What’s an easy trick to get your book from your head to the page?

Writing is a lot harder than Netflix or Disney+. If binge-watching The Mandalorian was as easy as writing a book, you wouldn’t have signed up to receive this email. The truth is writing is hard. It takes a lot of work! This simple trick is going to help shift your mindset and make the work of finishing your book that much easier. 

Are you letting distractions keep you from writing your book?

When it comes to writing books, there are a million things that are easier to do. Everything becomes a distraction. Do you know what’s easier than writing your book? Talking about your book. Complaining about not having time to write your book...well, there might be as much time spent doing that as it would take to actually write the book.

That’s why we often share this easy trick to help writers shake off distractions like Netflix or Disney+, etc.: “Butt in chair.” It’s that commitment to showing up that makes all the difference...

What’s the best way for me to figure out if my book idea is any good?

There’s this great cartoon of a doctor holding up an x-ray to a patient and saying, “It looks like you’ve got a book in you.” In the x-ray, there’s a book lodged in the patient’s ribs. 

If you’re reading this, you probably feel a lot like the patient, metaphorically, of course. Instead of wondering if your book idea is any good, let us help you figure that out.

Great book ideas start with the premise!!!

The very first step you should take when trying to figure out which book you should pursue first is to sit down and write out a premise of your book idea. The premise of your book is basically its thesis statement.

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“What are the important factors I should consider 

when I am developing my book idea?”

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But what if you have two book ideas and can’t decide which to write about first? The premise is a great way to compare ideas and share them with friends and fellow writers. T...

Audiobooks Continue Their Hot Streak

The Audio Publishers Association reported sales numbers for 2022 at approximately $1.8 billion – a 10% jump over 2021. That was the 11th consecutive year of double-digit growth for the audio segment—the current belle of the publishing industry ball. That followed a blistering 25% jump in 2021 over 2020. The group’s survey of Americans 18 and older showed that 53% of American adults have listened to an audiobook, up from 45% last year. That’s some incredible saturation.  

So Much for the Sunny Side of the Street

According to the good people at BookScan (I still can’t remember how to spell their new moniker), unit sales for the first half of 2023 finished down 2.7% to 353.5 million.  After a flat Q1 2023 (helped by a one-time prince), Q2 tipped us into the negative – and that’s compared to the first half of 2022 which fell 6.6% below the pandemically inflated first 6 months of 2021. By way of an equalizer, the slowing numbers from the first 6 month...

Not Too Shabby

In these uncertain economic times, good news seems even gooder. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) reported its Q1 2023 publishing industry results last week with an increase in total sales of 3.2% over Q1 2022. March 2023, in and of itself, shot up 6.6% in a year, with audio and ebook segments each posting double-digit gains both for the month and for the quarter.

The AAP also put out its final report on the 2022 results, with the total sales for the year slipping only 2.6% below banner 2021. That figure bested their preliminary “negative-Nancy” projection of a 6.4% drop. The early projections did not include K-12 educational publishing, which exceeded the prior year by a whopping 16.6%, and helped offset a 6.1% drop in trade sales.

As promised in last month’s issue, we now have Q1 results from Big 5 member, HarperCollins.  After some documented struggles—and some layoffs—HC appears to have stabilized. Following a notable drop in the last half of 2022, reve...

Back on the Auction Block

One of the lone bright spots in the publishing industry, league-leading Simon & Schuster posted another banner quarter.  Q1 2023 saw sales increase 19% and operating income jump 18%. Regular readers of the Update will remember that these results are being compared to a “gravity-defying” 2022.  But, all the S&S success isn’t fazing corporate parent Paramount Global.  Paramount still insists that they want to off-load this “non-video” cash cow.  

If anyone is looking to invest a couple of billion dollars, seems like a solid opportunity to us.

Meanwhile, Penguin Random House—the former suitor whose advances were rebuffed by the Justice Department—was saved by the (former) prince. Over 4 million copies of Harry Windsor’s “SPARE” were credited for German parent Bertelsmann’s Q1 2023 sales increase of 5.6%.

One last item in the “good news” category, our brick-and-mortar bookstore friends posted a sales increase of 10.7% in February 2023 over the same pe...

