The National Book Awards are the Oscars of the publishing industry, although nobody who attended the ceremony on November 16 at Cipriani Wall Street would likely confuse the two. Still, it wasn't without its glamour and drama. That night, Padma Lakshmi, best-selling author and former wife of Salman Rushdie - who only a few months before had been nearly murdered for his writing - was the host. Her yellow strapless dress was conspicuously adorned with a union button in solidarity with the striking HarperCollins staffers picketing out on the sidewalk. But all eyes were on Markus Dohle, the tuxedo-clad CEO of Penguin Random House who had for 14 years been the most powerful and successful publishing warlord in the room.
Links of the week January 16 2023 (03)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
16 January 2023
PRH had become the biggest publisher in the game after a 2013 merger, led by Dohle, that saw Random House gobble up Penguin. The combined company had cast a long shadow over its four smaller rivals - Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster - but Dohle wanted more and had spent much of the past two years fighting to buy S&S in order to create a world-spanning leviathan.
Few in the room had wanted the $2.175 billion S&S merger to happen. Already most felt that PRH had become too bureaucratic, too unwieldy, and they worried that competition among book buyers would be hobbled further if it went through. Many had cheered on the antitrust hawks of President Biden's Department of Justice who sued to block the deal's consummation. After a bruising, and in some ways humiliating, trial, Dohle had been denied his ambitions by the court. But more importantly, in the process, his imperial publishing house's weaknesses had been laid bare for all to see.
We've previously explored what I called "the end of the trade publishing concept", which stems from the now wide-open opportunity to publish available to anybody with a computer and something to deliver as a book. It feels like we may have reached a new benchmark: admittedly a very fuzzy one. But it looks like it has become very difficult, bordering on impossible, for a commercial entity to make money consistently publishing new titles. Let's summarize the facts that have changed on the ground that make that the case.
**Thirty years ago, each new book coming into the world in English was competing with 500,000 incumbents that were (at least theoretically) available for purchase. That was the total number of books %u201Cin print%u201D in English in the world. Today that number, with a big boost from Ingram%u2019s Lightning print-on-demand capability, has grown to more than nineteen million titles. **Up until twenty years ago, bookstores sold the lion%u2019s share of the books. Only serious publishers with sales forces, warehouses, inventory, and relationships with retailers could compete for sales. Now bookstores account for as little as 20 percent of the sales. Most sales are made through online promotion and availability that give incumbent publishers no particular edge. So increased title competition has come along with the vanishing of the unique publisher sales and distribution advantage.
The Bookseller - News - US sales of print books dropped 6.5% in 2022 but adult fiction sees increase
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.
Frontlist sales dropped 10.5% in 2022, while backlist sales fell 3.7%, according to the NPD BookScan figures, while sales of hardbacks fell 10.4% compared to 2.4% for trade paperbacks, which accounted for 60% of unit sales in 2022, up from 57% in 2021. Hardbacks' share of the market declined from 33% in 2021 to 30% in 2022.
Print sales of adult fiction were up 8.5% on 2019, which Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/ credited to the power of BookTok. US trade publishing's largest category, adult non-fiction, saw a 10.3% drop in sales in 2022 to 289.6 million copies sold, compared to 322.8 million copies in 2021.
Each year, The Economist publishes a special edition in which it encapsulates the state of the world as expressed by numbers. These articles are authoritative, accurate, well-researched, and comprehensive. I couldn't hope to emulate them in a review of the world in publishing. But a few numbers, randomly chosen and sometimes more approximate than precise, may serve to illustrate some elements of our industry in 2022.
Here are some positive and practical numbers from the IPA, our international trade association. In the last decade, the number of countries represented by the association has risen from 51 to 76, thus increasing the markets represented-per the IPA's estimates-from 52 to 83 percent of the world's population. The remaining 17 percent may be hard to land while Russia pursues its war against Ukraine.
Book censorship in school libraries continues to rise. A Texas school district pulled 41 titles from the shelves, including the Bible, to put them under further review. Missouri passed a bill that makes any text with "visual depictions" of "graphic material" illegal to have available in schools. This has caused the removal of many graphic novels. Some groups, like Moms for Liberty among others, have suggested giving books a rating system, like movies. Julia Rittenberg explains in depth why that won't work. Kelly Jensen reports extensively every week on censorship news around the United States. Weekly, I check in about what is going on in an effort to stay informed for when the books in my library will inevitably be challenged and possibly banned. It's important I stay apprised of the falsely named "culture wars" around book banning.
This got me thinking: What would a school library look like if it didn't have any books that could be considered offensive? What kind of books would be removed and what books would be safe to remain?
What began with an innocent flirtation quickly devolved into a full-blown affair. How was I to know that a $7.99 purchase at LaGuardia Airport would leave my palms damp and my heart changed? It had been years since my last flight. Anxious, I abandoned the chaos of my gate for the sanctum of Hudson News. Between the biographies of dead presidents and the jumbo book of crosswords, I spotted it-the book for me. No, I thought. I can't.
