The currency markets have found a new victim, and it is the traditional foreign rights deal. As exchange-rate volatility reshapes the economics of international publishing, a quieter structure has been gaining ground at the rights tables: co-publishing,…
The rights tables at this season’s fairs and festivals have a new geography, and the map is drawn in screen money. Where translation rights once anchored the professional programme — the dependable, book-by-book commerce that justified the…
The newest fixture in the new bookshop is a shelf of old books. Across the independent sector, the second-hand section — banished decades ago as a brand contaminant, the physical admission that not every book in the…
Every few publishing seasons, a genre detonates loudly enough to be heard in the contract boilerplate, and the blast pattern this time is unmistakable. The romantasy wave — romantic fantasy, the hybrid genre that married the compulsive…
The first printing, that old act of faith, has become an act of arithmetic. Across the trade, initial print runs have tightened to levels that would have alarmed the industry a decade ago — and the publishers…
The slush pile has acquired a data layer. Across trade publishing, the acquisition meeting — that stubbornly human institution of taste, advocacy and hunch — is now routinely preceded, and increasingly informed, by reading analytics: the behavioural…
The audiobook rights auction, once the final chapter of a deal cycle, is increasingly its first. Across the rights market this season, audio rights for major titles have been selling before print rights are finalised — sometimes…
The book fair’s carbon footprint has become, in the space of three seasons, a line item that organisers can no longer consign to the sustainability report’s appendix. With institutional travel budgets tightening and corporate net-zero commitments reaching…
The bookshop without books — the concept that once sounded like a publishing joke — has quietly become a live experiment on both sides of the Atlantic. Dark bookstores, fulfilment-only operations that keep stock in warehouses and…
The audiobook royalty statement, once a line item authors skimmed and signed, has become the contract battleground of the season. As audio revenue climbs toward a quarter of trade income at many houses, the authors whose voices…