Publishers Begin to Report Full-Year Results 

As the various regulatory filings trickle into the folks at the SEC and beyond, we start to get a more in-depth picture of the health of the industry.  Unit sales are the closest measure we have to any “real-time” data in this industry, but eventually, profits are what keep the presses running—and BookScan reports can’t help us there.

Case in point, the 800-lb. Penguin (Random House) saw sales rise 4.8% in 2022 over 2021.  But that pesky inflation, and some exchange rate shenanigans, left PRH parent Bertelsmann with only bad news for their shareholders, as earnings dropped 11.8%.  The company didn’t blame the massive legal bills or the hefty $200 million kill fee from the failed Simon & Schuster deal, but those couldn’t have helped. 

Deal Reports in Decline

Another less scientific, but leading indicator is the number of publishing deals signed in a given period – and then reported to our friends at Publishers Marketplace (less scientifi...

 What is Happening at Simon & Schuster?

Unless you’re new to the Update, you’ve already heard about the trend-bucking results that S&S has been having for the last couple of years. And 2022 was no exception. Sales were up 10%, topping $1.1 billion. Even better, operating income jumped 16% to $248 million. Some enviable numbers, to be sure. All this, while CEO Jonathan Karp and his moneymaking colleagues worked under the cloud of uncertainty that was the pending—now imploded—sale of the company to Penguin Random House.

Yet, Simon & Schuster parent Paramount continues to say that the publishing juggernaut isn’t core to their video-based business and still intends to sell it off. Man, if that’s a “non-core asset,” I would like to have one or two “non-core assets.” Reuters reported that a Wall Street firm is in talks with Paramount to shop S&S with the target price being between $2 billion and $2.5 billion. If PRH was willing to pay $2.2 billion two and a half years ago, you have to...

Is the End in Sight for Amazon?

No, of course not.

But the multi-category behemoth just posted its first loss since 2014…and to the tune of a cool $2.7 billion.  That’s more than petty cash, even at one of the world’s biggest companies. While their holiday sales grew 9% from the prior year, Amazon took a huge loss on its investment in the electric truck maker, Rivian, whose stock value plunged 82% after Amazon took a 20% stake.  

So, it wasn’t just me…

The other drag on profits came from Amazon’s pandemic-fueled growth plan.  CEO Andy Jassy commented that in just a couple of years during the pandemic, Amazon nearly doubled the warehouse space that it had previously built over the prior 25 years.  Amazon has announced a pull-back on many of those new warehouses, and last month revealed a plan to cut 5% of its workforce (18,000 jobs) this year.  Another astonishing figure from Jassy that exacerbated the losses in 2022: Amazon grew its “last-mile transportation network”—aka, all those...

2022 is behind us. And while it was a down year for the industry as a whole, there are reasons for hope. But a little less hope if you work at Amazon.

Final (preliminary) Numbers

With 2022 in the books (I'm sure we’ve used that one before), sales of print books finished 6.5% behind 2021. The decline was anticipated, as the world returned to a sense of normalcy, and with it more opportunities for entertainment besides reading.  But, on the bright side of the street, 2022 was still 11.8% over pre-pandemic 2019.  Again, for those avid readers of the Update, you’ll recall that we were pleased as punch about 2019 while it was happening.  

Our analyst colleagues at BookScan note that a couple of symptoms from the pandemic carried on into 2022.  First, with fewer brick-and-mortar stores, it was harder for new books to get their footing, so frontlist sales continued to slip (down 10.5% from 2021). Then, with that pesky inflation still lurking in every corner of commerce, hardcover books too...

The Christmas shopping season is here—with not a bang, but a whimper. But more on that later. 

Dohle-d Out!

From the “Didn’t See That Coming” file, Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle shocked much, if not all, of the industry, abruptly announcing his departure from the apex publisher effective at the end of 2022.  He did oversee the company during the very long and enormously expensive—yet failed—effort to acquire fellow Big 5 competitor, Simon & Schuster. But that sure didn’t seem like something people were blaming on Dohle.

S&S parent, Paramount, did decide to take their $200 million ball and go home—in the form of the negotiated kill fee due if PRH was unable to affect a closure of the deal in two years. In theory, that puts one of the publishing industry’s crown jewels back on the auction block. But with the Justice Department’s trust-busting win last month, it’s hard to see any competing publishers trying to buy where PRH failed.  If they are big enough to fund a $2 billion (...