I paced the shop, feigning interest in snow globes of Times Square and travel-sized doses of Pepto-Bismol, all the while stealing furtive glances in the direction of the trade paperbacks. When I heard my boarding call over the intercom, I knew it was now or never: I grabbed the book, practically threw my money at the sales clerk, and rushed to my gate with a fresh copy of the inspiration for the Netflix series Bridgerton, Julia Quinn's The Duke and I.
By the time my flight landed, Quinn's book had prompted a major literary revelation. While the tale of Daphne Bridgerton didn't exactly alter my perception of space and time (there were, frankly, far fewer descriptions of pretty dresses than I had hoped), I realized I had never read a romance novel. How many times had I walked past an entire section of the bookstore or library, subconsciously passing it off as unserious and therefore not worthy of my time?
When I look back at who I was just a few years ago and who I am today, it always gives me a jolt. A lot changes throughout our lives, but more often those changes happen slowly and in parts. We move house or change jobs; we meet people, we lose people. At the end of 2016, twenty years of working in Essex as an NHS radiographer in cancer services had left me feeling exhausted, frustrated, and mostly just sad. I wrote when I could, which wasn't often, and sold short stories while still harbouring my lifelong dream of one day becoming a full-time novelist. And then, shortly after I was given a life-changing medical diagnosis, a very close family member died unexpectedly. I think that no matter what changes happen in our lives, there always comes a moment when each of us realises that we don't have all the time in the world after all. And that was mine.
My mid-life crisis - or ours, because I roped my husband, Iain, in too - was deciding to sell our house, take an extended break from work, and blow what little savings we had on deciding what to do next. For six months, we lived in Cyprus, and I started writing what would become my first novel, Mirrorland. And then, because we'd rarely been home more than a few weeks a year, we returned to Scotland. We chose the Isle of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides because we'd visited there before, and I'd fantasised about writing a novel on a deserted Atlantic clifftop every bit as much as on a Greek island. We stayed all over Lewis and Harris during the seven months we lived there, but spent the autumn in the aptly-named Cliff, a small settlement on the Valtos peninsula on the rugged and remote west coast of Lewis.
At first, it was nothing short of idyllic. I finished writing Mirrorland with that view of the Atlantic and a never-ending succession of surfers in camper vans...
"My grandmother said, ‘Hungry dogs run faster,'" says the 75-year-old. "I've always been a hungry dog."
James Patterson has written so many books that he's long forgotten the number he hit during his most prolific single year. "I don't know the most, but right now I believe I have 31 active projects," says the 75-year-old over the phone, from his house about an hour north of New York City. "Lately, we've been doing eight to 10 fiction, one or two non-fiction, and then anywhere from three to five kids or young adult books." The latest, out next week, is The House of Wolves, a collaboration with Mike Lupica.
Mind you, Patterson didn't start publishing in earnest until after he'd finished a decades long career at J. Walter Thompson, an advertising firm. Though his productivity is due in large part to a stable of co-writers that he works with, it's also a result of a daily routine that includes about eleven hours of reading and writing, one hour of golf, and many chats with his wife Susan. Here, he explains how he can re-work a draft of a novel in half an hour, how co-writing works, and why he prefers funerals to weddings.
My earliest reading memory
I must have been read, probably by my mother, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, and Kipling's rhythms must have got into my memory, because I remember looking at the story How the Camel Got His Hump and experiencing the words gradually matching the sounds in my mind. I was six, and on board ship to join my father, an RAF officer stationed in what was then Southern Rhodesia.
The book I came back to
George Eliot's Middlemarch. I couldn't cope with it as a student; it wasn't until I was grown up, and married, and a parent, and trying to teach it myself, that I realised its majestic scope and depth.
The book I reread
Not so much a single book as all the poetry I know by heart, and all the poetry I don't know by heart and want to. Poetry is everything.
Happy New Year, book lovers! For me, January 1st came and went like a flash, and my TBR pile hasn't budged one iota since the start of 2022. Not ONE. SINGLE. MILLIMETER. In fact, it's grown even taller. And the pileup on my e-reader? At this stage it's reached monumental proportions-a traffic jam of delectable books just waiting to be unleashed.
I should begin by confessing that I never make New Year's resolutions. I only end up disappointed and mad at myself, and who needs more of that? Even where reading books is concerned, especially where reading books is concerned, I simply can't commit to powering through all of them within a set time frame.
My physical TBR pile isn't an actual pile. It's made up of stacks of books scattered hither and thither throughout the house. Is there a rhyme or reason to the disorder? Not really. A new hardcover might end up on my bedroom nightstand, or it might find itself plopped atop another stack on my living room end table. Eventually, it might find itself resting under a cat who's using it as a temporary perch.
Author and screenwriter Fay Weldon has died "peacefully" at the age of 91, her agent Georgina Capel has confirmed.
The writer was best known for her novels exploring society and class. She penned more than 30, including The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (Sceptre) and Praxis (Coronet), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The Telegraph also noted "though she was hailed as a feminist writer, Fay Weldon's heroines did not conform to any ideal, battling stereotype". Its obituary said: "She understood that people do not live politically correct lives; that they get jealous and depressed and vengeful and go off with the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Her women may be oppressed, but they can also be vain, and are prone to overeating, plastic surgery, divorce, death, children, money, therapy and affairs. What appealed to Fay Weldon's readers was not her feminism as such, but the feeling that she was on their side. Stories of how she had written her first novels in pencil at the kitchen table while children tumbled at her feet made her a favourite subject for women's magazines. The highbrow media also loved her for her forthright views."
