RX, which owns the London Book Fair, has announced that Adam Ridgway, previously commercial director at RX, will take over as fair director. He replaces Gareth Rapley, who was in the position for two years.
At the recent Bologna Children's Book Fair, publishers from India's OM Books, France's Lizzie, and Spain's Grupo Planeta discussed how Indian diaspora populations and Francophone and Spanish speakers abroad have fueled sales growth.
The Bologna Children's Book Fair hosted several discussions focusing on the impact of AI on the publishing industry, ranging from those advocating for regulation of AI to others addressing how it can be harnessed to foster creativity and efficiency.
The 2024 winners of the seven categories of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, honoring excellence in Arabic-language publishing, come from the UAE, Tunisia, Germany, Egypt, and China. Each receives prize money of 750,000 UAE dirhams, approximately $204,000.
The third International Booksellers Conference will be held on April 27-28 in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. More than two hundred booksellers and publishing professionals from the region and around the world are expected to attend.
Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare' was the top-selling English-language print book in Canada in 2023, according to BookNet Canada. Total sales in the country topped C$1.1 billion last year.
Former Penguin Canada publisher Nicole Winstanley has been named president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Canada, succeeding Kevin Hanson, who left the company last month.
Next month’s Bologna Book Fair, the world’s largest rights fair devoted to children’s books, offers an extensive lineup of programming throughout the fair’s four days. Here are some of the highlights.
The Bologna Children’s Book Fair expands its global reach while remaining focused on its flagship program.
A extensive new study published by RISE Bookselling and the European and International Booksellers Federation covers six areas where bookstores can implement changes to best mitigate their impact on the environment.
Two panels at the London Book Fair on Thursday emphasized the ongoing challenge of giving opportunities to women and working-class people to write, publish, and advance themselves in the publishing and creative industries.
The European and International Booksellers Federation, International Authors Forum, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, International Publishers Association, and PEN International jointly released a statement on March 14 in response to "the increasing efforts to restrict books."
Panelists from Audible, Bookwire, Penguin Random House, Spotify, and Storytel discussed the state of audiobooks, noting that sales continue to boom and there are new opportunities arising from advancing technology and business models.
Fairgoers feel positive that this year's fair is, if not the biggest, then easily one of the biggest fairs since Covid, and definitely the most exciting—and shared a couple of contenders for the semi-mythical title of "book of the show."
You made it! Welcome to Day Three of the London Book Fair. There are still plenty of panels on the docket for today at this year's Seminar Program. Here are our recommendations.
They can generate (iterative) images. They can generate (iterative) text. But how will large language models change translation—especially for literary translators? A panel at the London Book Fair suggested some possible outcomes.
Several key European markets are seeing rapid growth in English-language book sales, threatening to cannibalize sales of translated editions published in their native markets, as the TikTok generation is increasingly happy to read in English.
On the first morning of the London Book Fair, the heads of the International Publishing Association, the Federation of European Publishers, the Association of American Publishers, and the African Publishers Network gathered to discuss, and debate, the biggest issues facing the publishing industry today.
Welcome to Day Two of the London Book Fair. If you still need to decide between the more than 150 panels and discussions available on tap for this year's Seminar Program, we've got some suggestions.
A busy first day at Olympia London has found publishers abuzz with business, cautiously optimistic about AI, and dismayed over world events.
The U.K.-based nonprofit Book Aid International has partnered with PEN Ukraine, English PEN, and PEN International, one year after an initial meeting at the London Book Fair set the collaboration into motion. In addition to last year's 25,000-book shipment, 15,000 books will be donated this year to support war-affected libraries in Ukraine.
In the opening keynote session of this year's London Book Fair, Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, extolled the virtues of the company’s new status as "the largest independent publisher of adult and children’s trade books in the United States."
Even after two decades in the book business, Georgina Moore, deputy managing director of Midas, confesses she had much to learn from her own experience publishing and publicizing her debut novel on both sides of the Atlantic.
Just in time for the London Book Fair, Hello Sunshine has set up shop in the Sheraton Grand London Park Lane, a five-star Art Deco hotel just down the way from Buckingham Palace, where a new pop-up library and bookstore, Reese’s Book Club x Sheraton Lobby Library, has been installed.
Ziggy Hanaor, the founder of U.K. children's publishing house Cicada Books, offers her top tips for breaking into the American market, including asking for publicity help, using a single ISBN, and getting books to market six months before publication.
Welcome to Day One of the London Book Fair. If you need to choose which of the more than 150 panels and discussions offered by this year's Seminar Program you'll be checking out today, look no further.
The online rights database MatchWHALE, founded by Beatrice Lin, is set to add many more Korean titles to libraries and bookstores around the world.
With more than two decades of experience working in scholarly publishing, Amy Beisel has carved out a niche as a coach for publishers and their employees, helping them achieve their goals and undertake positive changes.
Amid a dispute over contract terms, Amazon has delisted e-book titles distributed by German digital distribution company Bookwire. While the exact number of delisted titles is not known, Bookwire distributes more than a million titles for publishers.
Sage Policy Profiles, a new web-based tool from Sage and Overton, lets researchers uncover and understand the influence their evidence-based research may have on public policy by identifying citations of their work. Sage associate v-p of corporate communications Camille Gamboa hopes that the tool will help scholars "better recognize the real-world impact of research."
New research from Europe on book procurement for libraries and schools finds that the process focuses too much on the cheapest prices rather than community impact, and suggests how it can be more fair—especially for small bookstores.
Kevin Hanson, president and publisher of S&S Canada, has left the company. Hanson's departure is the latest in a series of personnel changes since the acquisition of S&S by KKR last fall.
Inkitt, a German data-driven publishing company, is funding an expansion into AI-generated and personalized fiction, audiobooks, video, and games. It has raised more than $117 million total.
BookScan analyst Kristen McLean predicts romantasy should stay hot, but sees mixed signs for adult nonfiction.
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward signs a new three-book deal with Scribner, Bantam takes civil rights lawyer Ben Crump's fiction debut, and more.
A selection of the more than 150 panels and discussions featured on tap in the fair’s Seminar Program, including sessions on AI, audiobooks, BookTok, DEI, and the Freedom to read and publish.
British publishers discuss how transatlantic collaboration can boost books’ performance and the work it takes to maintain mutually beneficial relationships.
U.S. agents expect romantasy to be hot—and debut fiction not.
The London Book Fair embraces its new status as the first major publishing event of the year.
After its parent company was sold to private equity, the British subsidiary carries on with confidence, says CEO Ian Chapman.
Watkins Media’s head of marketing says that its unique titles, which span many categories—including the occult several countercultures—are finding success in the U.S.
At 50, the U.K. press is growing its list and expanding into new formats—all while keeping a sharp focus on libraries, which publisher Joanne Grant says "have always been our main market."
The managing director of Usborne Publishing reflects on the legacy of her father, the company’s founder, who died last year.
Dan Conway, the CEO of the U.K.’s Publishers Association, says that the U.S. and British industries have shared interests—even as they compete for rights and market share.
The London indie press started with a focus on nonfiction, but in the past decade has published three Booker Award–winning novels.
Katie Arora, the U.S. sales and marketing director for Michael O'Mara Books, describes the company’s strategies for engaging the U.S. market—including finding a niche in books on the royal family.
An independent publisher considers the challenges and opportunities for small presses in her home market.
At this year’s London Book Fair, U.S. agents will be talking up works by H.S. Cross, Laila Lalami, Casey McQuiston, Richard Price, Riley Sager, and others.
The managing director of Head of Zeus argues that the U.S. market presents a big opportunity for U.K. publishers, and is worth the effort to break through.
Editor Alex DiFrancesco explains the strategy Jessica Kingsley Publishers employs when publishing LGBTQ books on both sides of the Atlantic.
The managing director of the publishing startup describes her disruptive agenda and promises a list of "strong, game-changing voices."
A U.S.-based publishing exec for John Murray Press offers five pieces of advice on working with colleagues in the U.K.
The CEO of DK U.K. explains how the shift to remote work provided a vital connection to the U.S. and introduced new practices that helped grow sales by 20%.
The British illustrated reference publisher continues to reinvent itself a half-century on—and has used its anniversary milestone as a catalyst for examining new opportunities.
Martin Goodman, publisher of Barbican Press, describes his move from the U.K. to Los Angeles and the challenges of breaking into the U.S. market with transgressive and radical books.
Audiobook companies Storytel and BookBeat reported growth in sales and subscribers in 2023. Storytel, the larger of the two and parent company of Audiobooks.com, continues to struggle to improve its bottom line following a restructuring in 2022.
Thanks to the efforts of advocates, publishers, and grassroots initiatives, Indigenous representation in children's literature has expanded and evolved.
HarperVia will publish 'The Last Dream,' the debut collection of short stories by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne, on September 24, in print and audiobook formats.
Sales for the Italian book market reached €1.697 billion at cover price in 2023, a 0.8% increase from 2022. The increase is comparable to those in France and the U.K., which saw 1% growth for the year, and behind Germany's 2.9%.
Alex Correa, CEO of Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish-language books in the U.S., says the demand for Spanish-language titles continues to grow, noting Lectorum’s 2023 print sales were up 7% over 2022.
The Association of Canadian Publishers and l’Association nationale des éditeurs de livres have launched an online campaign urging the Canadian government to fulfill its promise to increase the Canada Book Fund.
Sally Rooney and Richard Osman were among the winners at this year's Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards, which celebrate titles that passed sales landmarks in print in the U.K. Nielsen reported that 199 million print books were sold in the U.K. in 2023.
The fair, to be held March 12–14, will have a dedicated space for audiobook exhibitors and discussions focused on AI, social media marketing, and translation. The National Literacy Trust and Book Aid International are its Charities of the Year.
German book trade magazine ‘Buchreport’ has ceased publication indefinitely. The ‘Spiegel’ bestseller lists, for which the magazine was responsible, will now be published by the trade magazine ‘BuchMarkt.’
With 'Buchreport' parent company Harenberg Kommunikation filing for bankruptcy and putting the magazine up for sale, some fear that the 'Spiegel' bestseller lists compiled by 'Buchreport' may disappear.
The annual Spanish-language fair attracted 857,000 attendees from around the world.
Sourcebooks and Penguin Random House North Asia have launched Callisto China, a new publishing house that will publish Chinese-language translations of Callisto titles in China.
The Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair kicked off on November 17 as the Chinese children's book market looks to put an end to slowing sales.
On February 1, Kwame Scott Fraser will step down from his role as president and publisher of Toronto-based independent publishing house Dundurn Press to focus on book acquisitions. The company has begun a search for his successor.
Officials expect 45,000 attendees at the fair, including a large number of international publishers; the fair will run November 17–19.
The Publishers Conference, which precedes the Sharjah International Book Fair, was held in the U.A.E. last weekend, and attracted more than 1,000 delegates from 106 countries.
The 2024 London Book Fair Author of the Day program will feature mystery writer Richard Osman, novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, Waterstones Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, and illustrator Flavia Z. Drago.
In Mexico, where there are 68 Indigenous languages but only 5.4% of the population speaks any of them, publishing books in such tongues as Seria and Zapotec pose challenges for publishers.
The cofounder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival says the event focuses on reaching a large but underserved audience.
The founding editor of Words Without Borders discusses some of the most exciting work being published in Spanish today.
As demand for Spanish-language books grows, publishers are finding diversity in Latin American markets.
Juan Milà is editorial director of HarperVia, an imprint at the HarperOne Group in the U.S., dedicated to publishing international voices. We spoke with Milà about the latest literary trends in the U.S., and around the world.
The most important book fair covering the Spanish language takes place November 25–December 3 in Mexico.
After another successful year of creating new relationships and building on long-term collaborations, Sharjah—the crown in the Arab book world—is back with the 42nd annual edition of one of the book world’s most anticipated events of the year.
How do booksellers keep up with the latest trends in a fast-changing world? It used to be simple: just read the newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. But now, with the rise of social media, blogs and podcasts, booksellers need to be more alert and adaptable than ever.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the Arabic book market is poised for a remarkable transformation driven by the escalating influence of AI, which I believe holds the promise of revolutionizing the reading experience for Arabic audiences by offering highly personalized book recommendations based on individual preferences, past choices, and real-time feedback.
Since 2011, the Sharjah Book Authority has been offering grant support for publishers looking to acquire rights while at the Sharjah International Book Fair.
The conference begins on November 7 with three preconference workshops. Entrepreneurs Need Libraries: How to Develop Your Entrepreneur Center will be collaboratively taught by librarians from the U.S. and Egypt.
In May this year, in a significant move aimed at promoting literature and the written word, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, announced the establishment of a dedicated Board of Directors for the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA). This decision reaffirmed Sharjah’s commitment to fostering a culture of reading and enhancing the emirate’s position as a global hub for the publishing industry.
The second Sharjah Booksellers Conference the U.A.E., held May 1-2, attracted some 200 booksellers and another 100 publishing professionals from across the world.
Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi has become the de facto ambassador for Arabic publishing around the world. As the recently appointed Chairperson of the new board of directors of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, and immediate past president of the International Publishers Association, she is in the leading position to help shape how the world engages with the Arabic language and literature, both at home in the U.A.E. and abroad. She spoke with us prior to this year’s fair.
Núria Cabutí is the CEO of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the largest Spanish-language publishing house in the world, which is based in Barcelona.
In September 2022 the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) announced two significant new awards for publishing rights professionals, to be presented each year at the Sharjah Publishers Conference. In 2022, Mauro Spagnol of Books-Everywhere was the inaugural winner of the category for an independent. rights professional.
Author MA Bennett is half Venetian, born in England and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She studied history at Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialised in the study of Shakespeare’s plays as a historical source, before going on to study art. She has since worked as an illustrator, an actress, and a film reviewer. She has also designed tour visuals for rock bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones.
Simon & Schuster (S&S) has recently been acquired by private equity firm KKR, ending a long process for S&S’s current owner Paramount who put the publishing company on the market back in 2020, with an acquisition bid by Penguin Random House blocked by U.S. courts late last year. Despite the long uncertainty surrounding their ownership, S&S has reported some extremely buoyant results over the past few years, with double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2023. In the U.K., S&S was named Publisher of the Year at the 2023 British Book Awards for the second year running and Children’s Publisher of the Year. Prior to the book fair we asked Ian Chapman, Chief Executive and Publisher, Simon & Schuster U.K. and International, how things are going.
Felix Francis is a British crime writer and Dick Francis’ younger son. He was a science teacher before quitting to look after his father’s literary affairs.
Elizabeth S. Moore has worked as a journalist since she won the Decanter Young Wine Writer of the Year at seventeen, writing columns and articles on restaurants, politics, South Africa and all things foodie.
Nielsen BookData, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic data and retail sales monitoring for print books, has partnered with the Emirates Publishers Association (EPA) to digitize title listings and boost the growth of the U.A.E.’s publishing industry.
This year’s winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s (ABC) International Excellence Award will be announced on October 30 at the 2023 Sharjah Publishers Conference, the first time that this prestigious award has been presented in the Middle East.
A new project set up to promote the translation and distribution of books from the Arabic-speaking literary scene into Europe, LEILA is funded by a European Union program and designed and implemented by iReMMO and ATLAS in France, BOZAR in Belgium and Federation Tunisienne des Editeurs in Tunisia.
Lightning Source Sharjah, the print-on-demand joint venture between Ingram Content Group’s (Ingram) Lightning Source LLC and the Sharjah Book Authority, is making more books accessible in the Arabic language and changing the way books are distributed in the Middle East.
A primary goal of the NYU Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts is teaching our students to understand the globalization of publishing and the needs and challenges of colleagues around the world.
A key objective and strength of the Sharjah Publishers Conference has been to connect publishers from the global publishing community with the African publishing world. This year’s African presence has increased again, with participants from 18 African countries (excluding North Africa/Arab countries), many of them Francophone, including Benin, Burkino Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius and Zaire for the first time, along with many returning participants.
Despite the state of world affairs, business appeared brisk, and the fair seemed to continue to bounce back from the pandemic, reporting 105,000 trade visitors from 130 countries.
Markus Dohle is the former global CEO of Penguin Random House. This past summer he was announced as one of the international members of the new board of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA).
RX, which owns the London Book Fair, has announced that Adam Ridgway, previously commercial director at RX, will take over as fair director. He replaces Gareth Rapley, who was in the position for two years.
