Despite working under the uncertainty of who their new owner will be, employees at Simon & Schuster were able to deliver a record year for the country's third largest trade publisher.
After three months of negotiations and two weeks after announcing plans to resume labor negotiations, HarperCollins has reached a tentative agreement with its employee union, Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers.
After a long run of surging profits from pandemic-era shopping sprees, Amazon is feeling the hangover. The retail and tech giant is reporting its first unprofitable year since 2014.
Amazon lost $2.7 billion last year, the company said on Thursday. This was despite holiday-season sales growing 9%. Amazon's shares fell in after hours trading. Read more
Shallow, fake, showy, and performative-these are a few of the adjectives used to describe BookTok, the corner of TikTok where young women share and discuss books on camera, by drive-by tourists to a culture they don't understand. Read more
Booksellers report that more customers are switching to paperbacks as household budgets tighten, with agents and publishers also predicting a shift towards the cheaper format. Read more
A decade ago fiction was said to be migrating to digital-but in 2022 adult fiction sales were £164m greater than its 2014 low, propelling the market to a strong total in the past 12 months.
For the first time since 2019, Nielsen was able to report data for the full year-and it seems most publishers have been reaping the reward of a bountiful few years, with a number posting all-time highs.
The backlist boom which surged during the pandemic continued with a mighty push from TikTok in 2022, as nearly two-thirds (£1.19bn) of Nielsen BookScan revenue last year came from editions published in 2021. This is the second-highest share of revenue for a TCM 12-month period coming from titles released prior to the beginning of that year.
Sales of print books in the US fell by 6.5% in 2022 compared to 2021 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan, Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/ has reported.
Sales totalled 788.7 million units last year according to the data, down from 843.1 million in 2021, though print unit sales in 2022 were still 11.8% above those from 2019, the last pre-pandemic year.
The price of books is likely to go up, say publishers - which are acting to avoid steep rises for readers.
Some presses are exploring printing on cheaper and thinner paper, postponing reprints for older books and publishing fewer titles to reduce costs and avoid increasing recommended retail prices.
The sale of Waterstones to activist hedge fund Elliott Advisers has been widely welcomed in the book trade and is very much in the interests of writers. Like Barnes & Noble in the US, the British bookstore chain occupies a key position in terms of chain bookselling. Read more
It's unusual to find a book chain boss who went into bookselling because he liked reading, but James Daunt, founder of Daunts bookshop chain in London, and CEO of the Waterstones chain in the UK, is that rare animal. Encouragingly, he still maintains that: 'Books still work and always will'. Read more
World Poetry Day has been marked by the publication of some encouraging sales figures from the UK, showing sales up 16% on last year in the first quarter. But a lot of these sales seem to be driven by social media and to feature poets who are appealing to a young female audience. Read more
As many in the northern hemisphere are still sunning themselves (or sitting out the rain if they're in the UK), the book trade is hotting up for the autumn. In the UK It looks as if 8 October will be Super Thursday, when the combination of big books being launched reaches its peak. A successful generic Booksellers' Association promotion, Books Are My Bag, will launch on the same day. Read more
Online communities are the way things are going. Publishers have been trying to establish communities of readers to sell books to for some time, but now an author blogger has called for them to set up communities of writers too, and perhaps even communities of publishers and freelances as well. Read more
That’s not putting too strongly the chorus of disapproval which greeted the surprise announcement from James Daunt of Waterstones that he had agreed an alliance with Amazon which would see Waterstones selling Kindles in their shops and providing wi-fi acess so that customers can browse the shop’s stock and then order ebooks on their Kindles. Read more
'People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.'