Over the past two weeks, writers and publishing professionals have been riveted by coverage of the trial in which the U.S. Department of Justice is attempting to block Penguin Random House's purchase of Big Five rival Simon & Schuster. Read more
Six months ago, independent publishers Jacaranda and Knights Of were warning publicly that their income had fallen to almost zero. They weren't the only small publishers struggling. With bookshops and distributors closing, a survey from the Bookseller at the time found that almost 60% of small publishers feared closure by the autumn. Read more
I pronounced rather grandly recently that smaller publishers are the delicatessens of the publishing world. We don't publish that much but when we do, it stays with the reader and lingers on the taste buds of the creative mind that bit longer.
If you're in any way a member of the independent publishing community (or a former member, or a recovering member, or an aspirational member), welcome. I hope you and yours are staying healthy and staying home, if able.
A significant proportion of the UK and Ireland's smallest independent presses say their businesses are at risk as a result of the coronavirus lockdown, having seen sales plunge and cash quickly run out. Read more
Paul McVeigh and Kirsty Logan are authors you may have heard of. Both of their debuts were published by Salt, an independent publisher. Paul McVeigh's The Good Son was shortlisted for a bunch of awards, and won the Polari first book prize this year. Read more
"Small presses do take a lot of risks, but talking so closely to John Murray, for instance, they're just as passionate. Yes, they have to factor in a lot more things. They're still taking risks, albeit at a larger scale. There are mainstream presses doing the same thing and publishing new authors, which is great." On seeing The Loney's success, he says: "We have very mixed feelings. Read more
In honor of last month's National Poetry Month, Krystal Languell interviewed 11 poet-publishers for Literary Hub, asking them what it takes to run a small press.
Some highlights:
How many hours per week do you work for small press(es) or other poetry organization(s)? Of those hours, how many are paid? Read more
'I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.'
In the third in a series on the implications of AI for publishing, Nadim Sadek argues that effective advertising is now feasible for everyone, and for all kinds of titles
A publishing friend of mine recently told me about a sales report they'd received from a major retailer in which some of their books had zero sales. It turned out that there had been plenty of sales, however-they just all went to counterfeiters. In case you think this is an outlier, it's not. Counterfeiting is a serious, nontrivial problem facing the industry.
If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you'll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Read more
The U.K. Publishers Association (PA) was established in 1896 and is a cornerstone of the British publishing industry, working with a diverse array of companies to promote innovation, collaboration, and commercial success. Read more
With English as a shared language, there is a natural relationship between the American and British publishing industries. Most of the world's top publishing companies, be they conglomerates or independent publishers, have operations in each country, typically in New York City and London. Literary traffic travels both ways across the Atlantic.
The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies.
Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023 - a "much stronger" growth than the overall increase in UK-based listings over the same period. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Read more
"We don't understand the consequences of AI with regards to copyright," Brazil's Karine Gonçalves Pansa, president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), said, when asked to name the most important issues facing publishing right now. "We can say, very easily, that our content is being used, without permission, and without license, by AI."
'There are two ways of speaking an audience will always like; one is to tell them what they don't understand; and the other is to tell them what they're used to.'