At the recent Bologna Children's Book Fair, publishers from India's OM Books, France's Lizzie, and Spain's Grupo Planeta discussed how Indian diaspora populations and Francophone and Spanish speakers abroad have fueled sales growth.
The Bologna Children's Book Fair hosted several discussions focusing on the impact of AI on the publishing industry, ranging from those advocating for regulation of AI to others addressing how it can be harnessed to foster creativity and efficiency.
The 2024 winners of the seven categories of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, honoring excellence in Arabic-language publishing, come from the UAE, Tunisia, Germany, Egypt, and China. Each receives prize money of 750,000 UAE dirhams, approximately $204,000.
The third International Booksellers Conference will be held on April 27-28 in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. More than two hundred booksellers and publishing professionals from the region and around the world are expected to attend.
Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare' was the top-selling English-language print book in Canada in 2023, according to BookNet Canada. Total sales in the country topped C$1.1 billion last year.
Former Penguin Canada publisher Nicole Winstanley has been named president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Canada, succeeding Kevin Hanson, who left the company last month.
Next month’s Bologna Book Fair, the world’s largest rights fair devoted to children’s books, offers an extensive lineup of programming throughout the fair’s four days. Here are some of the highlights.
The Bologna Children’s Book Fair expands its global reach while remaining focused on its flagship program.
A extensive new study published by RISE Bookselling and the European and International Booksellers Federation covers six areas where bookstores can implement changes to best mitigate their impact on the environment.
Two panels at the London Book Fair on Thursday emphasized the ongoing challenge of giving opportunities to women and working-class people to write, publish, and advance themselves in the publishing and creative industries.
The European and International Booksellers Federation, International Authors Forum, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, International Publishers Association, and PEN International jointly released a statement on March 14 in response to "the increasing efforts to restrict books."
Panelists from Audible, Bookwire, Penguin Random House, Spotify, and Storytel discussed the state of audiobooks, noting that sales continue to boom and there are new opportunities arising from advancing technology and business models.
Fairgoers feel positive that this year's fair is, if not the biggest, then easily one of the biggest fairs since Covid, and definitely the most exciting—and shared a couple of contenders for the semi-mythical title of "book of the show."
You made it! Welcome to Day Three of the London Book Fair. There are still plenty of panels on the docket for today at this year's Seminar Program. Here are our recommendations.
They can generate (iterative) images. They can generate (iterative) text. But how will large language models change translation—especially for literary translators? A panel at the London Book Fair suggested some possible outcomes.
Several key European markets are seeing rapid growth in English-language book sales, threatening to cannibalize sales of translated editions published in their native markets, as the TikTok generation is increasingly happy to read in English.
On the first morning of the London Book Fair, the heads of the International Publishing Association, the Federation of European Publishers, the Association of American Publishers, and the African Publishers Network gathered to discuss, and debate, the biggest issues facing the publishing industry today.
Welcome to Day Two of the London Book Fair. If you still need to decide between the more than 150 panels and discussions available on tap for this year's Seminar Program, we've got some suggestions.
A busy first day at Olympia London has found publishers abuzz with business, cautiously optimistic about AI, and dismayed over world events.
The U.K.-based nonprofit Book Aid International has partnered with PEN Ukraine, English PEN, and PEN International, one year after an initial meeting at the London Book Fair set the collaboration into motion. In addition to last year's 25,000-book shipment, 15,000 books will be donated this year to support war-affected libraries in Ukraine.
In the opening keynote session of this year's London Book Fair, Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, extolled the virtues of the company’s new status as "the largest independent publisher of adult and children’s trade books in the United States."
Even after two decades in the book business, Georgina Moore, deputy managing director of Midas, confesses she had much to learn from her own experience publishing and publicizing her debut novel on both sides of the Atlantic.
Just in time for the London Book Fair, Hello Sunshine has set up shop in the Sheraton Grand London Park Lane, a five-star Art Deco hotel just down the way from Buckingham Palace, where a new pop-up library and bookstore, Reese’s Book Club x Sheraton Lobby Library, has been installed.
Ziggy Hanaor, the founder of U.K. children's publishing house Cicada Books, offers her top tips for breaking into the American market, including asking for publicity help, using a single ISBN, and getting books to market six months before publication.
Welcome to Day One of the London Book Fair. If you need to choose which of the more than 150 panels and discussions offered by this year's Seminar Program you'll be checking out today, look no further.
The online rights database MatchWHALE, founded by Beatrice Lin, is set to add many more Korean titles to libraries and bookstores around the world.
With more than two decades of experience working in scholarly publishing, Amy Beisel has carved out a niche as a coach for publishers and their employees, helping them achieve their goals and undertake positive changes.
Amid a dispute over contract terms, Amazon has delisted e-book titles distributed by German digital distribution company Bookwire. While the exact number of delisted titles is not known, Bookwire distributes more than a million titles for publishers.
Sage Policy Profiles, a new web-based tool from Sage and Overton, lets researchers uncover and understand the influence their evidence-based research may have on public policy by identifying citations of their work. Sage associate v-p of corporate communications Camille Gamboa hopes that the tool will help scholars "better recognize the real-world impact of research."
New research from Europe on book procurement for libraries and schools finds that the process focuses too much on the cheapest prices rather than community impact, and suggests how it can be more fair—especially for small bookstores.
Kevin Hanson, president and publisher of S&S Canada, has left the company. Hanson's departure is the latest in a series of personnel changes since the acquisition of S&S by KKR last fall.
Inkitt, a German data-driven publishing company, is funding an expansion into AI-generated and personalized fiction, audiobooks, video, and games. It has raised more than $117 million total.
BookScan analyst Kristen McLean predicts romantasy should stay hot, but sees mixed signs for adult nonfiction.
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward signs a new three-book deal with Scribner, Bantam takes civil rights lawyer Ben Crump's fiction debut, and more.
A selection of the more than 150 panels and discussions featured on tap in the fair’s Seminar Program, including sessions on AI, audiobooks, BookTok, DEI, and the Freedom to read and publish.
British publishers discuss how transatlantic collaboration can boost books’ performance and the work it takes to maintain mutually beneficial relationships.
U.S. agents expect romantasy to be hot—and debut fiction not.
The London Book Fair embraces its new status as the first major publishing event of the year.
After its parent company was sold to private equity, the British subsidiary carries on with confidence, says CEO Ian Chapman.
Watkins Media’s head of marketing says that its unique titles, which span many categories—including the occult several countercultures—are finding success in the U.S.
At 50, the U.K. press is growing its list and expanding into new formats—all while keeping a sharp focus on libraries, which publisher Joanne Grant says "have always been our main market."
The managing director of Usborne Publishing reflects on the legacy of her father, the company’s founder, who died last year.
Dan Conway, the CEO of the U.K.’s Publishers Association, says that the U.S. and British industries have shared interests—even as they compete for rights and market share.
The London indie press started with a focus on nonfiction, but in the past decade has published three Booker Award–winning novels.
Katie Arora, the U.S. sales and marketing director for Michael O'Mara Books, describes the company’s strategies for engaging the U.S. market—including finding a niche in books on the royal family.
An independent publisher considers the challenges and opportunities for small presses in her home market.
At this year’s London Book Fair, U.S. agents will be talking up works by H.S. Cross, Laila Lalami, Casey McQuiston, Richard Price, Riley Sager, and others.
The managing director of Head of Zeus argues that the U.S. market presents a big opportunity for U.K. publishers, and is worth the effort to break through.
Editor Alex DiFrancesco explains the strategy Jessica Kingsley Publishers employs when publishing LGBTQ books on both sides of the Atlantic.
The managing director of the publishing startup describes her disruptive agenda and promises a list of "strong, game-changing voices."
A U.S.-based publishing exec for John Murray Press offers five pieces of advice on working with colleagues in the U.K.
The CEO of DK U.K. explains how the shift to remote work provided a vital connection to the U.S. and introduced new practices that helped grow sales by 20%.
The British illustrated reference publisher continues to reinvent itself a half-century on—and has used its anniversary milestone as a catalyst for examining new opportunities.
Martin Goodman, publisher of Barbican Press, describes his move from the U.K. to Los Angeles and the challenges of breaking into the U.S. market with transgressive and radical books.
Audiobook companies Storytel and BookBeat reported growth in sales and subscribers in 2023. Storytel, the larger of the two and parent company of Audiobooks.com, continues to struggle to improve its bottom line following a restructuring in 2022.
Thanks to the efforts of advocates, publishers, and grassroots initiatives, Indigenous representation in children's literature has expanded and evolved.
HarperVia will publish 'The Last Dream,' the debut collection of short stories by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne, on September 24, in print and audiobook formats.
Sales for the Italian book market reached €1.697 billion at cover price in 2023, a 0.8% increase from 2022. The increase is comparable to those in France and the U.K., which saw 1% growth for the year, and behind Germany's 2.9%.
Alex Correa, CEO of Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish-language books in the U.S., says the demand for Spanish-language titles continues to grow, noting Lectorum’s 2023 print sales were up 7% over 2022.
The Association of Canadian Publishers and l’Association nationale des éditeurs de livres have launched an online campaign urging the Canadian government to fulfill its promise to increase the Canada Book Fund.
Sally Rooney and Richard Osman were among the winners at this year's Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards, which celebrate titles that passed sales landmarks in print in the U.K. Nielsen reported that 199 million print books were sold in the U.K. in 2023.
The fair, to be held March 12–14, will have a dedicated space for audiobook exhibitors and discussions focused on AI, social media marketing, and translation. The National Literacy Trust and Book Aid International are its Charities of the Year.
German book trade magazine ‘Buchreport’ has ceased publication indefinitely. The ‘Spiegel’ bestseller lists, for which the magazine was responsible, will now be published by the trade magazine ‘BuchMarkt.’
With 'Buchreport' parent company Harenberg Kommunikation filing for bankruptcy and putting the magazine up for sale, some fear that the 'Spiegel' bestseller lists compiled by 'Buchreport' may disappear.
The annual Spanish-language fair attracted 857,000 attendees from around the world.
Sourcebooks and Penguin Random House North Asia have launched Callisto China, a new publishing house that will publish Chinese-language translations of Callisto titles in China.
The Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair kicked off on November 17 as the Chinese children's book market looks to put an end to slowing sales.
On February 1, Kwame Scott Fraser will step down from his role as president and publisher of Toronto-based independent publishing house Dundurn Press to focus on book acquisitions. The company has begun a search for his successor.
Officials expect 45,000 attendees at the fair, including a large number of international publishers; the fair will run November 17–19.
The Publishers Conference, which precedes the Sharjah International Book Fair, was held in the U.A.E. last weekend, and attracted more than 1,000 delegates from 106 countries.
The 2024 London Book Fair Author of the Day program will feature mystery writer Richard Osman, novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, Waterstones Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, and illustrator Flavia Z. Drago.
In Mexico, where there are 68 Indigenous languages but only 5.4% of the population speaks any of them, publishing books in such tongues as Seria and Zapotec pose challenges for publishers.
The cofounder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival says the event focuses on reaching a large but underserved audience.
The founding editor of Words Without Borders discusses some of the most exciting work being published in Spanish today.
As demand for Spanish-language books grows, publishers are finding diversity in Latin American markets.
Juan Milà is editorial director of HarperVia, an imprint at the HarperOne Group in the U.S., dedicated to publishing international voices. We spoke with Milà about the latest literary trends in the U.S., and around the world.
The most important book fair covering the Spanish language takes place November 25–December 3 in Mexico.
After another successful year of creating new relationships and building on long-term collaborations, Sharjah—the crown in the Arab book world—is back with the 42nd annual edition of one of the book world’s most anticipated events of the year.
How do booksellers keep up with the latest trends in a fast-changing world? It used to be simple: just read the newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. But now, with the rise of social media, blogs and podcasts, booksellers need to be more alert and adaptable than ever.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the Arabic book market is poised for a remarkable transformation driven by the escalating influence of AI, which I believe holds the promise of revolutionizing the reading experience for Arabic audiences by offering highly personalized book recommendations based on individual preferences, past choices, and real-time feedback.
Since 2011, the Sharjah Book Authority has been offering grant support for publishers looking to acquire rights while at the Sharjah International Book Fair.
The conference begins on November 7 with three preconference workshops. Entrepreneurs Need Libraries: How to Develop Your Entrepreneur Center will be collaboratively taught by librarians from the U.S. and Egypt.
In May this year, in a significant move aimed at promoting literature and the written word, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, announced the establishment of a dedicated Board of Directors for the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA). This decision reaffirmed Sharjah’s commitment to fostering a culture of reading and enhancing the emirate’s position as a global hub for the publishing industry.
The second Sharjah Booksellers Conference the U.A.E., held May 1-2, attracted some 200 booksellers and another 100 publishing professionals from across the world.
Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi has become the de facto ambassador for Arabic publishing around the world. As the recently appointed Chairperson of the new board of directors of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, and immediate past president of the International Publishers Association, she is in the leading position to help shape how the world engages with the Arabic language and literature, both at home in the U.A.E. and abroad. She spoke with us prior to this year’s fair.
Núria Cabutí is the CEO of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the largest Spanish-language publishing house in the world, which is based in Barcelona.
In September 2022 the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) announced two significant new awards for publishing rights professionals, to be presented each year at the Sharjah Publishers Conference. In 2022, Mauro Spagnol of Books-Everywhere was the inaugural winner of the category for an independent. rights professional.
Author MA Bennett is half Venetian, born in England and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She studied history at Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialised in the study of Shakespeare’s plays as a historical source, before going on to study art. She has since worked as an illustrator, an actress, and a film reviewer. She has also designed tour visuals for rock bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones.
Simon & Schuster (S&S) has recently been acquired by private equity firm KKR, ending a long process for S&S’s current owner Paramount who put the publishing company on the market back in 2020, with an acquisition bid by Penguin Random House blocked by U.S. courts late last year. Despite the long uncertainty surrounding their ownership, S&S has reported some extremely buoyant results over the past few years, with double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2023. In the U.K., S&S was named Publisher of the Year at the 2023 British Book Awards for the second year running and Children’s Publisher of the Year. Prior to the book fair we asked Ian Chapman, Chief Executive and Publisher, Simon & Schuster U.K. and International, how things are going.
Felix Francis is a British crime writer and Dick Francis’ younger son. He was a science teacher before quitting to look after his father’s literary affairs.
Elizabeth S. Moore has worked as a journalist since she won the Decanter Young Wine Writer of the Year at seventeen, writing columns and articles on restaurants, politics, South Africa and all things foodie.
Nielsen BookData, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic data and retail sales monitoring for print books, has partnered with the Emirates Publishers Association (EPA) to digitize title listings and boost the growth of the U.A.E.’s publishing industry.
This year’s winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s (ABC) International Excellence Award will be announced on October 30 at the 2023 Sharjah Publishers Conference, the first time that this prestigious award has been presented in the Middle East.
A new project set up to promote the translation and distribution of books from the Arabic-speaking literary scene into Europe, LEILA is funded by a European Union program and designed and implemented by iReMMO and ATLAS in France, BOZAR in Belgium and Federation Tunisienne des Editeurs in Tunisia.
Lightning Source Sharjah, the print-on-demand joint venture between Ingram Content Group’s (Ingram) Lightning Source LLC and the Sharjah Book Authority, is making more books accessible in the Arabic language and changing the way books are distributed in the Middle East.
A primary goal of the NYU Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts is teaching our students to understand the globalization of publishing and the needs and challenges of colleagues around the world.
A key objective and strength of the Sharjah Publishers Conference has been to connect publishers from the global publishing community with the African publishing world. This year’s African presence has increased again, with participants from 18 African countries (excluding North Africa/Arab countries), many of them Francophone, including Benin, Burkino Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius and Zaire for the first time, along with many returning participants.
Despite the state of world affairs, business appeared brisk, and the fair seemed to continue to bounce back from the pandemic, reporting 105,000 trade visitors from 130 countries.
Markus Dohle is the former global CEO of Penguin Random House. This past summer he was announced as one of the international members of the new board of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA).
RX, which owns the London Book Fair, has announced that Adam Ridgway, previously commercial director at RX, will take over as fair director. He replaces Gareth Rapley, who was in the position for two years.
At the recent Bologna Children's Book Fair, publishers from India's OM Books, France's Lizzie, and Spain's Grupo Planeta discussed how Indian diaspora populations and Francophone and Spanish speakers abroad have fueled sales growth.
The Bologna Children's Book Fair hosted several discussions focusing on the impact of AI on the publishing industry, ranging from those advocating for regulation of AI to others addressing how it can be harnessed to foster creativity and efficiency.
