Trends
- A look at some prominent hybrid and also not-hybrid publishers. It’s often confusing for authors when articles like this combine traditional publishers with hybrid publishers. Still, it’s a useful look at successful, entrepreneurial efforts right now outside of the Big Five. It includes frank comments by bestselling author James Clear, a financial backer of Authors Equity, who says, “Today, author brands are what is important, so authors should be getting the majority of the profits.” Read Jim Milliot and Ed Nawotka in Publishers Weekly.
- Book of the Month Club survives because it focuses on young women. Its most devoted members? College-educated women in their twenties, “the sweet spot when people are no longer reading for school, but don’t yet have kids.” Read Elizabeth Segran at Fast Company.
Traditional Publishing
- Some authors are happy to move from big presses to smaller ones. This is a great piece showing the value and importance of an independent or small publisher. But don’t be fooled: Just as many small-press authors move to big houses. Read Claire Kirch at Publishers Weekly.
Culture & Politics
- A conservative columnist offers his impressions of liberals and liberalism by browsing bookstores. He finds few books on display overtly about politics; instead, he sees offerings that retreat from politics. He writes, “[These books] carry the reader away from political engagement and toward an existential pessimism … and a survival-oriented view of the future in which hope belongs to a very long horizon. As such, they’re stories well suited to a liberalism that has lost confidence in the moral arc of history and that has passed from treating Trumpism as a temporary emergency to regarding it as a conquering power. They speak to a mood of internal exile, of uncertainty and dispossession, that awaits some new revelation to recover confidence and hope.” Read Ross Douthat (gift link).
Marketing & Promotion
- The author’s importance in how books get marketed and promoted is growing and growing and growing. If you’ve read James Clear’s comments lately about how publishing is now an author-centric business, then it shouldn’t come as a surprise when publicists confirm as much: “In the larger landscape of book review publishing, I’ve seen the ‘traditional book review’, … replaced by the not-exactly-a-profile, but a sort of hybrid ‘book story’ that isn’t a review at all but an attempt to influencer-infiltrate an author into the literary landscape. … It makes the author’s web of story much more important to the publicity of the work. We’ve been saying this for a while, but it’s telling authors that the work does not stand alone (not even fiction or poetry), it will not at least, in larger book coverage, be able to stand on its own.” Read Cassie Mannes Murray at Pine State Publicity.
AI
- Not sure what to do in a world with AI? You could do a lot worse than Seth Godin’s advice, which is walk away or dance. Read at his site. H/t Jule Kucera.
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.