Links of the week March 11 2024 (11)

 

1. Write from the Heart

Needless to say, I've sat through a lot of advice on trends over the years. Write whatever you want to write...but make it about vampires. Wait, domestic suspense is in...or is it international thrillers...unreliable narrators...books with the word girl/she/her in the title? These fads are all true and yet none of them matter. As writers, we think in story. Good news, so do readers. What is the best thing you can possibly be writing right now? The book that keeps knocking at your mental door. At seventeen, I had this scene I couldn't get out of my head-a woman who ran a shelter for homeless youths, witnessing a murder one night, and the killer spotting her. Maybe other people dream of rainbows and fluffy bunnies, but clearly they were never meant for crime fiction.

 

 

She fell in love with writing when she was almost a teenager, she says. "It was one of those things that when I discovered it, I never stopped...It was very much a hobby for me. I never thought it was something I would pursue."

She studied history and English in college and took one creative writing class where she wouldn't even share her written musings with classmates. After college she taught history in the Chicago suburbs to high school freshmen and juniors. Standing in front of a classroom not far from where she grew up energized her, she says. This says a lot about Kubica. She's not shy, just private.

After she married and had her first child, she finally started to take writing seriously. Her daughter was just three weeks old, and being at home all the time, Kubica found time to write when her baby was napping. And then a lightbulb went off that changed her life.

 

By that measure, commerce is good for the international book business at the 2024 London Book Fair. By most measures, in fact. The hope among literary scouts, agents, and publishers was that the LBF's move to March from April in years past, making it the first major rights fair of the year, would lead to more dealmaking. And while the general consensus among agents and publishers is that the weeks leading up to the fair are as busy as the fair itself, the rights business in London appears to be brisk.

 

Videl Bar-Kar introduced the expert speakers and highlighted the importance of the conversation in shaping the future of the audiobook industry, quipping, "If we can't figure out here as a group where our audio is going, I don't think anyone else can."

Michele Cobb began by sharing impressive statistics about the U.S. audiobook market. "For the first time in 2023, our consumer survey showed that more than 50% of US adults have listened to an audiobook," she said. "This is a huge increase in the past couple years and going along with that, what publishers care about is that we've had double-digit revenue growth and that's been for 11 years in a row."

 

 

The trend coincides with the launch of book clubs by young celebrities, including singer Dua Lipa and model Kaia Gerber, as well as the rise of #BookTok - the corner of TikTok where readers share recommendations. Victoria Okafor, who co-runs the book club Between2Books, said that the heightened interest in reading may be partly due to a generational "shift in hobbies", with nightclubs "getting less traction from gen Z" as young people turn to other ways to spend their free time.

The pandemic may have played a role in boosting the popularity of book clubs, suggested Okafor. Many "were forced to slow down and pick up or reignite hobbies", and online book clubs provided a platform to connect with others while isolated.

 

What are you eager for Americans to know about the PA and the U.K. book market?

There is a huge amount of collaboration and exchange between the U.K. and the U.S. publishing industries. It goes without saying that the cultural ties between the two nations are immensely strong, with U.K. and U.S. authors read very well on both sides of the Atlantic. Unearthing new authorial talent and bringing it to the fore benefits readers and publishers across both countries.

The publishing industry in the U.K. has done very well over the past decade and showed a huge amount of resilience in the years blighted by Covid. In our latest set of annual stats, we posted our highest-ever-recorded revenue figures at approximately £7 billion in direct sales and supported more than 70,000 U.K. jobs.

The industry is a strong exporter, with countries globally showing a significant appetite for U.K. published content, seeking research from our education institutions, and using curriculum resources. Overall, 60% of U.K. publishing revenues come from overseas.

 

But here's something you won't find in those materials, because it was deemed too sensitive to unredact: precisely how Amazon makes its money. Nearly 30 years after the company was founded, we still don't really know. Amazon has long cultivated the impression that it operates its shopping platform at razor-thin margins, relying instead on its cloud division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), for much of its profit. And yet the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit contends that Amazon's e-commerce business is, in fact, "enormously profitable." The resolution to this dispute is likely to figure heavily in whether the judge finds that Amazon is merely a benevolent retail giant or a destructive monopoly. And regardless of what happens in the Amazon case, the fact that large corporations have been able to keep such basic information private helps explain why policy makers, journalists, and the public were so slow to recognize the growing problem of monopolization in America.

Advertising is a $1 trillion industry globally that has been packaging, presenting, promoting, communicating and manifesting the value of things for a very long time. Showing things to people so they know more about those things, in ways that both seduce and persuade them of their value, ensures goods and services don't languish, undiscovered, in the dark. Advertising has proven itself to be useful and effective in monetising assets - but the historic model does not work for book publishing, except for an occasional frontlist release.

Advertising has also, historically, cost a fortune: in time, in expertise, in capital. In business model terms, its value chain is highly modular. To make good advertising you need to understand the inherent, implicit value of the item, consider its context (history, competitors, unique dimensions), identify its strategic point of difference, alight upon the elements most likely to appeal to its audience, be sure of what will drive engagement and purchase, create assets that manifest the best of the brand in lots of formats for different media environments, and then deploy the advertising executions into various channels, adroitly matching them with people to whom the product or service will appeal.