The 2024 winners of the seven categories of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, honoring excellence in Arabic-language publishing, come from the UAE, Tunisia, Germany, Egypt, and China. Each receives prize money of 750,000 UAE dirhams, approximately $204,000.
The third International Booksellers Conference will be held on April 27-28 in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. More than two hundred booksellers and publishing professionals from the region and around the world are expected to attend.
Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare' was the top-selling English-language print book in Canada in 2023, according to BookNet Canada. Total sales in the country topped C$1.1 billion last year.
Former Penguin Canada publisher Nicole Winstanley has been named president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Canada, succeeding Kevin Hanson, who left the company last month.
Next month’s Bologna Book Fair, the world’s largest rights fair devoted to children’s books, offers an extensive lineup of programming throughout the fair’s four days. Here are some of the highlights.
The Bologna Children’s Book Fair expands its global reach while remaining focused on its flagship program.
A extensive new study published by RISE Bookselling and the European and International Booksellers Federation covers six areas where bookstores can implement changes to best mitigate their impact on the environment.
Two panels at the London Book Fair on Thursday emphasized the ongoing challenge of giving opportunities to women and working-class people to write, publish, and advance themselves in the publishing and creative industries.
The European and International Booksellers Federation, International Authors Forum, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, International Publishers Association, and PEN International jointly released a statement on March 14 in response to "the increasing efforts to restrict books."
Panelists from Audible, Bookwire, Penguin Random House, Spotify, and Storytel discussed the state of audiobooks, noting that sales continue to boom and there are new opportunities arising from advancing technology and business models.
Fairgoers feel positive that this year's fair is, if not the biggest, then easily one of the biggest fairs since Covid, and definitely the most exciting—and shared a couple of contenders for the semi-mythical title of "book of the show."
You made it! Welcome to Day Three of the London Book Fair. There are still plenty of panels on the docket for today at this year's Seminar Program. Here are our recommendations.
They can generate (iterative) images. They can generate (iterative) text. But how will large language models change translation—especially for literary translators? A panel at the London Book Fair suggested some possible outcomes.
Several key European markets are seeing rapid growth in English-language book sales, threatening to cannibalize sales of translated editions published in their native markets, as the TikTok generation is increasingly happy to read in English.
On the first morning of the London Book Fair, the heads of the International Publishing Association, the Federation of European Publishers, the Association of American Publishers, and the African Publishers Network gathered to discuss, and debate, the biggest issues facing the publishing industry today.
Welcome to Day Two of the London Book Fair. If you still need to decide between the more than 150 panels and discussions available on tap for this year's Seminar Program, we've got some suggestions.
A busy first day at Olympia London has found publishers abuzz with business, cautiously optimistic about AI, and dismayed over world events.
The U.K.-based nonprofit Book Aid International has partnered with PEN Ukraine, English PEN, and PEN International, one year after an initial meeting at the London Book Fair set the collaboration into motion. In addition to last year's 25,000-book shipment, 15,000 books will be donated this year to support war-affected libraries in Ukraine.
In the opening keynote session of this year's London Book Fair, Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, extolled the virtues of the company’s new status as "the largest independent publisher of adult and children’s trade books in the United States."
Even after two decades in the book business, Georgina Moore, deputy managing director of Midas, confesses she had much to learn from her own experience publishing and publicizing her debut novel on both sides of the Atlantic.
Just in time for the London Book Fair, Hello Sunshine has set up shop in the Sheraton Grand London Park Lane, a five-star Art Deco hotel just down the way from Buckingham Palace, where a new pop-up library and bookstore, Reese’s Book Club x Sheraton Lobby Library, has been installed.
Ziggy Hanaor, the founder of U.K. children's publishing house Cicada Books, offers her top tips for breaking into the American market, including asking for publicity help, using a single ISBN, and getting books to market six months before publication.
Welcome to Day One of the London Book Fair. If you need to choose which of the more than 150 panels and discussions offered by this year's Seminar Program you'll be checking out today, look no further.
The online rights database MatchWHALE, founded by Beatrice Lin, is set to add many more Korean titles to libraries and bookstores around the world.
With more than two decades of experience working in scholarly publishing, Amy Beisel has carved out a niche as a coach for publishers and their employees, helping them achieve their goals and undertake positive changes.
Amid a dispute over contract terms, Amazon has delisted e-book titles distributed by German digital distribution company Bookwire. While the exact number of delisted titles is not known, Bookwire distributes more than a million titles for publishers.
Sage Policy Profiles, a new web-based tool from Sage and Overton, lets researchers uncover and understand the influence their evidence-based research may have on public policy by identifying citations of their work. Sage associate v-p of corporate communications Camille Gamboa hopes that the tool will help scholars "better recognize the real-world impact of research."
New research from Europe on book procurement for libraries and schools finds that the process focuses too much on the cheapest prices rather than community impact, and suggests how it can be more fair—especially for small bookstores.
Kevin Hanson, president and publisher of S&S Canada, has left the company. Hanson's departure is the latest in a series of personnel changes since the acquisition of S&S by KKR last fall.
Inkitt, a German data-driven publishing company, is funding an expansion into AI-generated and personalized fiction, audiobooks, video, and games. It has raised more than $117 million total.
BookScan analyst Kristen McLean predicts romantasy should stay hot, but sees mixed signs for adult nonfiction.
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward signs a new three-book deal with Scribner, Bantam takes civil rights lawyer Ben Crump's fiction debut, and more.
A selection of the more than 150 panels and discussions featured on tap in the fair’s Seminar Program, including sessions on AI, audiobooks, BookTok, DEI, and the Freedom to read and publish.
British publishers discuss how transatlantic collaboration can boost books’ performance and the work it takes to maintain mutually beneficial relationships.
U.S. agents expect romantasy to be hot—and debut fiction not.
The London Book Fair embraces its new status as the first major publishing event of the year.
After its parent company was sold to private equity, the British subsidiary carries on with confidence, says CEO Ian Chapman.
Watkins Media’s head of marketing says that its unique titles, which span many categories—including the occult several countercultures—are finding success in the U.S.
At 50, the U.K. press is growing its list and expanding into new formats—all while keeping a sharp focus on libraries, which publisher Joanne Grant says "have always been our main market."
The managing director of Usborne Publishing reflects on the legacy of her father, the company’s founder, who died last year.
Dan Conway, the CEO of the U.K.’s Publishers Association, says that the U.S. and British industries have shared interests—even as they compete for rights and market share.
The London indie press started with a focus on nonfiction, but in the past decade has published three Booker Award–winning novels.
Katie Arora, the U.S. sales and marketing director for Michael O'Mara Books, describes the company’s strategies for engaging the U.S. market—including finding a niche in books on the royal family.
An independent publisher considers the challenges and opportunities for small presses in her home market.
At this year’s London Book Fair, U.S. agents will be talking up works by H.S. Cross, Laila Lalami, Casey McQuiston, Richard Price, Riley Sager, and others.
The managing director of Head of Zeus argues that the U.S. market presents a big opportunity for U.K. publishers, and is worth the effort to break through.
Editor Alex DiFrancesco explains the strategy Jessica Kingsley Publishers employs when publishing LGBTQ books on both sides of the Atlantic.
The managing director of the publishing startup describes her disruptive agenda and promises a list of "strong, game-changing voices."
A U.S.-based publishing exec for John Murray Press offers five pieces of advice on working with colleagues in the U.K.
The CEO of DK U.K. explains how the shift to remote work provided a vital connection to the U.S. and introduced new practices that helped grow sales by 20%.
The British illustrated reference publisher continues to reinvent itself a half-century on—and has used its anniversary milestone as a catalyst for examining new opportunities.
Martin Goodman, publisher of Barbican Press, describes his move from the U.K. to Los Angeles and the challenges of breaking into the U.S. market with transgressive and radical books.
Audiobook companies Storytel and BookBeat reported growth in sales and subscribers in 2023. Storytel, the larger of the two and parent company of Audiobooks.com, continues to struggle to improve its bottom line following a restructuring in 2022.
Thanks to the efforts of advocates, publishers, and grassroots initiatives, Indigenous representation in children's literature has expanded and evolved.
HarperVia will publish 'The Last Dream,' the debut collection of short stories by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne, on September 24, in print and audiobook formats.
Sales for the Italian book market reached €1.697 billion at cover price in 2023, a 0.8% increase from 2022. The increase is comparable to those in France and the U.K., which saw 1% growth for the year, and behind Germany's 2.9%.
Alex Correa, CEO of Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish-language books in the U.S., says the demand for Spanish-language titles continues to grow, noting Lectorum’s 2023 print sales were up 7% over 2022.
The Association of Canadian Publishers and l’Association nationale des éditeurs de livres have launched an online campaign urging the Canadian government to fulfill its promise to increase the Canada Book Fund.
Sally Rooney and Richard Osman were among the winners at this year's Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards, which celebrate titles that passed sales landmarks in print in the U.K. Nielsen reported that 199 million print books were sold in the U.K. in 2023.
The fair, to be held March 12–14, will have a dedicated space for audiobook exhibitors and discussions focused on AI, social media marketing, and translation. The National Literacy Trust and Book Aid International are its Charities of the Year.
German book trade magazine ‘Buchreport’ has ceased publication indefinitely. The ‘Spiegel’ bestseller lists, for which the magazine was responsible, will now be published by the trade magazine ‘BuchMarkt.’
With 'Buchreport' parent company Harenberg Kommunikation filing for bankruptcy and putting the magazine up for sale, some fear that the 'Spiegel' bestseller lists compiled by 'Buchreport' may disappear.
The annual Spanish-language fair attracted 857,000 attendees from around the world.
Sourcebooks and Penguin Random House North Asia have launched Callisto China, a new publishing house that will publish Chinese-language translations of Callisto titles in China.
The Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair kicked off on November 17 as the Chinese children's book market looks to put an end to slowing sales.
On February 1, Kwame Scott Fraser will step down from his role as president and publisher of Toronto-based independent publishing house Dundurn Press to focus on book acquisitions. The company has begun a search for his successor.
Officials expect 45,000 attendees at the fair, including a large number of international publishers; the fair will run November 17–19.
The Publishers Conference, which precedes the Sharjah International Book Fair, was held in the U.A.E. last weekend, and attracted more than 1,000 delegates from 106 countries.
The 2024 London Book Fair Author of the Day program will feature mystery writer Richard Osman, novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, Waterstones Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, and illustrator Flavia Z. Drago.
In Mexico, where there are 68 Indigenous languages but only 5.4% of the population speaks any of them, publishing books in such tongues as Seria and Zapotec pose challenges for publishers.
The cofounder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival says the event focuses on reaching a large but underserved audience.
The founding editor of Words Without Borders discusses some of the most exciting work being published in Spanish today.
As demand for Spanish-language books grows, publishers are finding diversity in Latin American markets.
Juan Milà is editorial director of HarperVia, an imprint at the HarperOne Group in the U.S., dedicated to publishing international voices. We spoke with Milà about the latest literary trends in the U.S., and around the world.
The most important book fair covering the Spanish language takes place November 25–December 3 in Mexico.
After another successful year of creating new relationships and building on long-term collaborations, Sharjah—the crown in the Arab book world—is back with the 42nd annual edition of one of the book world’s most anticipated events of the year.
How do booksellers keep up with the latest trends in a fast-changing world? It used to be simple: just read the newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. But now, with the rise of social media, blogs and podcasts, booksellers need to be more alert and adaptable than ever.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the Arabic book market is poised for a remarkable transformation driven by the escalating influence of AI, which I believe holds the promise of revolutionizing the reading experience for Arabic audiences by offering highly personalized book recommendations based on individual preferences, past choices, and real-time feedback.
Since 2011, the Sharjah Book Authority has been offering grant support for publishers looking to acquire rights while at the Sharjah International Book Fair.
The conference begins on November 7 with three preconference workshops. Entrepreneurs Need Libraries: How to Develop Your Entrepreneur Center will be collaboratively taught by librarians from the U.S. and Egypt.
In May this year, in a significant move aimed at promoting literature and the written word, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, announced the establishment of a dedicated Board of Directors for the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA). This decision reaffirmed Sharjah’s commitment to fostering a culture of reading and enhancing the emirate’s position as a global hub for the publishing industry.
The second Sharjah Booksellers Conference the U.A.E., held May 1-2, attracted some 200 booksellers and another 100 publishing professionals from across the world.
Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi has become the de facto ambassador for Arabic publishing around the world. As the recently appointed Chairperson of the new board of directors of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, and immediate past president of the International Publishers Association, she is in the leading position to help shape how the world engages with the Arabic language and literature, both at home in the U.A.E. and abroad. She spoke with us prior to this year’s fair.
Núria Cabutí is the CEO of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the largest Spanish-language publishing house in the world, which is based in Barcelona.
In September 2022 the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) announced two significant new awards for publishing rights professionals, to be presented each year at the Sharjah Publishers Conference. In 2022, Mauro Spagnol of Books-Everywhere was the inaugural winner of the category for an independent. rights professional.
Author MA Bennett is half Venetian, born in England and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She studied history at Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialised in the study of Shakespeare’s plays as a historical source, before going on to study art. She has since worked as an illustrator, an actress, and a film reviewer. She has also designed tour visuals for rock bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones.
Simon & Schuster (S&S) has recently been acquired by private equity firm KKR, ending a long process for S&S’s current owner Paramount who put the publishing company on the market back in 2020, with an acquisition bid by Penguin Random House blocked by U.S. courts late last year. Despite the long uncertainty surrounding their ownership, S&S has reported some extremely buoyant results over the past few years, with double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2023. In the U.K., S&S was named Publisher of the Year at the 2023 British Book Awards for the second year running and Children’s Publisher of the Year. Prior to the book fair we asked Ian Chapman, Chief Executive and Publisher, Simon & Schuster U.K. and International, how things are going.
Felix Francis is a British crime writer and Dick Francis’ younger son. He was a science teacher before quitting to look after his father’s literary affairs.
Elizabeth S. Moore has worked as a journalist since she won the Decanter Young Wine Writer of the Year at seventeen, writing columns and articles on restaurants, politics, South Africa and all things foodie.
Nielsen BookData, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic data and retail sales monitoring for print books, has partnered with the Emirates Publishers Association (EPA) to digitize title listings and boost the growth of the U.A.E.’s publishing industry.
This year’s winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s (ABC) International Excellence Award will be announced on October 30 at the 2023 Sharjah Publishers Conference, the first time that this prestigious award has been presented in the Middle East.
A new project set up to promote the translation and distribution of books from the Arabic-speaking literary scene into Europe, LEILA is funded by a European Union program and designed and implemented by iReMMO and ATLAS in France, BOZAR in Belgium and Federation Tunisienne des Editeurs in Tunisia.
Lightning Source Sharjah, the print-on-demand joint venture between Ingram Content Group’s (Ingram) Lightning Source LLC and the Sharjah Book Authority, is making more books accessible in the Arabic language and changing the way books are distributed in the Middle East.
A primary goal of the NYU Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts is teaching our students to understand the globalization of publishing and the needs and challenges of colleagues around the world.
A key objective and strength of the Sharjah Publishers Conference has been to connect publishers from the global publishing community with the African publishing world. This year’s African presence has increased again, with participants from 18 African countries (excluding North Africa/Arab countries), many of them Francophone, including Benin, Burkino Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius and Zaire for the first time, along with many returning participants.
Despite the state of world affairs, business appeared brisk, and the fair seemed to continue to bounce back from the pandemic, reporting 105,000 trade visitors from 130 countries.
Markus Dohle is the former global CEO of Penguin Random House. This past summer he was announced as one of the international members of the new board of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA).
RX, which owns the London Book Fair, has announced that Adam Ridgway, previously commercial director at RX, will take over as fair director. He replaces Gareth Rapley, who was in the position for two years.
At the recent Bologna Children's Book Fair, publishers from India's OM Books, France's Lizzie, and Spain's Grupo Planeta discussed how Indian diaspora populations and Francophone and Spanish speakers abroad have fueled sales growth.
The Bologna Children's Book Fair hosted several discussions focusing on the impact of AI on the publishing industry, ranging from those advocating for regulation of AI to others addressing how it can be harnessed to foster creativity and efficiency.
The 2024 winners of the seven categories of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, honoring excellence in Arabic-language publishing, come from the UAE, Tunisia, Germany, Egypt, and China. Each receives prize money of 750,000 UAE dirhams, approximately $204,000.
