Takeaways from the AALA People of Publishing Conference

Last week, I attended the first annual Association of American Literary Agents’ People of Publishing Conference. In 2023 and 2024, AALA partnered with Publishers Weekly to produce the US Book Show, but this year they decided to host their own event. I attended four panels and was a participant on one panel.

The morning CEO panel discussed ongoing challenges but offered no big revelations. Panelists included three of the Big Five CEOs: Jonathan Karp of Simon & Schuster (who will be stepping down soon), David Shelley of Hachette, and Jon Yaged of Macmillan.

• Karp began by discussing the difficulties of marketing to readers in an “ADHD culture” while mass media’s reach and influence declines. He said, “Monoculture is gone. You can look at it two ways. There are 1,000 flowers blooming, or there are 1,000 different ways of establishing your book. … Unpredictability has become 1,000 times greater.” Yaged offered encouraging words about the long history of book publishing, saying no other form of media can boast 500 years of longevity. But he pointed to the same difficulties as Karp: “There’s only one way to sell a book, and that’s word of mouth. But word of mouth looks different than it used to.”
• Karp said he knows that one of agents’ pet peeves is when they get ghosted by editors and wait weeks (or longer) for a response on material. He’s been pushing a three-week standard for responses but also asked agents to accept “not for me” as a good-enough answer, rather than solicit a longer explanation as to why. (My take: “Not for me” is a complete answer, and far too many rejection explanations are invented, misleading, or irrelevant to authors’ next steps.) He added that S&S publicists also suffer from getting ghosted by outlets or individuals they pitch. “You never think we’re doing a good enough job on marketing and publicity,” Karp said. “We’re trying, we’re really trying.”
• In response to concerns that young people aren’t pleasure reading as much as before, Shelley pointed to Hachette’s new initiative, Raising Readers. In the back of many of Hachette’s books, they’re now including a page that discusses the importance of parents reading to kids, even if it’s just for 10 minutes a day. “Reading is the biggest predictor of success in life,” he said, plus it benefits kids’ mental health.

The most interesting panel I attended was on the creator economy, and it featured reps from Spotify, Substack, and Kickstarter, plus the CEO of Podium Entertainment. Part of the discussion focused on how agents and publishers should assess a potential author’s online following.

• Agents and editors should assess reader engagement across Substack’s ecosystem, not just through subscriber numbers, said Christina Loff at Substack. She suggested they look at “a lot of [Substack] posts by the creator” and at whether creators are truly invested—that is, using chat, using comments, posting on Notes, etc. While it was encouraging to hear someone point out that numbers aren’t everything, I would add that engagement can happen in many places, and you don’t have to go all in on Substack. (In fact, it would be a risk to put all your eggs in that particular basket.) Fortunately, Colleen Prendergast at Spotify spoke to the appeal and strength of a creator with depth of engagement who has the power “to take their audience from one format type to another format type.”
• Podium, a leading publisher of audiobooks, does a lot of work with authors already on Patreon, said CEO Scott Dickey. At first, when signing these authors, there was concern that the patronage would be cannibalized, but “it was quite the contrary. We saw a huge lift in the patronage.” One of their authors, Shirtaloon, has built a fandom across multiple channels of distribution and formats. Echoing that sentiment, Loff at Substack said agents and publishers should not dissuade their authors from starting a Substack, thinking it will cannibalize book sales or book promotion. “It’s only going to make [the book] stronger,” she said. “The earlier they start, the more time they’re going to have to build a street team.”
• “Just because you’re a successful podcaster doesn’t mean you can write a successful book,” said Prendergast at Spotify. It comes down to whether the book is additive and offers content that fans can’t get from the podcast and that they want more of. There must be a clear pitch or hook related to the book that can stand on its own.
• The boldest statement I heard that day: The era of publishers getting all rights “is gone,” said Dickey. I personally hope he’s right about this, because authors greatly benefit from such a change. Certainly it’s a growing phenomenon I’ve been writing and talking about, especially as indie authors sign print deals with traditional publishers, keeping their digital rights. Dickey said, “Monetization of intellectual property has never been better than today. That is going to continue to accelerate.” He believes authors and publishers must be strategic about how to monetize and build a fandom and “talk to multiple players” when doing deals. He said sometimes the “easy route” is to take the big advance from a single partner, but Podium’s authors generate far more revenue by holding onto digital rights in particular and earning higher royalties through self-publishing. During Q&A, someone in the audience did push back, saying the biggest publishers demand all rights, and Dickey admitted things will be different by genre and by author and in response to other pressures.

Update (Sept. 24, 2025): Dickey wrote in to correct my summary, saying, “That’s definitely not how I articulated this POV. I said: The days of publishers only signing deals for all rights is gone … pretty big distinction. Of course deals for all rights will be signed every single day, but the distinction is that in the past publishers would dig in and only sign deals if they secured all rights—now that isn’t the case.” I am sorry for not accurately expressing his perspective.

Other takeaways from the day:

• A panel discussed how books make it to the screen. A screenwriter, a producer, and a studio head discussed how and when they take on book adaptations. Most of what they outlined was the 101 of how Hollywood works (if you need the 101, read this). An interesting question arose at the end, when the panelists were asked how much TikTok virality, reviews, and other public signs of interest matter. Alana Mayo, head of Orion Pictures, said, “100 percent it does.” They’ll do adaptations of books that have won awards and also anything that’s broken through in the “attention economy” that helps them identify the audience. This is central to the job now, she said, and because BookTok reaches a younger audience, it has become important in gauging interest.
• One unique panel featured the financial leadership at three different companies, discussing how they make decisions when faced with great unpredictability about what will sell. Katie Ziga at Penguin Publishing Group spoke about how she assesses acquisitions: “Has this author published a book before? How did that author track?” If the author is a debut, she looks at comparable titles as a starting point instead. However, she said, “You can’t be wedded to the data. The data is backwards looking, and this [book] is a brand-new thing. You have to live with that.” She said the team discusses why a particular book might perform like successful comps or better than the comps. And that’s where the author’s platform often comes into the picture. “That’s an art also, not a science, figuring out someone’s platform, what that’s going to mean for book sales. We definitely haven’t mastered that yet.” Finally, she said, it’s the editor’s enthusiasm. “We rely on that a lot for that to shine through. That’s not a metric at all, and that’s the beauty of the business.” Later, Ziga added that one argument in favor of a recent acquisition was an author who used her platform to promote other books from Penguin. “You can’t quantify that,” she said, but it’s appealing.