Links of Interest: October 27, 2021

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Surprises

  • An award-winning Spanish female crime writer is in fact three men. They are all TV scriptwriters using a pseudonym. They’ve spent years doing interviews under the fake profile. No comment yet from publisher Penguin Random House. Read Hannah Ryan at CNN.
  • Do you enjoy the show Succession? Book publishing has its own succession story now playing out at Scholastic, where the founder left the company not to his family but to a business partner, friend, and alleged former lover. Read Katherine Rosman and Elizabeth A. Harris at The New York Times.

Supply Chain

  • UK publishers fear a wave of returns after the holiday. Reportedly Amazon is ordering in very high quantities to beat supply chain problems, which may leave independent booksellers with less stock and a surplus sitting in Amazon warehouses. Read at The Bookseller (subscription required).
  • The holiday book shortage won’t be as bad as predicted. So reports USA Today after speaking to James Daunt at Barnes & Noble and various publishers and bookstores. Those most likely to be affected are debut authors, lesser known writers, and “hard-to-predict viral titles.” Read Mary Cadden.

Trends

  • Editors’ and readers’ tastes are shifting: they want work that’s not traumatizing. Agent Anna Sproul-Latimer writes, “Whether or not a book is the opposite of traumatizing depends entirely on how it makes its readers feel. It is a process, not a genre—and it requires radical empathy.”Read her Substack (only partially available to nonsubscribers).
  • Pandemic surprise: a mini independent bookstore boom. During the worst of 2020, many feared that bookstores would not survive. However, there’s been growth in ABA membership and significant success for stores that are innovating and adapting during a time of change. Read Judith Rosen in Publishers Weekly.
  • Browsable nonfiction continues to be popular. At first, educators thought such books would interfere with students’ ability to develop critical reading skills. That attitude has changed. Read Melissa Stewart at School Library Journal.
  • How much money can you make writing romance? BookRiot examines various sources of earnings figures, including the Authors Guild survey, an RWA survey, and personal reports. Read Gina Nicoll.

Social Media & Creator Economy

  • Not many people are using Twitter’s new Super Followers feature. Super Followers allows people to tip their favorite creators, but it brought in only $6,000 in its first two weeks. Read Sarah Perez in TechCrunch.
  • Meet another publishing industry “disruptor.” Lots of people on Twitter were joking last week about the breathless tone of this profile. It’s focused on Copper, a new social media platform for authors that wants to be the “LinkedIn of the book world.” It is essentially Goodreads with some book-club features you’ll find in competitors like Book Club and Fable. Read Amy Shoenthal at Forbes.
  • The top 1 percent of podcasts get 99 percent of the downloads. Only a few big players make meaningful revenue from podcasts. Read Sara Fischer at Axios.

Self-publishing

  • How self-published authors can get on a bestseller list. Written Word Media looks at the mechanics of hitting the Amazon, USA Today, IndieBound, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times bestseller lists. Read Clayton Noblit.
  • A free barcode generator. Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur provides this service at no charge. You just need your ISBN. The page also explains whether you should include the price and if you need to include a Bookland EAN. Check it out.
  • PublishDrive now distributes to Baker & Taylor. B&T is one of the most important library distributors in the US for print titles. Learn more.

Culture & Politics

  • A thoughtful, high-level discussion of the Facebook Papers and what’s next. Over the next couple months, expect lots of reporting on the inner workings of Facebook. Journalist Charlie Warzel discusses the complexity of the situation and what’s next (he admits no one knows). Read at his Substack.
  • Simon & Schuster publisher speaks about the Mike Pence book deal. Dana Canedy says, of deciding to sign the former US vice president, “I knew there would be people who didn’t agree with it. What you don’t want is employees who come to work and are too intimidated to speak truth to power or quit.” Read Rachel King at Fortune.
  • Immigration in book publishing: Publishers discuss how the subject of immigration fits within their acquisitions strategy, what they look for in prospective titles and authors, and what new topics are emerging. Read Diane Patrick and Calvin Reid in Publishers Weekly.
  • International writers can struggle with payment methods and payment processors. Writers who live outside of the US or Western Europe sometimes face significant challenges in receiving payment for their work when services like PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle are restricted in their home countries. Read Jason Sanford at his Patreon.
  • The teacher who changed how writing gets taught. Mike Rose saw the damage done by teaching models that focused on errors and proposed mechanical fixes, and he decided to change course. Read Kevin Dettmar at The New Yorker.
  • Christian publishers address bias. Use of sensitivity reads is on the rise, and more authors are initiating the process themselves. Read Ann Byle at Publishers Weekly.
  • Do popular self-help books on trauma adequately address Americans’ current needs? Due to the effects of the pandemic, some people are turning to trauma self-help books, but the term trauma is a vague catchall that may not help readers find the best advice. Read Eleanor Cummins at The Atlantic.
  • Young writers of color take the lead in today’s poetry community. Amanda Gorman is exhibit A, representing a large shift. Read Leah Asmelash at CNN.
  • Is Amazon changing the novel? Here’s another review of literary scholar Mark McGurl’s latest book, Everything and Less, which argues that Amazon is the most significant novelty in recent literary history. Read Parul Sehgal in The New Yorker.