The third International Booksellers Conference will be held on April 27-28 in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. More than two hundred booksellers and publishing professionals from the region and around the world are expected to attend.
Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare' was the top-selling English-language print book in Canada in 2023, according to BookNet Canada. Total sales in the country topped C$1.1 billion last year.
Former Penguin Canada publisher Nicole Winstanley has been named president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Canada, succeeding Kevin Hanson, who left the company last month.
Next month’s Bologna Book Fair, the world’s largest rights fair devoted to children’s books, offers an extensive lineup of programming throughout the fair’s four days. Here are some of the highlights.
The Bologna Children’s Book Fair expands its global reach while remaining focused on its flagship program.
A extensive new study published by RISE Bookselling and the European and International Booksellers Federation covers six areas where bookstores can implement changes to best mitigate their impact on the environment.
Two panels at the London Book Fair on Thursday emphasized the ongoing challenge of giving opportunities to women and working-class people to write, publish, and advance themselves in the publishing and creative industries.
The European and International Booksellers Federation, International Authors Forum, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, International Publishers Association, and PEN International jointly released a statement on March 14 in response to "the increasing efforts to restrict books."
Panelists from Audible, Bookwire, Penguin Random House, Spotify, and Storytel discussed the state of audiobooks, noting that sales continue to boom and there are new opportunities arising from advancing technology and business models.
Fairgoers feel positive that this year's fair is, if not the biggest, then easily one of the biggest fairs since Covid, and definitely the most exciting—and shared a couple of contenders for the semi-mythical title of "book of the show."
You made it! Welcome to Day Three of the London Book Fair. There are still plenty of panels on the docket for today at this year's Seminar Program. Here are our recommendations.
They can generate (iterative) images. They can generate (iterative) text. But how will large language models change translation—especially for literary translators? A panel at the London Book Fair suggested some possible outcomes.
Several key European markets are seeing rapid growth in English-language book sales, threatening to cannibalize sales of translated editions published in their native markets, as the TikTok generation is increasingly happy to read in English.
On the first morning of the London Book Fair, the heads of the International Publishing Association, the Federation of European Publishers, the Association of American Publishers, and the African Publishers Network gathered to discuss, and debate, the biggest issues facing the publishing industry today.
Welcome to Day Two of the London Book Fair. If you still need to decide between the more than 150 panels and discussions available on tap for this year's Seminar Program, we've got some suggestions.
A busy first day at Olympia London has found publishers abuzz with business, cautiously optimistic about AI, and dismayed over world events.
The U.K.-based nonprofit Book Aid International has partnered with PEN Ukraine, English PEN, and PEN International, one year after an initial meeting at the London Book Fair set the collaboration into motion. In addition to last year's 25,000-book shipment, 15,000 books will be donated this year to support war-affected libraries in Ukraine.
In the opening keynote session of this year's London Book Fair, Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, extolled the virtues of the company’s new status as "the largest independent publisher of adult and children’s trade books in the United States."
Even after two decades in the book business, Georgina Moore, deputy managing director of Midas, confesses she had much to learn from her own experience publishing and publicizing her debut novel on both sides of the Atlantic.
Just in time for the London Book Fair, Hello Sunshine has set up shop in the Sheraton Grand London Park Lane, a five-star Art Deco hotel just down the way from Buckingham Palace, where a new pop-up library and bookstore, Reese’s Book Club x Sheraton Lobby Library, has been installed.
Ziggy Hanaor, the founder of U.K. children's publishing house Cicada Books, offers her top tips for breaking into the American market, including asking for publicity help, using a single ISBN, and getting books to market six months before publication.
Welcome to Day One of the London Book Fair. If you need to choose which of the more than 150 panels and discussions offered by this year's Seminar Program you'll be checking out today, look no further.
The online rights database MatchWHALE, founded by Beatrice Lin, is set to add many more Korean titles to libraries and bookstores around the world.
With more than two decades of experience working in scholarly publishing, Amy Beisel has carved out a niche as a coach for publishers and their employees, helping them achieve their goals and undertake positive changes.
Amid a dispute over contract terms, Amazon has delisted e-book titles distributed by German digital distribution company Bookwire. While the exact number of delisted titles is not known, Bookwire distributes more than a million titles for publishers.
Sage Policy Profiles, a new web-based tool from Sage and Overton, lets researchers uncover and understand the influence their evidence-based research may have on public policy by identifying citations of their work. Sage associate v-p of corporate communications Camille Gamboa hopes that the tool will help scholars "better recognize the real-world impact of research."
New research from Europe on book procurement for libraries and schools finds that the process focuses too much on the cheapest prices rather than community impact, and suggests how it can be more fair—especially for small bookstores.
Kevin Hanson, president and publisher of S&S Canada, has left the company. Hanson's departure is the latest in a series of personnel changes since the acquisition of S&S by KKR last fall.
Inkitt, a German data-driven publishing company, is funding an expansion into AI-generated and personalized fiction, audiobooks, video, and games. It has raised more than $117 million total.
BookScan analyst Kristen McLean predicts romantasy should stay hot, but sees mixed signs for adult nonfiction.
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward signs a new three-book deal with Scribner, Bantam takes civil rights lawyer Ben Crump's fiction debut, and more.
A selection of the more than 150 panels and discussions featured on tap in the fair’s Seminar Program, including sessions on AI, audiobooks, BookTok, DEI, and the Freedom to read and publish.
British publishers discuss how transatlantic collaboration can boost books’ performance and the work it takes to maintain mutually beneficial relationships.
U.S. agents expect romantasy to be hot—and debut fiction not.
The London Book Fair embraces its new status as the first major publishing event of the year.
After its parent company was sold to private equity, the British subsidiary carries on with confidence, says CEO Ian Chapman.
Watkins Media’s head of marketing says that its unique titles, which span many categories—including the occult several countercultures—are finding success in the U.S.
At 50, the U.K. press is growing its list and expanding into new formats—all while keeping a sharp focus on libraries, which publisher Joanne Grant says "have always been our main market."
The managing director of Usborne Publishing reflects on the legacy of her father, the company’s founder, who died last year.
Dan Conway, the CEO of the U.K.’s Publishers Association, says that the U.S. and British industries have shared interests—even as they compete for rights and market share.
The London indie press started with a focus on nonfiction, but in the past decade has published three Booker Award–winning novels.
Katie Arora, the U.S. sales and marketing director for Michael O'Mara Books, describes the company’s strategies for engaging the U.S. market—including finding a niche in books on the royal family.
An independent publisher considers the challenges and opportunities for small presses in her home market.
At this year’s London Book Fair, U.S. agents will be talking up works by H.S. Cross, Laila Lalami, Casey McQuiston, Richard Price, Riley Sager, and others.
The managing director of Head of Zeus argues that the U.S. market presents a big opportunity for U.K. publishers, and is worth the effort to break through.
Editor Alex DiFrancesco explains the strategy Jessica Kingsley Publishers employs when publishing LGBTQ books on both sides of the Atlantic.
The managing director of the publishing startup describes her disruptive agenda and promises a list of "strong, game-changing voices."
A U.S.-based publishing exec for John Murray Press offers five pieces of advice on working with colleagues in the U.K.
The CEO of DK U.K. explains how the shift to remote work provided a vital connection to the U.S. and introduced new practices that helped grow sales by 20%.
The British illustrated reference publisher continues to reinvent itself a half-century on—and has used its anniversary milestone as a catalyst for examining new opportunities.
Martin Goodman, publisher of Barbican Press, describes his move from the U.K. to Los Angeles and the challenges of breaking into the U.S. market with transgressive and radical books.
Audiobook companies Storytel and BookBeat reported growth in sales and subscribers in 2023. Storytel, the larger of the two and parent company of Audiobooks.com, continues to struggle to improve its bottom line following a restructuring in 2022.
Thanks to the efforts of advocates, publishers, and grassroots initiatives, Indigenous representation in children's literature has expanded and evolved.
HarperVia will publish 'The Last Dream,' the debut collection of short stories by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne, on September 24, in print and audiobook formats.
Sales for the Italian book market reached €1.697 billion at cover price in 2023, a 0.8% increase from 2022. The increase is comparable to those in France and the U.K., which saw 1% growth for the year, and behind Germany's 2.9%.
Alex Correa, CEO of Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish-language books in the U.S., says the demand for Spanish-language titles continues to grow, noting Lectorum’s 2023 print sales were up 7% over 2022.
The Association of Canadian Publishers and l’Association nationale des éditeurs de livres have launched an online campaign urging the Canadian government to fulfill its promise to increase the Canada Book Fund.
Sally Rooney and Richard Osman were among the winners at this year's Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards, which celebrate titles that passed sales landmarks in print in the U.K. Nielsen reported that 199 million print books were sold in the U.K. in 2023.
The fair, to be held March 12–14, will have a dedicated space for audiobook exhibitors and discussions focused on AI, social media marketing, and translation. The National Literacy Trust and Book Aid International are its Charities of the Year.
German book trade magazine ‘Buchreport’ has ceased publication indefinitely. The ‘Spiegel’ bestseller lists, for which the magazine was responsible, will now be published by the trade magazine ‘BuchMarkt.’
With 'Buchreport' parent company Harenberg Kommunikation filing for bankruptcy and putting the magazine up for sale, some fear that the 'Spiegel' bestseller lists compiled by 'Buchreport' may disappear.
The annual Spanish-language fair attracted 857,000 attendees from around the world.
Sourcebooks and Penguin Random House North Asia have launched Callisto China, a new publishing house that will publish Chinese-language translations of Callisto titles in China.
The Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair kicked off on November 17 as the Chinese children's book market looks to put an end to slowing sales.
On February 1, Kwame Scott Fraser will step down from his role as president and publisher of Toronto-based independent publishing house Dundurn Press to focus on book acquisitions. The company has begun a search for his successor.
Officials expect 45,000 attendees at the fair, including a large number of international publishers; the fair will run November 17–19.
The Publishers Conference, which precedes the Sharjah International Book Fair, was held in the U.A.E. last weekend, and attracted more than 1,000 delegates from 106 countries.
The 2024 London Book Fair Author of the Day program will feature mystery writer Richard Osman, novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, Waterstones Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, and illustrator Flavia Z. Drago.
In Mexico, where there are 68 Indigenous languages but only 5.4% of the population speaks any of them, publishing books in such tongues as Seria and Zapotec pose challenges for publishers.
The cofounder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival says the event focuses on reaching a large but underserved audience.
The founding editor of Words Without Borders discusses some of the most exciting work being published in Spanish today.
As demand for Spanish-language books grows, publishers are finding diversity in Latin American markets.
Juan Milà is editorial director of HarperVia, an imprint at the HarperOne Group in the U.S., dedicated to publishing international voices. We spoke with Milà about the latest literary trends in the U.S., and around the world.
The most important book fair covering the Spanish language takes place November 25–December 3 in Mexico.
After another successful year of creating new relationships and building on long-term collaborations, Sharjah—the crown in the Arab book world—is back with the 42nd annual edition of one of the book world’s most anticipated events of the year.
How do booksellers keep up with the latest trends in a fast-changing world? It used to be simple: just read the newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. But now, with the rise of social media, blogs and podcasts, booksellers need to be more alert and adaptable than ever.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the Arabic book market is poised for a remarkable transformation driven by the escalating influence of AI, which I believe holds the promise of revolutionizing the reading experience for Arabic audiences by offering highly personalized book recommendations based on individual preferences, past choices, and real-time feedback.
Since 2011, the Sharjah Book Authority has been offering grant support for publishers looking to acquire rights while at the Sharjah International Book Fair.
The conference begins on November 7 with three preconference workshops. Entrepreneurs Need Libraries: How to Develop Your Entrepreneur Center will be collaboratively taught by librarians from the U.S. and Egypt.
In May this year, in a significant move aimed at promoting literature and the written word, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, announced the establishment of a dedicated Board of Directors for the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA). This decision reaffirmed Sharjah’s commitment to fostering a culture of reading and enhancing the emirate’s position as a global hub for the publishing industry.
The second Sharjah Booksellers Conference the U.A.E., held May 1-2, attracted some 200 booksellers and another 100 publishing professionals from across the world.
Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi has become the de facto ambassador for Arabic publishing around the world. As the recently appointed Chairperson of the new board of directors of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, and immediate past president of the International Publishers Association, she is in the leading position to help shape how the world engages with the Arabic language and literature, both at home in the U.A.E. and abroad. She spoke with us prior to this year’s fair.
Núria Cabutí is the CEO of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the largest Spanish-language publishing house in the world, which is based in Barcelona.
In September 2022 the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) announced two significant new awards for publishing rights professionals, to be presented each year at the Sharjah Publishers Conference. In 2022, Mauro Spagnol of Books-Everywhere was the inaugural winner of the category for an independent. rights professional.
Author MA Bennett is half Venetian, born in England and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She studied history at Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialised in the study of Shakespeare’s plays as a historical source, before going on to study art. She has since worked as an illustrator, an actress, and a film reviewer. She has also designed tour visuals for rock bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones.
Simon & Schuster (S&S) has recently been acquired by private equity firm KKR, ending a long process for S&S’s current owner Paramount who put the publishing company on the market back in 2020, with an acquisition bid by Penguin Random House blocked by U.S. courts late last year. Despite the long uncertainty surrounding their ownership, S&S has reported some extremely buoyant results over the past few years, with double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2023. In the U.K., S&S was named Publisher of the Year at the 2023 British Book Awards for the second year running and Children’s Publisher of the Year. Prior to the book fair we asked Ian Chapman, Chief Executive and Publisher, Simon & Schuster U.K. and International, how things are going.
Felix Francis is a British crime writer and Dick Francis’ younger son. He was a science teacher before quitting to look after his father’s literary affairs.
Elizabeth S. Moore has worked as a journalist since she won the Decanter Young Wine Writer of the Year at seventeen, writing columns and articles on restaurants, politics, South Africa and all things foodie.
Nielsen BookData, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic data and retail sales monitoring for print books, has partnered with the Emirates Publishers Association (EPA) to digitize title listings and boost the growth of the U.A.E.’s publishing industry.
This year’s winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s (ABC) International Excellence Award will be announced on October 30 at the 2023 Sharjah Publishers Conference, the first time that this prestigious award has been presented in the Middle East.
A new project set up to promote the translation and distribution of books from the Arabic-speaking literary scene into Europe, LEILA is funded by a European Union program and designed and implemented by iReMMO and ATLAS in France, BOZAR in Belgium and Federation Tunisienne des Editeurs in Tunisia.
Lightning Source Sharjah, the print-on-demand joint venture between Ingram Content Group’s (Ingram) Lightning Source LLC and the Sharjah Book Authority, is making more books accessible in the Arabic language and changing the way books are distributed in the Middle East.
A primary goal of the NYU Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts is teaching our students to understand the globalization of publishing and the needs and challenges of colleagues around the world.
A key objective and strength of the Sharjah Publishers Conference has been to connect publishers from the global publishing community with the African publishing world. This year’s African presence has increased again, with participants from 18 African countries (excluding North Africa/Arab countries), many of them Francophone, including Benin, Burkino Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius and Zaire for the first time, along with many returning participants.
Despite the state of world affairs, business appeared brisk, and the fair seemed to continue to bounce back from the pandemic, reporting 105,000 trade visitors from 130 countries.
Markus Dohle is the former global CEO of Penguin Random House. This past summer he was announced as one of the international members of the new board of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA).
RX, which owns the London Book Fair, has announced that Adam Ridgway, previously commercial director at RX, will take over as fair director. He replaces Gareth Rapley, who was in the position for two years.
At the recent Bologna Children's Book Fair, publishers from India's OM Books, France's Lizzie, and Spain's Grupo Planeta discussed how Indian diaspora populations and Francophone and Spanish speakers abroad have fueled sales growth.
The Bologna Children's Book Fair hosted several discussions focusing on the impact of AI on the publishing industry, ranging from those advocating for regulation of AI to others addressing how it can be harnessed to foster creativity and efficiency.
The 2024 winners of the seven categories of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, honoring excellence in Arabic-language publishing, come from the UAE, Tunisia, Germany, Egypt, and China. Each receives prize money of 750,000 UAE dirhams, approximately $204,000.
The third International Booksellers Conference will be held on April 27-28 in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. More than two hundred booksellers and publishing professionals from the region and around the world are expected to attend.
Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare' was the top-selling English-language print book in Canada in 2023, according to BookNet Canada. Total sales in the country topped C$1.1 billion last year.
