Calls have been made for the industry to "decolonise" the trade by promoting publishers in African and Caribbean countries acquiring territorial and language rights and pushing back against major Anglophone presses hoovering up world rights.
The estate of Watership Down author Richard Adams has won back all of the rights to the late author's classic novel about anthropomorphised rabbits, in a high court ruling against the director of the famed animated adaptation. Read more
‘Rights departments of publishing houses invariably seem to be the poor relation of the sales team,' says Richard Charkin. Think of the coronavirus pandemic as a prompt to have another look at that.
Book publishing has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, and authors of all stripes have new opportunities to manage. Whether you are a long-time author with published work and contracts, or you are a self-published or "hybrid" author with some titles self-published and some licensed to publisher-partners, you need to do some serious thinking and track all of those licenses. Read more
Is Netflix a friend or foe to the book business? That question was addressed by the Global 50 CEO Talk 2019, which featured a conversation with Kelly Luegenbiehl, VP International Originals of Netflix, hosted by publishing consultant Ruediger Wischenbart and with the editors of global trade journals.
‘The share of income from rights has steadily increased from 72 percent in 2013 to 80 percent in 2016,' says the UK's Publishers Association, in a report released this summer.
International rights sales are one of the loftiest holy grails of self-publishing today. As any seasoned indie author will tell you, you can make your book available in myriad markets through Amazon or Kobo. But selling translation rights is not as easy. Read more
The Scandinavians love true crime. The Dutch won't touch historical fiction. The Turks love weepies.
These are trends noticed by the UK's Little, Brown Book Group joint rights director Kate Hibbert, who was named Rights Professional of the Year-an honor sponsored by Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two.-at The Bookseller's British Book Awards, the "Nibbies," last month in London. Read more
It is always a challenge to get accurate figures to demonstrate the importance of rights income to the publishing industry - and therefore to the UK's creative industries as a whole. Read more
‘The real increase in sales recently has been the spread of business to Asian countries,' says Lownie Agency author Roger Crowley. And China holds the key, says Andrew Lownie.
'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."
'In my experience, writing doesn't get any easier the more you do it. But there is a growth of confidence, not much, but a nugget, like a pearl, like a tumour.'