Year in Review: 2024

Best news for authors: increasing and profitable partnerships between self-pub authors and traditional publishers
While traditional publishers have always picked up successful self-published work, I can’t recall seeing more examples, on both a large and small scale, in prior years. The strategy and success of Sourcebooks’ Bloom Books imprint, an imprint formed specifically to partner with self-published authors, has spread to other imprints at Sourcebooks. Sourcebooks also established a new imprint, Hear Your Story, built on a self-published series that’s been selling terrifically well. (Read my conversation with the team, including CEO Dominique Raccah, from February 2024.) Sourcebooks’ majority owner is Penguin Random House, the biggest of the Big Five publishers.

A bestselling nonfiction title on TikTok, The Shadow Work Journal by Keila Shaheen, was picked up this year by Simon & Schuster as part of a five-book deal. Shaheen reportedly received a seven-figure advance and a 50-50 profit share. Indie cookbook authors, too, have been avidly signed; an example is Matthew Bounds, who I interviewed in August.

When I started digging further into the trend, I found that nearly every bestselling self-published romance author has an agent and a track record of subsidiary rights deals with traditional publishers; authors are able to retain ebook and audiobook rights if they wish. New literary agencies outside of New York City have sprung up to support these authors as well.

I believe it’s by far one of the best industry developments I’ve seen in recent years: good for authors, good for publishers, and possibly great for the future of the author-publisher relationship. Which brings me to …

Startup of the year: Authors Equity
In March 2024, a new publishing company—Authors Equity—launched, offering authors 60 to 70 percent of profits from book sales but no advance. It was founded by Madeline McIntosh, former CEO of Penguin Random House. What I find particularly interesting about the company: The investors are successful, established authors. They include James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, which has sold more than 15 million copies and is published by PRH; Tim Ferriss, author of five number-one New York Times bestsellers (most of his books are published by PRH); and Louise Penny, a Canadian bestselling author of countless mystery novels (one of her publishers is Macmillan).

Some have criticized Authors Equity for not hiring a full complement of in-house editors, designers, etc. I find this criticism baffling because part of the point of Authors Equity is to give authors the freedom and power to determine their own creative team for their project. And one of the challenges of traditional publishing is that sometimes authors end up with mediocre or unenthusiastic editorial and design help—especially editors with limited time to edit.

Others find Authors Equity no different from hybrid publishing or paid publishing arrangements. That I understand, but there are differences. Authors Equity is as selective as any traditional publisher (I cannot tell the average author to go work with them—they would be rejected), and they’re not selling publishing packages or trying to upsell authors on additional services that sometimes add little value. Nor are they charging fees year after year to keep books in print or maintain the author-publisher relationship. In other words: Authors Equity has far more in common with traditional publishing (comparable to what Sourcebooks is doing with self-publishing authors), and I’d consider any author working with them to have scored a great deal. Here is my initial coverage from March. At the time, their first list hadn’t been announced. Now that it has, I think it supports my initial arguments about Authors Equity.

More successful than I anticipated (so far): Spotify’s entry into the audiobook market
In late 2023, Spotify announced that it would start giving premium subscribers 15 hours of audiobook listening at no additional charge. While it has made some pricing tweaks along the way, that offering for premium subscribers remains in effect. All major publishers continue to be on board with Spotify’s program, despite their reluctance to enter into similar subscription programs offered by competitors.

Now that we have a full year’s worth of book sales data since the launch, it’s clear Spotify has had an effect on the market, boosting audiobook sales by about 10 percent. Storytel, a competitor, credits Spotify for having “made the cake much bigger” by converting music listeners to audiobook listeners. However, it’s unclear to me whether this growth will continue. For now, publishers tout their audiobook growth, with audiobook sales often outpacing ebook sales.

Spotify has always argued there’s a bigger market for audiobooks that hasn’t been tapped because of distribution and discoverability barriers. For example, there’s the “credit worthy” problem in the Audible market: Consumers are less likely to choose shorter books, children’s books, or any book that doesn’t feel “worth” their monthly credit. But with hours-based listening, Spotify is offering subscribers the flexibility to mix it up, explore a range of books, and pick the right book for any moment.