Former Penguin Canada publisher Nicole Winstanley has been named president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Canada, succeeding Kevin Hanson, who left the company last month.
Next month’s Bologna Book Fair, the world’s largest rights fair devoted to children’s books, offers an extensive lineup of programming throughout the fair’s four days. Here are some of the highlights.
The Bologna Children’s Book Fair expands its global reach while remaining focused on its flagship program.
A extensive new study published by RISE Bookselling and the European and International Booksellers Federation covers six areas where bookstores can implement changes to best mitigate their impact on the environment.
Two panels at the London Book Fair on Thursday emphasized the ongoing challenge of giving opportunities to women and working-class people to write, publish, and advance themselves in the publishing and creative industries.
The European and International Booksellers Federation, International Authors Forum, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, International Publishers Association, and PEN International jointly released a statement on March 14 in response to "the increasing efforts to restrict books."
Panelists from Audible, Bookwire, Penguin Random House, Spotify, and Storytel discussed the state of audiobooks, noting that sales continue to boom and there are new opportunities arising from advancing technology and business models.
Fairgoers feel positive that this year's fair is, if not the biggest, then easily one of the biggest fairs since Covid, and definitely the most exciting—and shared a couple of contenders for the semi-mythical title of "book of the show."
You made it! Welcome to Day Three of the London Book Fair. There are still plenty of panels on the docket for today at this year's Seminar Program. Here are our recommendations.
They can generate (iterative) images. They can generate (iterative) text. But how will large language models change translation—especially for literary translators? A panel at the London Book Fair suggested some possible outcomes.
Several key European markets are seeing rapid growth in English-language book sales, threatening to cannibalize sales of translated editions published in their native markets, as the TikTok generation is increasingly happy to read in English.
On the first morning of the London Book Fair, the heads of the International Publishing Association, the Federation of European Publishers, the Association of American Publishers, and the African Publishers Network gathered to discuss, and debate, the biggest issues facing the publishing industry today.
Welcome to Day Two of the London Book Fair. If you still need to decide between the more than 150 panels and discussions available on tap for this year's Seminar Program, we've got some suggestions.
A busy first day at Olympia London has found publishers abuzz with business, cautiously optimistic about AI, and dismayed over world events.
The U.K.-based nonprofit Book Aid International has partnered with PEN Ukraine, English PEN, and PEN International, one year after an initial meeting at the London Book Fair set the collaboration into motion. In addition to last year's 25,000-book shipment, 15,000 books will be donated this year to support war-affected libraries in Ukraine.
In the opening keynote session of this year's London Book Fair, Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, extolled the virtues of the company’s new status as "the largest independent publisher of adult and children’s trade books in the United States."
Even after two decades in the book business, Georgina Moore, deputy managing director of Midas, confesses she had much to learn from her own experience publishing and publicizing her debut novel on both sides of the Atlantic.
Just in time for the London Book Fair, Hello Sunshine has set up shop in the Sheraton Grand London Park Lane, a five-star Art Deco hotel just down the way from Buckingham Palace, where a new pop-up library and bookstore, Reese’s Book Club x Sheraton Lobby Library, has been installed.
Ziggy Hanaor, the founder of U.K. children's publishing house Cicada Books, offers her top tips for breaking into the American market, including asking for publicity help, using a single ISBN, and getting books to market six months before publication.
Welcome to Day One of the London Book Fair. If you need to choose which of the more than 150 panels and discussions offered by this year's Seminar Program you'll be checking out today, look no further.
The online rights database MatchWHALE, founded by Beatrice Lin, is set to add many more Korean titles to libraries and bookstores around the world.
With more than two decades of experience working in scholarly publishing, Amy Beisel has carved out a niche as a coach for publishers and their employees, helping them achieve their goals and undertake positive changes.
Amid a dispute over contract terms, Amazon has delisted e-book titles distributed by German digital distribution company Bookwire. While the exact number of delisted titles is not known, Bookwire distributes more than a million titles for publishers.
Sage Policy Profiles, a new web-based tool from Sage and Overton, lets researchers uncover and understand the influence their evidence-based research may have on public policy by identifying citations of their work. Sage associate v-p of corporate communications Camille Gamboa hopes that the tool will help scholars "better recognize the real-world impact of research."
New research from Europe on book procurement for libraries and schools finds that the process focuses too much on the cheapest prices rather than community impact, and suggests how it can be more fair—especially for small bookstores.
Kevin Hanson, president and publisher of S&S Canada, has left the company. Hanson's departure is the latest in a series of personnel changes since the acquisition of S&S by KKR last fall.
Inkitt, a German data-driven publishing company, is funding an expansion into AI-generated and personalized fiction, audiobooks, video, and games. It has raised more than $117 million total.
BookScan analyst Kristen McLean predicts romantasy should stay hot, but sees mixed signs for adult nonfiction.
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward signs a new three-book deal with Scribner, Bantam takes civil rights lawyer Ben Crump's fiction debut, and more.
A selection of the more than 150 panels and discussions featured on tap in the fair’s Seminar Program, including sessions on AI, audiobooks, BookTok, DEI, and the Freedom to read and publish.
British publishers discuss how transatlantic collaboration can boost books’ performance and the work it takes to maintain mutually beneficial relationships.
U.S. agents expect romantasy to be hot—and debut fiction not.
The London Book Fair embraces its new status as the first major publishing event of the year.
After its parent company was sold to private equity, the British subsidiary carries on with confidence, says CEO Ian Chapman.
Watkins Media’s head of marketing says that its unique titles, which span many categories—including the occult several countercultures—are finding success in the U.S.
At 50, the U.K. press is growing its list and expanding into new formats—all while keeping a sharp focus on libraries, which publisher Joanne Grant says "have always been our main market."
The managing director of Usborne Publishing reflects on the legacy of her father, the company’s founder, who died last year.
Dan Conway, the CEO of the U.K.’s Publishers Association, says that the U.S. and British industries have shared interests—even as they compete for rights and market share.
The London indie press started with a focus on nonfiction, but in the past decade has published three Booker Award–winning novels.
Katie Arora, the U.S. sales and marketing director for Michael O'Mara Books, describes the company’s strategies for engaging the U.S. market—including finding a niche in books on the royal family.
An independent publisher considers the challenges and opportunities for small presses in her home market.
At this year’s London Book Fair, U.S. agents will be talking up works by H.S. Cross, Laila Lalami, Casey McQuiston, Richard Price, Riley Sager, and others.
The managing director of Head of Zeus argues that the U.S. market presents a big opportunity for U.K. publishers, and is worth the effort to break through.
Editor Alex DiFrancesco explains the strategy Jessica Kingsley Publishers employs when publishing LGBTQ books on both sides of the Atlantic.
The managing director of the publishing startup describes her disruptive agenda and promises a list of "strong, game-changing voices."
A U.S.-based publishing exec for John Murray Press offers five pieces of advice on working with colleagues in the U.K.
The CEO of DK U.K. explains how the shift to remote work provided a vital connection to the U.S. and introduced new practices that helped grow sales by 20%.
The British illustrated reference publisher continues to reinvent itself a half-century on—and has used its anniversary milestone as a catalyst for examining new opportunities.
Martin Goodman, publisher of Barbican Press, describes his move from the U.K. to Los Angeles and the challenges of breaking into the U.S. market with transgressive and radical books.
Audiobook companies Storytel and BookBeat reported growth in sales and subscribers in 2023. Storytel, the larger of the two and parent company of Audiobooks.com, continues to struggle to improve its bottom line following a restructuring in 2022.
Thanks to the efforts of advocates, publishers, and grassroots initiatives, Indigenous representation in children's literature has expanded and evolved.
HarperVia will publish 'The Last Dream,' the debut collection of short stories by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne, on September 24, in print and audiobook formats.
Sales for the Italian book market reached €1.697 billion at cover price in 2023, a 0.8% increase from 2022. The increase is comparable to those in France and the U.K., which saw 1% growth for the year, and behind Germany's 2.9%.
Alex Correa, CEO of Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish-language books in the U.S., says the demand for Spanish-language titles continues to grow, noting Lectorum’s 2023 print sales were up 7% over 2022.
The Association of Canadian Publishers and l’Association nationale des éditeurs de livres have launched an online campaign urging the Canadian government to fulfill its promise to increase the Canada Book Fund.
Sally Rooney and Richard Osman were among the winners at this year's Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards, which celebrate titles that passed sales landmarks in print in the U.K. Nielsen reported that 199 million print books were sold in the U.K. in 2023.
The fair, to be held March 12–14, will have a dedicated space for audiobook exhibitors and discussions focused on AI, social media marketing, and translation. The National Literacy Trust and Book Aid International are its Charities of the Year.
German book trade magazine ‘Buchreport’ has ceased publication indefinitely. The ‘Spiegel’ bestseller lists, for which the magazine was responsible, will now be published by the trade magazine ‘BuchMarkt.’
With 'Buchreport' parent company Harenberg Kommunikation filing for bankruptcy and putting the magazine up for sale, some fear that the 'Spiegel' bestseller lists compiled by 'Buchreport' may disappear.
The annual Spanish-language fair attracted 857,000 attendees from around the world.
Sourcebooks and Penguin Random House North Asia have launched Callisto China, a new publishing house that will publish Chinese-language translations of Callisto titles in China.
The Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair kicked off on November 17 as the Chinese children's book market looks to put an end to slowing sales.
On February 1, Kwame Scott Fraser will step down from his role as president and publisher of Toronto-based independent publishing house Dundurn Press to focus on book acquisitions. The company has begun a search for his successor.
Officials expect 45,000 attendees at the fair, including a large number of international publishers; the fair will run November 17–19.
The Publishers Conference, which precedes the Sharjah International Book Fair, was held in the U.A.E. last weekend, and attracted more than 1,000 delegates from 106 countries.
The 2024 London Book Fair Author of the Day program will feature mystery writer Richard Osman, novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, Waterstones Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, and illustrator Flavia Z. Drago.
In Mexico, where there are 68 Indigenous languages but only 5.4% of the population speaks any of them, publishing books in such tongues as Seria and Zapotec pose challenges for publishers.
The cofounder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival says the event focuses on reaching a large but underserved audience.
The founding editor of Words Without Borders discusses some of the most exciting work being published in Spanish today.
As demand for Spanish-language books grows, publishers are finding diversity in Latin American markets.
Juan Milà is editorial director of HarperVia, an imprint at the HarperOne Group in the U.S., dedicated to publishing international voices. We spoke with Milà about the latest literary trends in the U.S., and around the world.
The most important book fair covering the Spanish language takes place November 25–December 3 in Mexico.
After another successful year of creating new relationships and building on long-term collaborations, Sharjah—the crown in the Arab book world—is back with the 42nd annual edition of one of the book world’s most anticipated events of the year.
How do booksellers keep up with the latest trends in a fast-changing world? It used to be simple: just read the newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. But now, with the rise of social media, blogs and podcasts, booksellers need to be more alert and adaptable than ever.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the Arabic book market is poised for a remarkable transformation driven by the escalating influence of AI, which I believe holds the promise of revolutionizing the reading experience for Arabic audiences by offering highly personalized book recommendations based on individual preferences, past choices, and real-time feedback.
Since 2011, the Sharjah Book Authority has been offering grant support for publishers looking to acquire rights while at the Sharjah International Book Fair.
The conference begins on November 7 with three preconference workshops. Entrepreneurs Need Libraries: How to Develop Your Entrepreneur Center will be collaboratively taught by librarians from the U.S. and Egypt.
In May this year, in a significant move aimed at promoting literature and the written word, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, announced the establishment of a dedicated Board of Directors for the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA). This decision reaffirmed Sharjah’s commitment to fostering a culture of reading and enhancing the emirate’s position as a global hub for the publishing industry.
The second Sharjah Booksellers Conference the U.A.E., held May 1-2, attracted some 200 booksellers and another 100 publishing professionals from across the world.
Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi has become the de facto ambassador for Arabic publishing around the world. As the recently appointed Chairperson of the new board of directors of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, and immediate past president of the International Publishers Association, she is in the leading position to help shape how the world engages with the Arabic language and literature, both at home in the U.A.E. and abroad. She spoke with us prior to this year’s fair.
Núria Cabutí is the CEO of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the largest Spanish-language publishing house in the world, which is based in Barcelona.
In September 2022 the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) announced two significant new awards for publishing rights professionals, to be presented each year at the Sharjah Publishers Conference. In 2022, Mauro Spagnol of Books-Everywhere was the inaugural winner of the category for an independent. rights professional.
Author MA Bennett is half Venetian, born in England and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She studied history at Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialised in the study of Shakespeare’s plays as a historical source, before going on to study art. She has since worked as an illustrator, an actress, and a film reviewer. She has also designed tour visuals for rock bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones.
Simon & Schuster (S&S) has recently been acquired by private equity firm KKR, ending a long process for S&S’s current owner Paramount who put the publishing company on the market back in 2020, with an acquisition bid by Penguin Random House blocked by U.S. courts late last year. Despite the long uncertainty surrounding their ownership, S&S has reported some extremely buoyant results over the past few years, with double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2023. In the U.K., S&S was named Publisher of the Year at the 2023 British Book Awards for the second year running and Children’s Publisher of the Year. Prior to the book fair we asked Ian Chapman, Chief Executive and Publisher, Simon & Schuster U.K. and International, how things are going.
Felix Francis is a British crime writer and Dick Francis’ younger son. He was a science teacher before quitting to look after his father’s literary affairs.
Elizabeth S. Moore has worked as a journalist since she won the Decanter Young Wine Writer of the Year at seventeen, writing columns and articles on restaurants, politics, South Africa and all things foodie.
Nielsen BookData, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic data and retail sales monitoring for print books, has partnered with the Emirates Publishers Association (EPA) to digitize title listings and boost the growth of the U.A.E.’s publishing industry.
This year’s winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s (ABC) International Excellence Award will be announced on October 30 at the 2023 Sharjah Publishers Conference, the first time that this prestigious award has been presented in the Middle East.
A new project set up to promote the translation and distribution of books from the Arabic-speaking literary scene into Europe, LEILA is funded by a European Union program and designed and implemented by iReMMO and ATLAS in France, BOZAR in Belgium and Federation Tunisienne des Editeurs in Tunisia.
Lightning Source Sharjah, the print-on-demand joint venture between Ingram Content Group’s (Ingram) Lightning Source LLC and the Sharjah Book Authority, is making more books accessible in the Arabic language and changing the way books are distributed in the Middle East.
A primary goal of the NYU Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts is teaching our students to understand the globalization of publishing and the needs and challenges of colleagues around the world.
A key objective and strength of the Sharjah Publishers Conference has been to connect publishers from the global publishing community with the African publishing world. This year’s African presence has increased again, with participants from 18 African countries (excluding North Africa/Arab countries), many of them Francophone, including Benin, Burkino Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius and Zaire for the first time, along with many returning participants.
Despite the state of world affairs, business appeared brisk, and the fair seemed to continue to bounce back from the pandemic, reporting 105,000 trade visitors from 130 countries.
Markus Dohle is the former global CEO of Penguin Random House. This past summer he was announced as one of the international members of the new board of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA).
RX, which owns the London Book Fair, has announced that Adam Ridgway, previously commercial director at RX, will take over as fair director. He replaces Gareth Rapley, who was in the position for two years.
At the recent Bologna Children's Book Fair, publishers from India's OM Books, France's Lizzie, and Spain's Grupo Planeta discussed how Indian diaspora populations and Francophone and Spanish speakers abroad have fueled sales growth.
The Bologna Children's Book Fair hosted several discussions focusing on the impact of AI on the publishing industry, ranging from those advocating for regulation of AI to others addressing how it can be harnessed to foster creativity and efficiency.
The 2024 winners of the seven categories of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, honoring excellence in Arabic-language publishing, come from the UAE, Tunisia, Germany, Egypt, and China. Each receives prize money of 750,000 UAE dirhams, approximately $204,000.
The third International Booksellers Conference will be held on April 27-28 in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. More than two hundred booksellers and publishing professionals from the region and around the world are expected to attend.
Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare' was the top-selling English-language print book in Canada in 2023, according to BookNet Canada. Total sales in the country topped C$1.1 billion last year.
Former Penguin Canada publisher Nicole Winstanley has been named president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Canada, succeeding Kevin Hanson, who left the company last month.
