good Tape.
- The New York Times looks at how much we all now pay for newsletters. It’s far more than I would’ve guessed on an individual basis. Sari Botton, who runs the Substack Oldster, adds everything up and finds she’s spending $3,000 a year. (!) Read Logan Sachon (gift link). Botton has written a follow-up at her own Substack; she is cutting back.
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.