Spotify is absolutely correct that the credit model has warped how consumers buy audiobooks, pushing consumption toward frontlist and bestsellers. In Europe, where subscription programs (e.g., Storytel) dominate, consumption is backlist dominant. Where I have questions: (1) How many Spotify customers go beyond their 15 free credits and pay for additional credits? (2) Is outright credit purchasing or audiobook purchasing necessary for this to be sustainable for Spotify? (3) Whatever publishers have been getting paid by Spotify—and it is a near certainty the biggest publishers receive payout rates that are the same as an audiobook unit sale elsewhere—can and will those rates continue? Were publishers given more money up front to participate? Is Spotify taking a loss right now in the hopes of building a program and audiobook customer base that will be profitable in the future?

Biggest horse out of the barn: AI licensing at a Big Five publisher
Even as publishers and media organizations sue OpenAI for copyright infringement, others are deciding to extract as much money as possible through legal licensing arrangements. Some of the most notable companies that have decided to take the money: the Associated Press, Politico, Business Insider, the Financial Times, Dotdash Meredith (the biggest US magazine publisher), News Corp (Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and many other newspapers), Vox Media, and The Atlantic.

The most recent to take the money? HarperCollins. They are the first Big Five publisher to strike an AI licensing deal, in this case with Microsoft for an unnamed model. I find it highly unlikely they will be the last, and AI models and licensing won’t abruptly come to an end because of author outrage or disgust—although authors absolutely have the legal right to opt out of such training. Still, I agree with the Authors Guild statement that says, “It is important to understand that the licensed use of books must replace AI companies’ current unlicensed and uncontrolled use. Moving to a regime of licensed AI use gives authors the power to say no or to insist on limits on output uses and be compensated. The current regime, which relies on fair use, means that authors have no ability to prevent use of their books by AI or control output uses.”

The question of what material AI companies can legally train on without permission or licensing remains open and will ultimately be decided in court.

Worst clickbait of the year: “No One Buys Books”
Anyone who’s anyone in publishing effectively rebutted the argument, made by Elle Griffin in spring 2024, that no one buys books. Unfortunately, it was one of those pieces that went viral for all the wrong reasons. If you missed this brouhaha, then here’s the best encapsulation of it, from Freddie deBoer, who wrote: “The very fact that Griffin’s piece went so viral is a good reason you should be skeptical of it. A fairly dry discussion of publishing’s sales numbers seems unlikely to attract that kind of attention. But Griffin is no dummy, and I think she was very deliberately courting an audience that the online newsletter industry is absolutely stuffed with: people who carry around bitterness and resentment towards the traditional routes through which people achieve success in writing.” There is nothing more meaningful to be said about this sad episode.

Terrible situation with a silver lining: SPD closure
Book distributor Small Press Distribution (SPD), in business since 1969, abruptly closed in spring 2024. The news came as a shock to the hundreds of small literary publishers who relied on it and had been shipping books to SPD for distribution up until its last days. After closure, SPD owed publishers significant amounts of money and left tens of thousands of books in distribution limbo.

At the time of the closure, former SPD executive director Jeffrey Lependorf told me that he hoped organizational donors would step in and help these presses weather the storm. That indeed happened: The community that values small presses banded together to assist one another. Some took advantage of grants and aid—primarily from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses and the Poetry Foundation—to help recoup lost sales and ship their books to new distribution centers. And more helpful distribution options became available immediately to help the presses. While no one would wish this type of crisis to occur again—the presses deserved so much more notice and consideration—good outcomes have come out of a bad situation.

The sales trend that’s the new normal: growth of romance and romantasy
It has been a stellar few years for the romance and romantasy categories. Romance sales increased from 18 million print copies in 2020 to more than 39 million in 2023, according to Circana BookScan, and sales of romantasy nearly doubled during the first half of 2024. Teenagers in particular are reading romance in record numbers. Meanwhile, the number of romance bookstores in the US has increased nearly tenfold in the last five years. Literary critics observe that romance reading no longer carries a stigma, as exemplified by the popularity of authors like Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros.

Before the pandemic, the romance category would experience seasonal lows in January, but K-lytics—which analyzes the self-publishing market at Amazon—has observed a new pattern: one of continued growth. Seasonal lows have become negligible.