A Brief Dispatch from the Front Lines
The US Book Show and our current bookish moment
Hi friends!
I’ve been busy this week moderating the BookTok panel at the US Book Show (the semi-replacement for the dearly departed BEA) and pounding the pavement talking to editors and marketers and readers about the current state of romance publishing. I also saw John Proctor is the Villain (10/10, no notes, have never cried so hard in a theater, my mascara fully migrated to my cheekbones). So this week, I’m going to share a few thoughts and a few links. Paid subscribers will get my summer reading recommendations on Monday (because I have some other news to announce then).
Without further ado:
wrote an excellent piece about the never-ending discourse cycle on Threads that captures a lot of my feelings about the outrage that lately feels like it’s always simmering on the back burner:
I am also happy to direct y’all to Jane Friedman’s coverage of the book show. For my part, I’ll say that a lot of the panels devolved into depressing conversations about AI (one of the only things on anyone’s minds lately) and that the CEO of Simon and Schuster said Trump has been good for the book business.
I was particularly interested in hearing more about Bindery, an online platform and publisher that is allowing “tastemakers,” mostly BookTok creators, to curate their own imprints (and doing so quite successfully). The CEO of Bindery came from a role at Patreon, which makes total sense and feels like the right model to be applying to a startup publishing business.
I also enjoyed hearing from booksellers about how they find ARCs, discover new reads, and share them with customers. Barnes and Noble’s Miwa Messer discussed how the chain is encouraging their booksellers to discover new books, and that the chain plans to open 60 new stores this year. That is a lot of new booksellers reading ARCs and curating store placement.
Iconic BookTok creator Smitty was one of the speakers on the panel I moderated, and one of the most interesting things I learned from him was that he typically doesn’t accept any ARCs or free books from publishers. Instead, all of the books he covers are books he buys himself or checks out from the library. We spoke a lot about authenticity, and this is one of the ways he maintains trust with his followers. I talk a lot about how BookTok often breaks out backlist books or books that aren’t strictly new releases, and this is one of the reasons why. It’s possible to market to BookTok creators, but a lot of them are discovering books in their own time.
On the panel, Smitty also pointed out that publishers should be engaging more with creators with smaller followings, closer to 3k - 5k followers, because those creators have the strongest communities and more personal relationships with their followers.
The best quote of the panel cam from Charlotte Bryla, Advertising and Social Commerce Director at Hachette. I asked our panelists to predict what they thought the next big trends will be based on what they’re seeing on BookTok and Charlotte picked full production, full cast audiobooks, describing them as “sprayed edges for your ears.”
Other things I did while I was in New York: walk into bookstores and see what their summer reading sections look like, buy a copy of Deep Cuts from The Strand, eat an obscene amount of dumplings at Din Tai Fung, have wonderful conversations with new and old favorite book people about what the next romance sport is and what we think is coming next.
More soon! See you Monday!
xoxo
To piggy back off the prediction of full cast audiobooks— A trend I’ve noticed recently is duet narration audiobooks (where the female/male narrators narrate all of a character’s dialogue throughout the book instead of switching chapters with the POV switch). Problematic Summer Romance and Say You’ll Remember Me are the two I’ve noticed this year.
Problematic Summer Romance being notable because the MMC didn’t have his own POV chapters- the whole book is from the FMC POV but we got to hear an Irish male voice narrate all his dialogue (a real treat).
As someone who does 95% of my reading via audiobook, this is a very exciting trend for me.
I was at the Bindery party on Tues night—let me know if you’d like to be connected to my contact there!