Next month’s Bologna Book Fair, the world’s largest rights fair devoted to children’s books, offers an extensive lineup of programming throughout the fair’s four days. Here are some of the highlights.
The Bologna Children’s Book Fair expands its global reach while remaining focused on its flagship program.
A extensive new study published by RISE Bookselling and the European and International Booksellers Federation covers six areas where bookstores can implement changes to best mitigate their impact on the environment.
Two panels at the London Book Fair on Thursday emphasized the ongoing challenge of giving opportunities to women and working-class people to write, publish, and advance themselves in the publishing and creative industries.
The European and International Booksellers Federation, International Authors Forum, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, International Publishers Association, and PEN International jointly released a statement on March 14 in response to "the increasing efforts to restrict books."
Panelists from Audible, Bookwire, Penguin Random House, Spotify, and Storytel discussed the state of audiobooks, noting that sales continue to boom and there are new opportunities arising from advancing technology and business models.
Fairgoers feel positive that this year's fair is, if not the biggest, then easily one of the biggest fairs since Covid, and definitely the most exciting—and shared a couple of contenders for the semi-mythical title of "book of the show."
You made it! Welcome to Day Three of the London Book Fair. There are still plenty of panels on the docket for today at this year's Seminar Program. Here are our recommendations.
They can generate (iterative) images. They can generate (iterative) text. But how will large language models change translation—especially for literary translators? A panel at the London Book Fair suggested some possible outcomes.
Several key European markets are seeing rapid growth in English-language book sales, threatening to cannibalize sales of translated editions published in their native markets, as the TikTok generation is increasingly happy to read in English.
On the first morning of the London Book Fair, the heads of the International Publishing Association, the Federation of European Publishers, the Association of American Publishers, and the African Publishers Network gathered to discuss, and debate, the biggest issues facing the publishing industry today.
Welcome to Day Two of the London Book Fair. If you still need to decide between the more than 150 panels and discussions available on tap for this year's Seminar Program, we've got some suggestions.
A busy first day at Olympia London has found publishers abuzz with business, cautiously optimistic about AI, and dismayed over world events.
The U.K.-based nonprofit Book Aid International has partnered with PEN Ukraine, English PEN, and PEN International, one year after an initial meeting at the London Book Fair set the collaboration into motion. In addition to last year's 25,000-book shipment, 15,000 books will be donated this year to support war-affected libraries in Ukraine.
In the opening keynote session of this year's London Book Fair, Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, extolled the virtues of the company’s new status as "the largest independent publisher of adult and children’s trade books in the United States."
Even after two decades in the book business, Georgina Moore, deputy managing director of Midas, confesses she had much to learn from her own experience publishing and publicizing her debut novel on both sides of the Atlantic.
Just in time for the London Book Fair, Hello Sunshine has set up shop in the Sheraton Grand London Park Lane, a five-star Art Deco hotel just down the way from Buckingham Palace, where a new pop-up library and bookstore, Reese’s Book Club x Sheraton Lobby Library, has been installed.
Ziggy Hanaor, the founder of U.K. children's publishing house Cicada Books, offers her top tips for breaking into the American market, including asking for publicity help, using a single ISBN, and getting books to market six months before publication.
Welcome to Day One of the London Book Fair. If you need to choose which of the more than 150 panels and discussions offered by this year's Seminar Program you'll be checking out today, look no further.
The online rights database MatchWHALE, founded by Beatrice Lin, is set to add many more Korean titles to libraries and bookstores around the world.
With more than two decades of experience working in scholarly publishing, Amy Beisel has carved out a niche as a coach for publishers and their employees, helping them achieve their goals and undertake positive changes.
Amid a dispute over contract terms, Amazon has delisted e-book titles distributed by German digital distribution company Bookwire. While the exact number of delisted titles is not known, Bookwire distributes more than a million titles for publishers.
Sage Policy Profiles, a new web-based tool from Sage and Overton, lets researchers uncover and understand the influence their evidence-based research may have on public policy by identifying citations of their work. Sage associate v-p of corporate communications Camille Gamboa hopes that the tool will help scholars "better recognize the real-world impact of research."
New research from Europe on book procurement for libraries and schools finds that the process focuses too much on the cheapest prices rather than community impact, and suggests how it can be more fair—especially for small bookstores.
Kevin Hanson, president and publisher of S&S Canada, has left the company. Hanson's departure is the latest in a series of personnel changes since the acquisition of S&S by KKR last fall.
Inkitt, a German data-driven publishing company, is funding an expansion into AI-generated and personalized fiction, audiobooks, video, and games. It has raised more than $117 million total.
BookScan analyst Kristen McLean predicts romantasy should stay hot, but sees mixed signs for adult nonfiction.
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward signs a new three-book deal with Scribner, Bantam takes civil rights lawyer Ben Crump's fiction debut, and more.
A selection of the more than 150 panels and discussions featured on tap in the fair’s Seminar Program, including sessions on AI, audiobooks, BookTok, DEI, and the Freedom to read and publish.
British publishers discuss how transatlantic collaboration can boost books’ performance and the work it takes to maintain mutually beneficial relationships.
U.S. agents expect romantasy to be hot—and debut fiction not.
The London Book Fair embraces its new status as the first major publishing event of the year.
After its parent company was sold to private equity, the British subsidiary carries on with confidence, says CEO Ian Chapman.
Watkins Media’s head of marketing says that its unique titles, which span many categories—including the occult several countercultures—are finding success in the U.S.
At 50, the U.K. press is growing its list and expanding into new formats—all while keeping a sharp focus on libraries, which publisher Joanne Grant says "have always been our main market."
The managing director of Usborne Publishing reflects on the legacy of her father, the company’s founder, who died last year.
Dan Conway, the CEO of the U.K.’s Publishers Association, says that the U.S. and British industries have shared interests—even as they compete for rights and market share.
The London indie press started with a focus on nonfiction, but in the past decade has published three Booker Award–winning novels.
Katie Arora, the U.S. sales and marketing director for Michael O'Mara Books, describes the company’s strategies for engaging the U.S. market—including finding a niche in books on the royal family.
An independent publisher considers the challenges and opportunities for small presses in her home market.
At this year’s London Book Fair, U.S. agents will be talking up works by H.S. Cross, Laila Lalami, Casey McQuiston, Richard Price, Riley Sager, and others.
The managing director of Head of Zeus argues that the U.S. market presents a big opportunity for U.K. publishers, and is worth the effort to break through.
Editor Alex DiFrancesco explains the strategy Jessica Kingsley Publishers employs when publishing LGBTQ books on both sides of the Atlantic.
The managing director of the publishing startup describes her disruptive agenda and promises a list of "strong, game-changing voices."
A U.S.-based publishing exec for John Murray Press offers five pieces of advice on working with colleagues in the U.K.
The CEO of DK U.K. explains how the shift to remote work provided a vital connection to the U.S. and introduced new practices that helped grow sales by 20%.
The British illustrated reference publisher continues to reinvent itself a half-century on—and has used its anniversary milestone as a catalyst for examining new opportunities.
Martin Goodman, publisher of Barbican Press, describes his move from the U.K. to Los Angeles and the challenges of breaking into the U.S. market with transgressive and radical books.
Audiobook companies Storytel and BookBeat reported growth in sales and subscribers in 2023. Storytel, the larger of the two and parent company of Audiobooks.com, continues to struggle to improve its bottom line following a restructuring in 2022.
Thanks to the efforts of advocates, publishers, and grassroots initiatives, Indigenous representation in children's literature has expanded and evolved.
HarperVia will publish 'The Last Dream,' the debut collection of short stories by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne, on September 24, in print and audiobook formats.
Sales for the Italian book market reached €1.697 billion at cover price in 2023, a 0.8% increase from 2022. The increase is comparable to those in France and the U.K., which saw 1% growth for the year, and behind Germany's 2.9%.
Alex Correa, CEO of Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish-language books in the U.S., says the demand for Spanish-language titles continues to grow, noting Lectorum’s 2023 print sales were up 7% over 2022.
The Association of Canadian Publishers and l’Association nationale des éditeurs de livres have launched an online campaign urging the Canadian government to fulfill its promise to increase the Canada Book Fund.
Sally Rooney and Richard Osman were among the winners at this year's Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards, which celebrate titles that passed sales landmarks in print in the U.K. Nielsen reported that 199 million print books were sold in the U.K. in 2023.
The fair, to be held March 12–14, will have a dedicated space for audiobook exhibitors and discussions focused on AI, social media marketing, and translation. The National Literacy Trust and Book Aid International are its Charities of the Year.
German book trade magazine ‘Buchreport’ has ceased publication indefinitely. The ‘Spiegel’ bestseller lists, for which the magazine was responsible, will now be published by the trade magazine ‘BuchMarkt.’
With 'Buchreport' parent company Harenberg Kommunikation filing for bankruptcy and putting the magazine up for sale, some fear that the 'Spiegel' bestseller lists compiled by 'Buchreport' may disappear.
The annual Spanish-language fair attracted 857,000 attendees from around the world.
Sourcebooks and Penguin Random House North Asia have launched Callisto China, a new publishing house that will publish Chinese-language translations of Callisto titles in China.
The Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair kicked off on November 17 as the Chinese children's book market looks to put an end to slowing sales.
On February 1, Kwame Scott Fraser will step down from his role as president and publisher of Toronto-based independent publishing house Dundurn Press to focus on book acquisitions. The company has begun a search for his successor.
Officials expect 45,000 attendees at the fair, including a large number of international publishers; the fair will run November 17–19.
The Publishers Conference, which precedes the Sharjah International Book Fair, was held in the U.A.E. last weekend, and attracted more than 1,000 delegates from 106 countries.
The 2024 London Book Fair Author of the Day program will feature mystery writer Richard Osman, novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, Waterstones Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, and illustrator Flavia Z. Drago.
In Mexico, where there are 68 Indigenous languages but only 5.4% of the population speaks any of them, publishing books in such tongues as Seria and Zapotec pose challenges for publishers.
The cofounder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival says the event focuses on reaching a large but underserved audience.
The founding editor of Words Without Borders discusses some of the most exciting work being published in Spanish today.
As demand for Spanish-language books grows, publishers are finding diversity in Latin American markets.
Juan Milà is editorial director of HarperVia, an imprint at the HarperOne Group in the U.S., dedicated to publishing international voices. We spoke with Milà about the latest literary trends in the U.S., and around the world.
The most important book fair covering the Spanish language takes place November 25–December 3 in Mexico.
After another successful year of creating new relationships and building on long-term collaborations, Sharjah—the crown in the Arab book world—is back with the 42nd annual edition of one of the book world’s most anticipated events of the year.
How do booksellers keep up with the latest trends in a fast-changing world? It used to be simple: just read the newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. But now, with the rise of social media, blogs and podcasts, booksellers need to be more alert and adaptable than ever.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the Arabic book market is poised for a remarkable transformation driven by the escalating influence of AI, which I believe holds the promise of revolutionizing the reading experience for Arabic audiences by offering highly personalized book recommendations based on individual preferences, past choices, and real-time feedback.
Since 2011, the Sharjah Book Authority has been offering grant support for publishers looking to acquire rights while at the Sharjah International Book Fair.
The conference begins on November 7 with three preconference workshops. Entrepreneurs Need Libraries: How to Develop Your Entrepreneur Center will be collaboratively taught by librarians from the U.S. and Egypt.
In May this year, in a significant move aimed at promoting literature and the written word, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, announced the establishment of a dedicated Board of Directors for the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA). This decision reaffirmed Sharjah’s commitment to fostering a culture of reading and enhancing the emirate’s position as a global hub for the publishing industry.
The second Sharjah Booksellers Conference the U.A.E., held May 1-2, attracted some 200 booksellers and another 100 publishing professionals from across the world.
Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi has become the de facto ambassador for Arabic publishing around the world. As the recently appointed Chairperson of the new board of directors of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, and immediate past president of the International Publishers Association, she is in the leading position to help shape how the world engages with the Arabic language and literature, both at home in the U.A.E. and abroad. She spoke with us prior to this year’s fair.
Núria Cabutí is the CEO of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the largest Spanish-language publishing house in the world, which is based in Barcelona.
In September 2022 the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) announced two significant new awards for publishing rights professionals, to be presented each year at the Sharjah Publishers Conference. In 2022, Mauro Spagnol of Books-Everywhere was the inaugural winner of the category for an independent. rights professional.
Author MA Bennett is half Venetian, born in England and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She studied history at Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialised in the study of Shakespeare’s plays as a historical source, before going on to study art. She has since worked as an illustrator, an actress, and a film reviewer. She has also designed tour visuals for rock bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones.
Simon & Schuster (S&S) has recently been acquired by private equity firm KKR, ending a long process for S&S’s current owner Paramount who put the publishing company on the market back in 2020, with an acquisition bid by Penguin Random House blocked by U.S. courts late last year. Despite the long uncertainty surrounding their ownership, S&S has reported some extremely buoyant results over the past few years, with double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2023. In the U.K., S&S was named Publisher of the Year at the 2023 British Book Awards for the second year running and Children’s Publisher of the Year. Prior to the book fair we asked Ian Chapman, Chief Executive and Publisher, Simon & Schuster U.K. and International, how things are going.
Felix Francis is a British crime writer and Dick Francis’ younger son. He was a science teacher before quitting to look after his father’s literary affairs.
Elizabeth S. Moore has worked as a journalist since she won the Decanter Young Wine Writer of the Year at seventeen, writing columns and articles on restaurants, politics, South Africa and all things foodie.
Nielsen BookData, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic data and retail sales monitoring for print books, has partnered with the Emirates Publishers Association (EPA) to digitize title listings and boost the growth of the U.A.E.’s publishing industry.
This year’s winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s (ABC) International Excellence Award will be announced on October 30 at the 2023 Sharjah Publishers Conference, the first time that this prestigious award has been presented in the Middle East.
A new project set up to promote the translation and distribution of books from the Arabic-speaking literary scene into Europe, LEILA is funded by a European Union program and designed and implemented by iReMMO and ATLAS in France, BOZAR in Belgium and Federation Tunisienne des Editeurs in Tunisia.
Lightning Source Sharjah, the print-on-demand joint venture between Ingram Content Group’s (Ingram) Lightning Source LLC and the Sharjah Book Authority, is making more books accessible in the Arabic language and changing the way books are distributed in the Middle East.
A primary goal of the NYU Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts is teaching our students to understand the globalization of publishing and the needs and challenges of colleagues around the world.
A key objective and strength of the Sharjah Publishers Conference has been to connect publishers from the global publishing community with the African publishing world. This year’s African presence has increased again, with participants from 18 African countries (excluding North Africa/Arab countries), many of them Francophone, including Benin, Burkino Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius and Zaire for the first time, along with many returning participants.
Despite the state of world affairs, business appeared brisk, and the fair seemed to continue to bounce back from the pandemic, reporting 105,000 trade visitors from 130 countries.
Markus Dohle is the former global CEO of Penguin Random House. This past summer he was announced as one of the international members of the new board of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA).
RX, which owns the London Book Fair, has announced that Adam Ridgway, previously commercial director at RX, will take over as fair director. He replaces Gareth Rapley, who was in the position for two years.
At the recent Bologna Children's Book Fair, publishers from India's OM Books, France's Lizzie, and Spain's Grupo Planeta discussed how Indian diaspora populations and Francophone and Spanish speakers abroad have fueled sales growth.
The Bologna Children's Book Fair hosted several discussions focusing on the impact of AI on the publishing industry, ranging from those advocating for regulation of AI to others addressing how it can be harnessed to foster creativity and efficiency.
The 2024 winners of the seven categories of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, honoring excellence in Arabic-language publishing, come from the UAE, Tunisia, Germany, Egypt, and China. Each receives prize money of 750,000 UAE dirhams, approximately $204,000.
The third International Booksellers Conference will be held on April 27-28 in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. More than two hundred booksellers and publishing professionals from the region and around the world are expected to attend.
Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare' was the top-selling English-language print book in Canada in 2023, according to BookNet Canada. Total sales in the country topped C$1.1 billion last year.
Former Penguin Canada publisher Nicole Winstanley has been named president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Canada, succeeding Kevin Hanson, who left the company last month.
Next month’s Bologna Book Fair, the world’s largest rights fair devoted to children’s books, offers an extensive lineup of programming throughout the fair’s four days. Here are some of the highlights.
The Bologna Children’s Book Fair expands its global reach while remaining focused on its flagship program.
A extensive new study published by RISE Bookselling and the European and International Booksellers Federation covers six areas where bookstores can implement changes to best mitigate their impact on the environment.