The new report, released this month, is titled UK Authors' Earnings and Contracts 2022: A Survey of 60,000 Writers. Our Publishing Perspectives readers will recall that we and other various news media did a good deal of reporting in 2018, when an earlier report in this series found that in the United Kingdom, a "median annual income of a professional author [was] £10,500 (now US$12,699), well below the minimum wage," reminding readers that "the equivalent figure in 2013 was £11,000 (now US$13,304) and in 2005 it was £12,500 (now US$15,118)."
The top-line figure in the new 2022 report paints an even less felicitous picture, putting median earnings from self-employed writing in the UK at £7,000 (US$8,466), obviously a substantial drop.
At 91, Robert Gottlieb is perhaps the most acclaimed book editor of his time. He started out in 1955 and has been working in publishing ever since - serving as editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker. The list of authors he's edited include Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, John le Carré, Katharine Graham, Bill Clinton, Nora Ephron and Michael Crichton.
I can't think of many cases of writers I've worked with whose work I really loved and whose person I didn't like at all. There are people who are more difficult than other people, and more needy. It's a very emotional relationship. There's a transference that occurs as in psychoanalysis. The editor represents many things, and different things to every writer. It's a financial relationship. It's an approval relationship. It's a technical relationship. It can be a close one or it can not. Some writers don't want to be social with their editors. Others need to talk to them constantly. And if you would let them, would like to read to you what they've written that day over the telephone. Not for me. So your job, being a service job, is to supply the writer with whatever you intuit he or she requires and needs and can make the most of.
It was a dreary day in October, and the baby that was supposed to have arrived was already late. Maybe that means nothing to you, but to me, it meant that my out-of-office had long ago gone up and instead of holding my new baby, I was Googling the rates of stillbirth for post-term infants and the mortality rate of the women who carried them. Like most people who are afraid of death (theirs and other people's), I sought solace in crime fiction.
There's something tantalizing about unsolved murders and whodunnit puzzles that, when executed well, can draw even the most anxious among us away from our internal spiraling. As a lifelong reader of mysteries and thrillers, I was looking forward to staving off my fears with a familiar and comforting setup: a dead body, a plucky detective, and a clever resolution.
The only problem was that this time, crime fiction didn't take my mind off my problems. In fact, it highlighted them. That's because every suspense novel I read centered on at least one dead woman. As a result, I found myself sympathizing not with the intrepid detectives, whose mental acuity could outmatch even the cleverest of villains, but instead, with the hapless victims, whose fates were sealed just as much by circumstance as by chance.
"Everyone always asks, so here you go," Aaliyah Aroha wrote in the caption of what would go on to become one of her most popular TikTok videos. She appears, lip-syncing to a song from the app-favorite Unofficial Bridgerton Musical and holding a stack of books, as the words "Enemies to Lovers book recommendations" float overhead. The video, posted to her account, @aaliyahreads, which boasts over 216,000 followers, now has 2.5 million views and more than 431,000 likes.
Many book lovers who are in the market for their next read-especially readers who stick to genres like romance and fantasy - turn first to accounts like this. TikTok is teeming with book influencers like Aroha (her last name is a pseudonym), who use their platforms to peddle new releases, make book recommendations, share reviews, and more. But in 2021 and 2022, these content creators found a new way to hack the algorithm-and in turn, the publishing industry. That is, until they began to wonder if they had created a monster.
People from many different industries have watched the rapid erosion of Twitter. While it remains up and running as of this date, millions of people have abandoned or shut down their accounts for reasons ranging from owner Elon Musk's reinstatement of former president Donald Trump's account to overall disenchantment with the role social media plays in our lives.
But for me, Twitter has and always will be a platform that helped me find my way in book publishing, and not just because my @TheBookMaven account has more than 200,000 followers or because I created #FridayReads, which is used by book professionals of all types to share current reading choices. By "finding my way in book publishing," I mean less my personal career than my overall views about our own industry and its changes in the 25 years I've written about, and worked in, the book world.
Something interesting has been going on in publishing this year. Not the thumping increases in overall revenue - up 5 per cent to £6.7 billion across digital and physical books in the UK and Ireland. And not the surge in export markets: despite Brexit, exports are up 8 per cent to English language domains. There is nothing new about the dominance of Anglo-American publishing in a field where English has become a de facto global language - more books in English are published each year than any other language.
In 2021, running against this grain, translation has become a disruptive innovation in what has been termed a monoglot and insular world - that of British publishing. Shattering the 3 per cent translations rule holding sway for decades, UK and Irish sales of translated fiction grew to 5.63 per cent. What the growth in translation signals about reading tastes may be even more telling when set beside a declining shift in general sales of crime fiction and thrillers. According to the Bookseller magazine, this is in line with a trend in which translated short stories and anthologies saw sales surge by 90 per cent over the last three years.