6 days ago
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Traditional Publishing
- What are the trends at major conservative imprints? Each of the Big Five except Macmillan has at least one imprint devoted to conservative-leaning nonfiction: Penguin Random House’s Sentinel, Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions, Hachette’s Basic Liberty and Center Street imprints, and HarperCollins’s Broadside Books. According to Eric Nelson at Broadside, the advent of BookScan (in 2001) was important in the creation of these imprints over the last two decades. “Everyone could suddenly see how many copies of books were selling. It overturned this assumption that red state readers are illiterate or lack access to bookstores.” However, there’s not as much energy or sales in conservative publishing when conservatives are in power. Thus, such publishers are more focused right now on titles about faith. Read Sam Spratford in Publishers Weekly.
- UK publisher Canongate moves to quarterly payments (versus twice annually) for authors and calls it “revolutionary.” CEO Jamie Byng told The Bookseller, “It was the right thing to do for our authors, they need the cash more than we do, and it doesn’t really impact our cash flow, you are just sending the payments out more regularly. Once we realised it was doable, it was about having the will to do it.” It took years of planning to make the change. Read Philip Jones.
Self-Publishing
- How Theo of Golden went from self-published title to New York Times bestseller. A major literary agent, Suzanne Gluck at WME, emailed author Allen Levi cold, via his website, after she learned about the book from a friend. By that time, the book had already sold over 100,000 copies and was ranked 38 on Amazon’s Top 100 bestseller list. “It was hiding in plain sight,” she said. The article includes details on how Levi’s niece did (in my estimation) all the right things to gain traction for the book, including making a list of Levi’s “allies.” It’s also undeniably the right book at the right moment for some people. Read Pamela Paul in the Wall Street Journal (gift link).
Marketing & Promotion
- How social media works these days: Writer and entrepreneur Tara McMullin hasn’t been active on social media despite having a following, but she recently decided to return to Instagram and experiment a bit. She has written a lengthy analysis of what’s happened, and her big takeaway is how little she’s reaching existing followers while getting more exposure to non-followers. A helpful read for anyone who isn’t up to date on how social algorithms work these days and/or still posts as if it’s 2012. (That would be me.) This article helps explain why follower count can be such a poor metric for overall reach. Read What Works.
Culture & Politics
- A successful Substack pundit considers the tradeoffs of writing for a paid readership. In brief, the more you write for the audience you’ve captured, the less you’re in dialogue with colleagues and other community members and potentially producing bigger, more meaningful conversations. I’ve seen some people taking issue with some of the conclusions here (with compelling arguments and respect), but it’s a thought-provoking piece that points to one of the tensions for anyone monetizing a newsletter (again, that would be me). Sometimes you’re trading influence and visibility for money. Read Noah Smith at Noahpinion.
- A music site analyzes the soundtrack of BookTok’s dark romance community. “While most of the mid-level BookTok-catered pop is frustratingly vapid, the community has been the secret engine behind some of the most popular and sometimes gorgeous music of the 2020s.” Read Kieran Press-Reynolds at Pitchfork.
AI
- Are readers using AI to generate fiction to meet their own personal needs? This research paper looks at 500,000 anonymized, English-language ChatGPT-user conversations and finds that a small cohort of power users (“infinite story demanders”) generate a large volume of repetitive, AI fanfiction and erotica for personal consumption. The paper notes, “LLMs enable interactivity, play, and permutation in ways that are seemingly pleasurable for users, raising questions about where AI will fit into contemporary storytelling and entertainment ecosystems. … AI-generated fiction shares structural affinities with on-demand, personalized, and repetitive cultural forms.” Read the paper.