Two panels at the London Book Fair on Thursday emphasized the ongoing challenge of giving opportunities to women and working-class people to write, publish, and advance themselves in the publishing and creative industries.
The European and International Booksellers Federation, International Authors Forum, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, International Publishers Association, and PEN International jointly released a statement on March 14 in response to "the increasing efforts to restrict books."
Panelists from Audible, Bookwire, Penguin Random House, Spotify, and Storytel discussed the state of audiobooks, noting that sales continue to boom and there are new opportunities arising from advancing technology and business models.
Fairgoers feel positive that this year's fair is, if not the biggest, then easily one of the biggest fairs since Covid, and definitely the most exciting—and shared a couple of contenders for the semi-mythical title of "book of the show."
You made it! Welcome to Day Three of the London Book Fair. There are still plenty of panels on the docket for today at this year's Seminar Program. Here are our recommendations.
They can generate (iterative) images. They can generate (iterative) text. But how will large language models change translation—especially for literary translators? A panel at the London Book Fair suggested some possible outcomes.
Several key European markets are seeing rapid growth in English-language book sales, threatening to cannibalize sales of translated editions published in their native markets, as the TikTok generation is increasingly happy to read in English.
On the first morning of the London Book Fair, the heads of the International Publishing Association, the Federation of European Publishers, the Association of American Publishers, and the African Publishers Network gathered to discuss, and debate, the biggest issues facing the publishing industry today.
Welcome to Day Two of the London Book Fair. If you still need to decide between the more than 150 panels and discussions available on tap for this year's Seminar Program, we've got some suggestions.
A busy first day at Olympia London has found publishers abuzz with business, cautiously optimistic about AI, and dismayed over world events.
The U.K.-based nonprofit Book Aid International has partnered with PEN Ukraine, English PEN, and PEN International, one year after an initial meeting at the London Book Fair set the collaboration into motion. In addition to last year's 25,000-book shipment, 15,000 books will be donated this year to support war-affected libraries in Ukraine.
In the opening keynote session of this year's London Book Fair, Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, extolled the virtues of the company’s new status as "the largest independent publisher of adult and children’s trade books in the United States."
Even after two decades in the book business, Georgina Moore, deputy managing director of Midas, confesses she had much to learn from her own experience publishing and publicizing her debut novel on both sides of the Atlantic.
Just in time for the London Book Fair, Hello Sunshine has set up shop in the Sheraton Grand London Park Lane, a five-star Art Deco hotel just down the way from Buckingham Palace, where a new pop-up library and bookstore, Reese’s Book Club x Sheraton Lobby Library, has been installed.
Ziggy Hanaor, the founder of U.K. children's publishing house Cicada Books, offers her top tips for breaking into the American market, including asking for publicity help, using a single ISBN, and getting books to market six months before publication.
Welcome to Day One of the London Book Fair. If you need to choose which of the more than 150 panels and discussions offered by this year's Seminar Program you'll be checking out today, look no further.
The online rights database MatchWHALE, founded by Beatrice Lin, is set to add many more Korean titles to libraries and bookstores around the world.
With more than two decades of experience working in scholarly publishing, Amy Beisel has carved out a niche as a coach for publishers and their employees, helping them achieve their goals and undertake positive changes.
Amid a dispute over contract terms, Amazon has delisted e-book titles distributed by German digital distribution company Bookwire. While the exact number of delisted titles is not known, Bookwire distributes more than a million titles for publishers.
Sage Policy Profiles, a new web-based tool from Sage and Overton, lets researchers uncover and understand the influence their evidence-based research may have on public policy by identifying citations of their work. Sage associate v-p of corporate communications Camille Gamboa hopes that the tool will help scholars "better recognize the real-world impact of research."
New research from Europe on book procurement for libraries and schools finds that the process focuses too much on the cheapest prices rather than community impact, and suggests how it can be more fair—especially for small bookstores.
Kevin Hanson, president and publisher of S&S Canada, has left the company. Hanson's departure is the latest in a series of personnel changes since the acquisition of S&S by KKR last fall.
Inkitt, a German data-driven publishing company, is funding an expansion into AI-generated and personalized fiction, audiobooks, video, and games. It has raised more than $117 million total.
BookScan analyst Kristen McLean predicts romantasy should stay hot, but sees mixed signs for adult nonfiction.
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward signs a new three-book deal with Scribner, Bantam takes civil rights lawyer Ben Crump's fiction debut, and more.
A selection of the more than 150 panels and discussions featured on tap in the fair’s Seminar Program, including sessions on AI, audiobooks, BookTok, DEI, and the Freedom to read and publish.
British publishers discuss how transatlantic collaboration can boost books’ performance and the work it takes to maintain mutually beneficial relationships.
U.S. agents expect romantasy to be hot—and debut fiction not.
The London Book Fair embraces its new status as the first major publishing event of the year.
After its parent company was sold to private equity, the British subsidiary carries on with confidence, says CEO Ian Chapman.
Watkins Media’s head of marketing says that its unique titles, which span many categories—including the occult several countercultures—are finding success in the U.S.
At 50, the U.K. press is growing its list and expanding into new formats—all while keeping a sharp focus on libraries, which publisher Joanne Grant says "have always been our main market."
The managing director of Usborne Publishing reflects on the legacy of her father, the company’s founder, who died last year.
Dan Conway, the CEO of the U.K.’s Publishers Association, says that the U.S. and British industries have shared interests—even as they compete for rights and market share.
The London indie press started with a focus on nonfiction, but in the past decade has published three Booker Award–winning novels.
Katie Arora, the U.S. sales and marketing director for Michael O'Mara Books, describes the company’s strategies for engaging the U.S. market—including finding a niche in books on the royal family.
An independent publisher considers the challenges and opportunities for small presses in her home market.
At this year’s London Book Fair, U.S. agents will be talking up works by H.S. Cross, Laila Lalami, Casey McQuiston, Richard Price, Riley Sager, and others.
The managing director of Head of Zeus argues that the U.S. market presents a big opportunity for U.K. publishers, and is worth the effort to break through.
Editor Alex DiFrancesco explains the strategy Jessica Kingsley Publishers employs when publishing LGBTQ books on both sides of the Atlantic.
The managing director of the publishing startup describes her disruptive agenda and promises a list of "strong, game-changing voices."
A U.S.-based publishing exec for John Murray Press offers five pieces of advice on working with colleagues in the U.K.
The CEO of DK U.K. explains how the shift to remote work provided a vital connection to the U.S. and introduced new practices that helped grow sales by 20%.
The British illustrated reference publisher continues to reinvent itself a half-century on—and has used its anniversary milestone as a catalyst for examining new opportunities.
Martin Goodman, publisher of Barbican Press, describes his move from the U.K. to Los Angeles and the challenges of breaking into the U.S. market with transgressive and radical books.
Audiobook companies Storytel and BookBeat reported growth in sales and subscribers in 2023. Storytel, the larger of the two and parent company of Audiobooks.com, continues to struggle to improve its bottom line following a restructuring in 2022.
Thanks to the efforts of advocates, publishers, and grassroots initiatives, Indigenous representation in children's literature has expanded and evolved.
HarperVia will publish 'The Last Dream,' the debut collection of short stories by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne, on September 24, in print and audiobook formats.
Sales for the Italian book market reached €1.697 billion at cover price in 2023, a 0.8% increase from 2022. The increase is comparable to those in France and the U.K., which saw 1% growth for the year, and behind Germany's 2.9%.
Alex Correa, CEO of Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish-language books in the U.S., says the demand for Spanish-language titles continues to grow, noting Lectorum’s 2023 print sales were up 7% over 2022.
The Association of Canadian Publishers and l’Association nationale des éditeurs de livres have launched an online campaign urging the Canadian government to fulfill its promise to increase the Canada Book Fund.
Sally Rooney and Richard Osman were among the winners at this year's Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards, which celebrate titles that passed sales landmarks in print in the U.K. Nielsen reported that 199 million print books were sold in the U.K. in 2023.
The fair, to be held March 12–14, will have a dedicated space for audiobook exhibitors and discussions focused on AI, social media marketing, and translation. The National Literacy Trust and Book Aid International are its Charities of the Year.
German book trade magazine ‘Buchreport’ has ceased publication indefinitely. The ‘Spiegel’ bestseller lists, for which the magazine was responsible, will now be published by the trade magazine ‘BuchMarkt.’
With 'Buchreport' parent company Harenberg Kommunikation filing for bankruptcy and putting the magazine up for sale, some fear that the 'Spiegel' bestseller lists compiled by 'Buchreport' may disappear.
The annual Spanish-language fair attracted 857,000 attendees from around the world.
Sourcebooks and Penguin Random House North Asia have launched Callisto China, a new publishing house that will publish Chinese-language translations of Callisto titles in China.
The Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair kicked off on November 17 as the Chinese children's book market looks to put an end to slowing sales.
On February 1, Kwame Scott Fraser will step down from his role as president and publisher of Toronto-based independent publishing house Dundurn Press to focus on book acquisitions. The company has begun a search for his successor.
Officials expect 45,000 attendees at the fair, including a large number of international publishers; the fair will run November 17–19.
The Publishers Conference, which precedes the Sharjah International Book Fair, was held in the U.A.E. last weekend, and attracted more than 1,000 delegates from 106 countries.
The 2024 London Book Fair Author of the Day program will feature mystery writer Richard Osman, novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, Waterstones Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, and illustrator Flavia Z. Drago.
In Mexico, where there are 68 Indigenous languages but only 5.4% of the population speaks any of them, publishing books in such tongues as Seria and Zapotec pose challenges for publishers.
The cofounder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival says the event focuses on reaching a large but underserved audience.
The founding editor of Words Without Borders discusses some of the most exciting work being published in Spanish today.
As demand for Spanish-language books grows, publishers are finding diversity in Latin American markets.
Juan Milà is editorial director of HarperVia, an imprint at the HarperOne Group in the U.S., dedicated to publishing international voices. We spoke with Milà about the latest literary trends in the U.S., and around the world.
The most important book fair covering the Spanish language takes place November 25–December 3 in Mexico.
After another successful year of creating new relationships and building on long-term collaborations, Sharjah—the crown in the Arab book world—is back with the 42nd annual edition of one of the book world’s most anticipated events of the year.
How do booksellers keep up with the latest trends in a fast-changing world? It used to be simple: just read the newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. But now, with the rise of social media, blogs and podcasts, booksellers need to be more alert and adaptable than ever.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the Arabic book market is poised for a remarkable transformation driven by the escalating influence of AI, which I believe holds the promise of revolutionizing the reading experience for Arabic audiences by offering highly personalized book recommendations based on individual preferences, past choices, and real-time feedback.
Since 2011, the Sharjah Book Authority has been offering grant support for publishers looking to acquire rights while at the Sharjah International Book Fair.
The conference begins on November 7 with three preconference workshops. Entrepreneurs Need Libraries: How to Develop Your Entrepreneur Center will be collaboratively taught by librarians from the U.S. and Egypt.
In May this year, in a significant move aimed at promoting literature and the written word, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, announced the establishment of a dedicated Board of Directors for the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA). This decision reaffirmed Sharjah’s commitment to fostering a culture of reading and enhancing the emirate’s position as a global hub for the publishing industry.
The second Sharjah Booksellers Conference the U.A.E., held May 1-2, attracted some 200 booksellers and another 100 publishing professionals from across the world.
Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi has become the de facto ambassador for Arabic publishing around the world. As the recently appointed Chairperson of the new board of directors of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, and immediate past president of the International Publishers Association, she is in the leading position to help shape how the world engages with the Arabic language and literature, both at home in the U.A.E. and abroad. She spoke with us prior to this year’s fair.
Núria Cabutí is the CEO of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the largest Spanish-language publishing house in the world, which is based in Barcelona.
In September 2022 the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) announced two significant new awards for publishing rights professionals, to be presented each year at the Sharjah Publishers Conference. In 2022, Mauro Spagnol of Books-Everywhere was the inaugural winner of the category for an independent. rights professional.
Author MA Bennett is half Venetian, born in England and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She studied history at Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialised in the study of Shakespeare’s plays as a historical source, before going on to study art. She has since worked as an illustrator, an actress, and a film reviewer. She has also designed tour visuals for rock bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones.
Simon & Schuster (S&S) has recently been acquired by private equity firm KKR, ending a long process for S&S’s current owner Paramount who put the publishing company on the market back in 2020, with an acquisition bid by Penguin Random House blocked by U.S. courts late last year. Despite the long uncertainty surrounding their ownership, S&S has reported some extremely buoyant results over the past few years, with double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2023. In the U.K., S&S was named Publisher of the Year at the 2023 British Book Awards for the second year running and Children’s Publisher of the Year. Prior to the book fair we asked Ian Chapman, Chief Executive and Publisher, Simon & Schuster U.K. and International, how things are going.
Felix Francis is a British crime writer and Dick Francis’ younger son. He was a science teacher before quitting to look after his father’s literary affairs.
Elizabeth S. Moore has worked as a journalist since she won the Decanter Young Wine Writer of the Year at seventeen, writing columns and articles on restaurants, politics, South Africa and all things foodie.
Nielsen BookData, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic data and retail sales monitoring for print books, has partnered with the Emirates Publishers Association (EPA) to digitize title listings and boost the growth of the U.A.E.’s publishing industry.
This year’s winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s (ABC) International Excellence Award will be announced on October 30 at the 2023 Sharjah Publishers Conference, the first time that this prestigious award has been presented in the Middle East.
A new project set up to promote the translation and distribution of books from the Arabic-speaking literary scene into Europe, LEILA is funded by a European Union program and designed and implemented by iReMMO and ATLAS in France, BOZAR in Belgium and Federation Tunisienne des Editeurs in Tunisia.
Lightning Source Sharjah, the print-on-demand joint venture between Ingram Content Group’s (Ingram) Lightning Source LLC and the Sharjah Book Authority, is making more books accessible in the Arabic language and changing the way books are distributed in the Middle East.
A primary goal of the NYU Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts is teaching our students to understand the globalization of publishing and the needs and challenges of colleagues around the world.
A key objective and strength of the Sharjah Publishers Conference has been to connect publishers from the global publishing community with the African publishing world. This year’s African presence has increased again, with participants from 18 African countries (excluding North Africa/Arab countries), many of them Francophone, including Benin, Burkino Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius and Zaire for the first time, along with many returning participants.
Despite the state of world affairs, business appeared brisk, and the fair seemed to continue to bounce back from the pandemic, reporting 105,000 trade visitors from 130 countries.
Markus Dohle is the former global CEO of Penguin Random House. This past summer he was announced as one of the international members of the new board of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA).
RX, which owns the London Book Fair, has announced that Adam Ridgway, previously commercial director at RX, will take over as fair director. He replaces Gareth Rapley, who was in the position for two years.
At the recent Bologna Children's Book Fair, publishers from India's OM Books, France's Lizzie, and Spain's Grupo Planeta discussed how Indian diaspora populations and Francophone and Spanish speakers abroad have fueled sales growth.
The Bologna Children's Book Fair hosted several discussions focusing on the impact of AI on the publishing industry, ranging from those advocating for regulation of AI to others addressing how it can be harnessed to foster creativity and efficiency.
The 2024 winners of the seven categories of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, honoring excellence in Arabic-language publishing, come from the UAE, Tunisia, Germany, Egypt, and China. Each receives prize money of 750,000 UAE dirhams, approximately $204,000.
The third International Booksellers Conference will be held on April 27-28 in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. More than two hundred booksellers and publishing professionals from the region and around the world are expected to attend.
Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare' was the top-selling English-language print book in Canada in 2023, according to BookNet Canada. Total sales in the country topped C$1.1 billion last year.
Former Penguin Canada publisher Nicole Winstanley has been named president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Canada, succeeding Kevin Hanson, who left the company last month.
Next month’s Bologna Book Fair, the world’s largest rights fair devoted to children’s books, offers an extensive lineup of programming throughout the fair’s four days. Here are some of the highlights.
The Bologna Children’s Book Fair expands its global reach while remaining focused on its flagship program.
A extensive new study published by RISE Bookselling and the European and International Booksellers Federation covers six areas where bookstores can implement changes to best mitigate their impact on the environment.
Two panels at the London Book Fair on Thursday emphasized the ongoing challenge of giving opportunities to women and working-class people to write, publish, and advance themselves in the publishing and creative industries.
