by Jay Hartman
Good grief, is it really another new year already? Where does the time go? It seems as if we just set up our plan of attack for the year and here we are again needing more new goals.
Except, the landscape has changed quite a bit from last year at this time. After all, a lot happens over the course of twelve months. Readers’ tastes change, markets open and close, beloved authors pass, and new authors gain acclaim. If you plan to write as a business and try to make a living from it, you need to understand what’s going on in the publishing landscape and what this might mean for you. As January is a time people set goals for the year, I decided to look at items people have reported through recent surveys as the things they’re most concerned about in the publishing industry moving forward. Some are legitimate concerns, while some are blown a bit out of proportion. The goal here is to determine how many you need to worry about and how many to disregard to focus on other issues.
THE DEATH OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Surprisingly, this one’s been a threat hanging over our heads for a long time, but now social media is starting to circle the drain. Facebook has long fallen off as a valuable place to build book sales; it’s now primarily a place for authors to promote to other authors. The algorithm changed so many times that getting posts viewed by enough people to generate actual sales requires a serious pot of cash. Users of Twitter fled for platforms like Threads or Bluesky but without yet making the same kind of publishing community previously found elsewhere. TikTok is in danger of shutting down in January. Instagram continues to be useful, but not to the degree it used to be.
What happens if social media dies and we don’t have those places for promotion? Well, do the same thing everyone should have done all along: build email lists, do specific, targeted marketing through distributors such as Ingram or Overdrive, work with libraries for more events, etc. The old tried-and-true methods still work. They just take more effort.
THE RISE OF AI
I find the whole fear of AI (artificial intelligence) wildly overblown in terms of concerns of the impact on publishing. No publisher worth their salt is going to knowingly publish a book written by AI, and it’s still easy to tell when a story has been written by a computer and when it’s written by a human. No publisher will replace human authors with robots to save royalties. Readers are savvy, and they still identify crap whether it’s written by a human or an algorithm. If you think a computer can write a better story than you, the issue lies with your writing skills, not with the technology.
There are some definite reasons to use AI if you are an author or a publisher. One is to help you write marketing or book jacket copy. Considering the absolutely, genuinely terrible submission emails I receive, lots of people in the world could benefit from AI to help them write better sales pitches. In a world where so-called “book marketers” charge insane fees for services that rarely boost the sales of titles to any significant degree, you can use AI for at no cost to write marketing copy and have better results.
CHANGE IN READER INTEREST
This one is harder to deal with if you don’t write in multiple genres or make your titles available in multiple formats. 2024 has seen a decrease in sales in the nonfiction, children, and young adult markets vs. 2023. The biggest gains were in adult fiction, educational materials, and religious presses. Audiobooks continue to rise, while print sales represent about 78 percent of total book sales and ebook consumption has shown one of its bigger year-over-year increases. While North America represents 33 percent of the world reading market, that leaves 66 percent of the world most authors don’t reach by going solely through Amazon and Kindle Select.
Online book retailers have seen an increase in sales this year, while brick-and-mortar stores saw decreases, showing a preference by readers to shop online rather than in their local bookstore. One very interesting statistic is that ebooks only make up 31 percent of Amazon’s total digital book sales, while the other 69 percent are digital textbooks and other formats. And people wonder why the current CEO of Amazon says he wants out of the ebook business.
My advice to authors and publishers is the same as it has been for years now: Publish in every possible format you can and distribute your titles to every single ebookstore and print shop on the planet.
In the end, the only things that stand between you and a successful career as a writer are a) talent and b) knowledge. If you don’t know what’s happening in the industry you work in, you’ll never address head-on the issues that arise in the publishing world. Don’t get left behind by changes in the marketplace and the industry. The 1980s cartoon series G.I. Joe used to close episodes by saying “And knowing is half the battle.” This is very true if you want to become a winner in The Publishing Game.
Join the discussion! Send your questions to jhartman@mistimedia.com with TPG in your subject line.
WPN Vice President Jay A. Hartman has worked in the publishing industry for more than 30 years. For 13 years he served as the creator and editor-in-chief of Untreed Reads Publishing before the company was acquired in 2022. In 2023 he created Misti Media, a company dedicated to book publishing and author education.
