A record-breaking year for publishers has been greeted with renewed demands for authors to receive a bigger slice of income and investment, as sales of books passed the £5.7bn mark in 2017.

Twenty-eight million American adults read poetry this year - the highest percentage of poetry readership in more than 15 years, according to a survey of arts participation conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the U.S. Census Bureau.

The loving and attentive reader of children's books knows that the best of them are not one-dimensional oversimplifications of life but stories that tackle with elegant simplicity such complexities as uncertainty, loneliness, loss, and the cycle of life. And anyone who sits with this awareness...

Biography combines history, psychology, and gossip, and there will always be a market for its insights into the Life (how careers crest or crater) and the Times (the context of each life) of a stranger.

British publishing houses broke all previous revenue records in 2017 to see their collective sales rise 5% to £5.7bn, driven by a growth in export sales which now account for 60% of publishers' revenues. However, while most areas of business performed robustly, domestic sales of textbooks to...

• ‘A bestseller might be read by hundreds of thousands of people, but Apple Tree Yard on TV reached 8 million people per episode - one of the few occasions when an author can become part of the national conversation. But writing a good book on its own is not enough - it needs to be a...