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Book Market

US book sales up

10 July 2017

Figures from the US continue the trend in book sales which shows children's books doing well and hardback sales outpacing trade paperback and mass market segments. It's good to see positive figures - unit sales for 2017 are 3% higher than in the first 6 months of last year.  Read more

The author as a brand

23 March 2015

Karen Joy Fowler in this week's Comment makes a totally fair point about the importance of enjoying your writing, and what makes some writers happy is writing a different kind of book each time. But is there any truth in the suggestion that writing similar books is the best way to build a successful writing career?  Read more

A challlenge to Amazon at last?

9 March 2015

So what are the chances of the just-launched German online book retailer and e-reader, backed by bookstore chains Thalia, Weltbild and Hugendubel, Deutsche Telekom, and giant German publisher Bertelsmann providing a real challenge to Amazon?  Read more

Reaching for an international book market

5 January 2015

As we enter another new year it seems that the book world is becoming ever more global. Our new list of 2015 International Book Fairs brings home just how many are aspiring to international status and trying to establish themselves as attracting a truly worldwide audience of publishers, booksellers and authors.  Read more

Bestselling trends

11 November 2013

A recent investigation by USA Today into their bestseller lists of the last thirty years throws an interesting light on changes in bestsellerdom and background changes in the way in which books are bought and sold.  Read more

Children's books still strong

27 August 2012

 In an article in a recent Bookseller, Caroline Horn wrote cheeringly about the continued health of the children's books sector. At a time when publishing for adults is well down and there are many changes which make it difficult to see far ahead, the children's publishing sector remains robust.  Read more

A tsunami hits the book world

16 April 2012

At the beginning of the week it looked like the London Book Fair would be the story of the week. But by mid-week a tsunami had swept through the book world and there was only one story dominating the headlines.   Read more

Books and consumers research shows rapid change

9 April 2012

The annual Books & Consumers research into the British book market was delivered to a highly interested audience last week. Rarely can there have been so much change in one year and the assembled bookseller and publishers were keen to hear what had actually been going on.  Read more

Pottermore launches Harry Potter ebooks

2 April 2012

The launch of the Harry Pottter books in ebook form last week was described by the Bookseller's Philip Jones as 'digital publishing's Beatles moment'. He said 'These will be huge - they are a game changer because of the power of the Potter brand.' (The Harry Potter series has sold 450m print copies worldwide to date.)  Read more

Amazon moves towards a monopoly

26 March 2012

I'm afraid we can't escape Amazon in the news at the moment. In Publishing Perspectives Bryce Milligan, the publisher of small American indie Wings Press, asks whether Amazon's philanthropic grants are not just helping along their company aim of overwhelming the competition.  Read more

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'Anybody who claims that one genre is categorically superior to all others must be ready and able to defend their prejudice. And that involves knowing what the ‘inferior' genres actually consist of, their nature and their forms of excellence. It involves reading them.'

— Ursula K. Le Guin

'A projection back of modern sensibilities'

9 September 2024

‘It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to write a character well in the past who is not a projection back of modern sensibilities. My defence would be that the 16th century was the time when rational, sceptical inquiry was beginning. This was the age of the humanists: we're leaving medieval thought patterns behind.  Read more

26 August 2024 - What's new

August 2024
  • ‘You can offend somebody in the 21st century with something you said in 1970... By the end of the process I was questioning myself, that was the problem. I wrote innocently and I wrote to make people laugh but when I read the book through I thought, gosh, really, is this offensive? And that? And that? Am I all these things?
  Read more