4 hours ago
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Book Sales
- Yes, blockbusters carry the industry, but that has been the case for the last decade. Big Five editor Sean deLone offers sales data that shows blockbuster concentration has stayed flat or declined over the last decade, while breakout hits increasingly emerge unpredictably. Read at Dear Head of Mine.
Book Marketing
- Audiobook marketing tips for self-publishing authors: Voices (formerly known as Findaway Voices) asks authors how they get attention for their audiobooks. Read at their site.
Culture & Politics
- The big gay lit boom. According to Circana BookScan, LGTBQ fiction sales (print only) were about $8 million in 2015. By 2025, sales had reached more than $80 million. “Queer books come with organic systems of circulation: book clubs, queer bookstores, online fan communities, and events that double as gatherings of friends.” Read bookstore owner Aaron Hicklin in the New York Times (gift link).
AI
- The Atlantic interviews the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, widely accused of using AI to help write his story. Interviewer Will Oremus says, “We talked for more than an hour about his writing process, his health (he referenced complications with both diabetes and cancer), and his views on technology. On several occasions, he seemed to avoid answering my questions directly; when he did, some of the answers were circuitous. I was surprised to hear him opine that AI-generated writing will soon be widely accepted in literature, even as he maintained that he didn’t use AI tools in creating his story. He seemed bullish on AI overall, viewing it as a revolutionary technology, though he worried about the repercussions of saying so. Although he couldn’t name any works by Derek Walcott, a writer he cited as one of his main literary inspirations, he said he had prepared a collection of short stories in Walcott’s style, which he hopes to publish soon.” Read the interview (paid sub likely required).
- OverDrive’s Libby app will soon filter out AI content, but such content is self-labeled. Readers can select whether they want to see books that have AI-generated content (whether writing, audio, art, or translation). However, the filter relies on publishers and authors self-labeling such works via metadata; OverDrive is not attempting to use AI detection. Read Janko Roetggers in The Verge (paid sub).
