A new generation of romance novel consumers has moved a long-standing three-way conversation between reader, writer and publisher onto social media, industry insiders say, speeding up an already fast-moving segment of the publishing world.
Last year ended #HEA (that's happily ever after) for Romance & Sagas, as sales continued an upward BookTok-boosted momentum to hit £62.4m through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market. That's the category's second-best total ever, only bettered by 2012's Fifty Shades of Grey-fuelled (£68.3m) climax.
"One of the things that I've always been into, passionate about, and focused on is love stories," says Monique Patterson, in one heck of an understatement. The romance publishing veteran, who was tapped in February to helm Bramble, Tor Publishing Group's new romance imprint, has made a top-tier publishing career out of finding and putting out romance novels across a span of subgenres. Read more
All my favourite memories as a teenager - and I insist you fully judge me for this - are of sitting in my bedroom, reading. I have a huge family and, as the only black sheep introvert, my escape was hiding away with a novel. I would withdraw from all the loudness and reality of my life with a novel that made me laugh, cry and - above all else - pretend.
Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of seven novels, including American Wife and Rodham, reimaginings of the lives of Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton. Her new novel, Romantic Comedy, revolves around a TV sketch show based on Saturday Night Live, and dissects celebrity culture in a love story set during the pandemic, much of which takes place via email exchange. Read more
Sales of romantic fiction continue to boom, but with the genre often accused of being formulaic, are its authors at risk of being replaced by book-writing chatbots?
Social media is opening publishers' eyes to a new demographic of younger and more diverse readers of romance novels. BookTok, a corner of TikTok where readers post content around books such as reviews, recommendations, and reactions, has changed the publishing industry rapidly. Read more
Both Romance & Sagas and Sci-Fi & Fantasy had banner years, with Romance's £53m its best since 2012, the year of E L James and Fifty Shades, and Sci-Fi & Fantasy's £47m its highest since 2007. Colleen Hoover's It Ends with Us was the overall bestseller of the year, with four other Hoover titles in the top 10. Read more
"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. Read more
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. Read more
'I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.'
In the third in a series on the implications of AI for publishing, Nadim Sadek argues that effective advertising is now feasible for everyone, and for all kinds of titles
A publishing friend of mine recently told me about a sales report they'd received from a major retailer in which some of their books had zero sales. It turned out that there had been plenty of sales, however-they just all went to counterfeiters. In case you think this is an outlier, it's not. Counterfeiting is a serious, nontrivial problem facing the industry.
If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you'll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Read more
The U.K. Publishers Association (PA) was established in 1896 and is a cornerstone of the British publishing industry, working with a diverse array of companies to promote innovation, collaboration, and commercial success. Read more
With English as a shared language, there is a natural relationship between the American and British publishing industries. Most of the world's top publishing companies, be they conglomerates or independent publishers, have operations in each country, typically in New York City and London. Literary traffic travels both ways across the Atlantic.
The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies.
Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023 - a "much stronger" growth than the overall increase in UK-based listings over the same period. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Read more
"We don't understand the consequences of AI with regards to copyright," Brazil's Karine Gonçalves Pansa, president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), said, when asked to name the most important issues facing publishing right now. "We can say, very easily, that our content is being used, without permission, and without license, by AI."
'I certainly never intended to speak for anyone other than myself. Even myself I find it difficult to speak for. My books may well fail as artistic endeavours but I don't want them to fail for failing to speak for a generation for which I never intended to speak in the first place.'