The European and International Booksellers Federation, International Authors Forum, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, International Publishers Association, and PEN International jointly released a statement on March 14 in response to "the increasing efforts to restrict books."
Panelists from Audible, Bookwire, Penguin Random House, Spotify, and Storytel discussed the state of audiobooks, noting that sales continue to boom and there are new opportunities arising from advancing technology and business models.
Fairgoers feel positive that this year's fair is, if not the biggest, then easily one of the biggest fairs since Covid, and definitely the most exciting—and shared a couple of contenders for the semi-mythical title of "book of the show."
You made it! Welcome to Day Three of the London Book Fair. There are still plenty of panels on the docket for today at this year's Seminar Program. Here are our recommendations.
They can generate (iterative) images. They can generate (iterative) text. But how will large language models change translation—especially for literary translators? A panel at the London Book Fair suggested some possible outcomes.
Several key European markets are seeing rapid growth in English-language book sales, threatening to cannibalize sales of translated editions published in their native markets, as the TikTok generation is increasingly happy to read in English.
On the first morning of the London Book Fair, the heads of the International Publishing Association, the Federation of European Publishers, the Association of American Publishers, and the African Publishers Network gathered to discuss, and debate, the biggest issues facing the publishing industry today.
Welcome to Day Two of the London Book Fair. If you still need to decide between the more than 150 panels and discussions available on tap for this year's Seminar Program, we've got some suggestions.
A busy first day at Olympia London has found publishers abuzz with business, cautiously optimistic about AI, and dismayed over world events.
The U.K.-based nonprofit Book Aid International has partnered with PEN Ukraine, English PEN, and PEN International, one year after an initial meeting at the London Book Fair set the collaboration into motion. In addition to last year's 25,000-book shipment, 15,000 books will be donated this year to support war-affected libraries in Ukraine.
In the opening keynote session of this year's London Book Fair, Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, extolled the virtues of the company’s new status as "the largest independent publisher of adult and children’s trade books in the United States."
Even after two decades in the book business, Georgina Moore, deputy managing director of Midas, confesses she had much to learn from her own experience publishing and publicizing her debut novel on both sides of the Atlantic.
Just in time for the London Book Fair, Hello Sunshine has set up shop in the Sheraton Grand London Park Lane, a five-star Art Deco hotel just down the way from Buckingham Palace, where a new pop-up library and bookstore, Reese’s Book Club x Sheraton Lobby Library, has been installed.
Ziggy Hanaor, the founder of U.K. children's publishing house Cicada Books, offers her top tips for breaking into the American market, including asking for publicity help, using a single ISBN, and getting books to market six months before publication.
Welcome to Day One of the London Book Fair. If you need to choose which of the more than 150 panels and discussions offered by this year's Seminar Program you'll be checking out today, look no further.
The online rights database MatchWHALE, founded by Beatrice Lin, is set to add many more Korean titles to libraries and bookstores around the world.
With more than two decades of experience working in scholarly publishing, Amy Beisel has carved out a niche as a coach for publishers and their employees, helping them achieve their goals and undertake positive changes.
Amid a dispute over contract terms, Amazon has delisted e-book titles distributed by German digital distribution company Bookwire. While the exact number of delisted titles is not known, Bookwire distributes more than a million titles for publishers.
Sage Policy Profiles, a new web-based tool from Sage and Overton, lets researchers uncover and understand the influence their evidence-based research may have on public policy by identifying citations of their work. Sage associate v-p of corporate communications Camille Gamboa hopes that the tool will help scholars "better recognize the real-world impact of research."
New research from Europe on book procurement for libraries and schools finds that the process focuses too much on the cheapest prices rather than community impact, and suggests how it can be more fair—especially for small bookstores.
Kevin Hanson, president and publisher of S&S Canada, has left the company. Hanson's departure is the latest in a series of personnel changes since the acquisition of S&S by KKR last fall.
Inkitt, a German data-driven publishing company, is funding an expansion into AI-generated and personalized fiction, audiobooks, video, and games. It has raised more than $117 million total.
BookScan analyst Kristen McLean predicts romantasy should stay hot, but sees mixed signs for adult nonfiction.
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward signs a new three-book deal with Scribner, Bantam takes civil rights lawyer Ben Crump's fiction debut, and more.
A selection of the more than 150 panels and discussions featured on tap in the fair’s Seminar Program, including sessions on AI, audiobooks, BookTok, DEI, and the Freedom to read and publish.
British publishers discuss how transatlantic collaboration can boost books’ performance and the work it takes to maintain mutually beneficial relationships.
U.S. agents expect romantasy to be hot—and debut fiction not.
The London Book Fair embraces its new status as the first major publishing event of the year.
After its parent company was sold to private equity, the British subsidiary carries on with confidence, says CEO Ian Chapman.
Watkins Media’s head of marketing says that its unique titles, which span many categories—including the occult several countercultures—are finding success in the U.S.
At 50, the U.K. press is growing its list and expanding into new formats—all while keeping a sharp focus on libraries, which publisher Joanne Grant says "have always been our main market."
The managing director of Usborne Publishing reflects on the legacy of her father, the company’s founder, who died last year.
Dan Conway, the CEO of the U.K.’s Publishers Association, says that the U.S. and British industries have shared interests—even as they compete for rights and market share.
The London indie press started with a focus on nonfiction, but in the past decade has published three Booker Award–winning novels.
Katie Arora, the U.S. sales and marketing director for Michael O'Mara Books, describes the company’s strategies for engaging the U.S. market—including finding a niche in books on the royal family.
An independent publisher considers the challenges and opportunities for small presses in her home market.
At this year’s London Book Fair, U.S. agents will be talking up works by H.S. Cross, Laila Lalami, Casey McQuiston, Richard Price, Riley Sager, and others.
The managing director of Head of Zeus argues that the U.S. market presents a big opportunity for U.K. publishers, and is worth the effort to break through.
Editor Alex DiFrancesco explains the strategy Jessica Kingsley Publishers employs when publishing LGBTQ books on both sides of the Atlantic.
The managing director of the publishing startup describes her disruptive agenda and promises a list of "strong, game-changing voices."
A U.S.-based publishing exec for John Murray Press offers five pieces of advice on working with colleagues in the U.K.
The CEO of DK U.K. explains how the shift to remote work provided a vital connection to the U.S. and introduced new practices that helped grow sales by 20%.
The British illustrated reference publisher continues to reinvent itself a half-century on—and has used its anniversary milestone as a catalyst for examining new opportunities.
Martin Goodman, publisher of Barbican Press, describes his move from the U.K. to Los Angeles and the challenges of breaking into the U.S. market with transgressive and radical books.
Audiobook companies Storytel and BookBeat reported growth in sales and subscribers in 2023. Storytel, the larger of the two and parent company of Audiobooks.com, continues to struggle to improve its bottom line following a restructuring in 2022.
Thanks to the efforts of advocates, publishers, and grassroots initiatives, Indigenous representation in children's literature has expanded and evolved.
HarperVia will publish 'The Last Dream,' the debut collection of short stories by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne, on September 24, in print and audiobook formats.
Sales for the Italian book market reached €1.697 billion at cover price in 2023, a 0.8% increase from 2022. The increase is comparable to those in France and the U.K., which saw 1% growth for the year, and behind Germany's 2.9%.
Alex Correa, CEO of Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish-language books in the U.S., says the demand for Spanish-language titles continues to grow, noting Lectorum’s 2023 print sales were up 7% over 2022.
The Association of Canadian Publishers and l’Association nationale des éditeurs de livres have launched an online campaign urging the Canadian government to fulfill its promise to increase the Canada Book Fund.
Sally Rooney and Richard Osman were among the winners at this year's Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards, which celebrate titles that passed sales landmarks in print in the U.K. Nielsen reported that 199 million print books were sold in the U.K. in 2023.
The fair, to be held March 12–14, will have a dedicated space for audiobook exhibitors and discussions focused on AI, social media marketing, and translation. The National Literacy Trust and Book Aid International are its Charities of the Year.
German book trade magazine ‘Buchreport’ has ceased publication indefinitely. The ‘Spiegel’ bestseller lists, for which the magazine was responsible, will now be published by the trade magazine ‘BuchMarkt.’
With 'Buchreport' parent company Harenberg Kommunikation filing for bankruptcy and putting the magazine up for sale, some fear that the 'Spiegel' bestseller lists compiled by 'Buchreport' may disappear.
The annual Spanish-language fair attracted 857,000 attendees from around the world.
Sourcebooks and Penguin Random House North Asia have launched Callisto China, a new publishing house that will publish Chinese-language translations of Callisto titles in China.
The Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair kicked off on November 17 as the Chinese children's book market looks to put an end to slowing sales.
On February 1, Kwame Scott Fraser will step down from his role as president and publisher of Toronto-based independent publishing house Dundurn Press to focus on book acquisitions. The company has begun a search for his successor.
Officials expect 45,000 attendees at the fair, including a large number of international publishers; the fair will run November 17–19.
The Publishers Conference, which precedes the Sharjah International Book Fair, was held in the U.A.E. last weekend, and attracted more than 1,000 delegates from 106 countries.
The 2024 London Book Fair Author of the Day program will feature mystery writer Richard Osman, novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, Waterstones Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, and illustrator Flavia Z. Drago.
In Mexico, where there are 68 Indigenous languages but only 5.4% of the population speaks any of them, publishing books in such tongues as Seria and Zapotec pose challenges for publishers.
The cofounder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival says the event focuses on reaching a large but underserved audience.
The founding editor of Words Without Borders discusses some of the most exciting work being published in Spanish today.
As demand for Spanish-language books grows, publishers are finding diversity in Latin American markets.
Juan Milà is editorial director of HarperVia, an imprint at the HarperOne Group in the U.S., dedicated to publishing international voices. We spoke with Milà about the latest literary trends in the U.S., and around the world.
The most important book fair covering the Spanish language takes place November 25–December 3 in Mexico.
After another successful year of creating new relationships and building on long-term collaborations, Sharjah—the crown in the Arab book world—is back with the 42nd annual edition of one of the book world’s most anticipated events of the year.
How do booksellers keep up with the latest trends in a fast-changing world? It used to be simple: just read the newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. But now, with the rise of social media, blogs and podcasts, booksellers need to be more alert and adaptable than ever.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the Arabic book market is poised for a remarkable transformation driven by the escalating influence of AI, which I believe holds the promise of revolutionizing the reading experience for Arabic audiences by offering highly personalized book recommendations based on individual preferences, past choices, and real-time feedback.
Since 2011, the Sharjah Book Authority has been offering grant support for publishers looking to acquire rights while at the Sharjah International Book Fair.
The conference begins on November 7 with three preconference workshops. Entrepreneurs Need Libraries: How to Develop Your Entrepreneur Center will be collaboratively taught by librarians from the U.S. and Egypt.
In May this year, in a significant move aimed at promoting literature and the written word, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, announced the establishment of a dedicated Board of Directors for the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA). This decision reaffirmed Sharjah’s commitment to fostering a culture of reading and enhancing the emirate’s position as a global hub for the publishing industry.
The second Sharjah Booksellers Conference the U.A.E., held May 1-2, attracted some 200 booksellers and another 100 publishing professionals from across the world.
Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi has become the de facto ambassador for Arabic publishing around the world. As the recently appointed Chairperson of the new board of directors of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, and immediate past president of the International Publishers Association, she is in the leading position to help shape how the world engages with the Arabic language and literature, both at home in the U.A.E. and abroad. She spoke with us prior to this year’s fair.
Núria Cabutí is the CEO of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the largest Spanish-language publishing house in the world, which is based in Barcelona.
In September 2022 the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) announced two significant new awards for publishing rights professionals, to be presented each year at the Sharjah Publishers Conference. In 2022, Mauro Spagnol of Books-Everywhere was the inaugural winner of the category for an independent. rights professional.
Author MA Bennett is half Venetian, born in England and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She studied history at Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialised in the study of Shakespeare’s plays as a historical source, before going on to study art. She has since worked as an illustrator, an actress, and a film reviewer. She has also designed tour visuals for rock bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones.
Simon & Schuster (S&S) has recently been acquired by private equity firm KKR, ending a long process for S&S’s current owner Paramount who put the publishing company on the market back in 2020, with an acquisition bid by Penguin Random House blocked by U.S. courts late last year. Despite the long uncertainty surrounding their ownership, S&S has reported some extremely buoyant results over the past few years, with double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2023. In the U.K., S&S was named Publisher of the Year at the 2023 British Book Awards for the second year running and Children’s Publisher of the Year. Prior to the book fair we asked Ian Chapman, Chief Executive and Publisher, Simon & Schuster U.K. and International, how things are going.
Felix Francis is a British crime writer and Dick Francis’ younger son. He was a science teacher before quitting to look after his father’s literary affairs.
Elizabeth S. Moore has worked as a journalist since she won the Decanter Young Wine Writer of the Year at seventeen, writing columns and articles on restaurants, politics, South Africa and all things foodie.
Nielsen BookData, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic data and retail sales monitoring for print books, has partnered with the Emirates Publishers Association (EPA) to digitize title listings and boost the growth of the U.A.E.’s publishing industry.
This year’s winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s (ABC) International Excellence Award will be announced on October 30 at the 2023 Sharjah Publishers Conference, the first time that this prestigious award has been presented in the Middle East.
A new project set up to promote the translation and distribution of books from the Arabic-speaking literary scene into Europe, LEILA is funded by a European Union program and designed and implemented by iReMMO and ATLAS in France, BOZAR in Belgium and Federation Tunisienne des Editeurs in Tunisia.
Lightning Source Sharjah, the print-on-demand joint venture between Ingram Content Group’s (Ingram) Lightning Source LLC and the Sharjah Book Authority, is making more books accessible in the Arabic language and changing the way books are distributed in the Middle East.
A primary goal of the NYU Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts is teaching our students to understand the globalization of publishing and the needs and challenges of colleagues around the world.
A key objective and strength of the Sharjah Publishers Conference has been to connect publishers from the global publishing community with the African publishing world. This year’s African presence has increased again, with participants from 18 African countries (excluding North Africa/Arab countries), many of them Francophone, including Benin, Burkino Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius and Zaire for the first time, along with many returning participants.
Despite the state of world affairs, business appeared brisk, and the fair seemed to continue to bounce back from the pandemic, reporting 105,000 trade visitors from 130 countries.
Markus Dohle is the former global CEO of Penguin Random House. This past summer he was announced as one of the international members of the new board of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA).
RX, which owns the London Book Fair, has announced that Adam Ridgway, previously commercial director at RX, will take over as fair director. He replaces Gareth Rapley, who was in the position for two years.
At the recent Bologna Children's Book Fair, publishers from India's OM Books, France's Lizzie, and Spain's Grupo Planeta discussed how Indian diaspora populations and Francophone and Spanish speakers abroad have fueled sales growth.
The Bologna Children's Book Fair hosted several discussions focusing on the impact of AI on the publishing industry, ranging from those advocating for regulation of AI to others addressing how it can be harnessed to foster creativity and efficiency.
The 2024 winners of the seven categories of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, honoring excellence in Arabic-language publishing, come from the UAE, Tunisia, Germany, Egypt, and China. Each receives prize money of 750,000 UAE dirhams, approximately $204,000.
The third International Booksellers Conference will be held on April 27-28 in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. More than two hundred booksellers and publishing professionals from the region and around the world are expected to attend.
Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare' was the top-selling English-language print book in Canada in 2023, according to BookNet Canada. Total sales in the country topped C$1.1 billion last year.
Former Penguin Canada publisher Nicole Winstanley has been named president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Canada, succeeding Kevin Hanson, who left the company last month.
Next month’s Bologna Book Fair, the world’s largest rights fair devoted to children’s books, offers an extensive lineup of programming throughout the fair’s four days. Here are some of the highlights.
The Bologna Children’s Book Fair expands its global reach while remaining focused on its flagship program.
A extensive new study published by RISE Bookselling and the European and International Booksellers Federation covers six areas where bookstores can implement changes to best mitigate their impact on the environment.
Two panels at the London Book Fair on Thursday emphasized the ongoing challenge of giving opportunities to women and working-class people to write, publish, and advance themselves in the publishing and creative industries.
The European and International Booksellers Federation, International Authors Forum, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, International Publishers Association, and PEN International jointly released a statement on March 14 in response to "the increasing efforts to restrict books."
Panelists from Audible, Bookwire, Penguin Random House, Spotify, and Storytel discussed the state of audiobooks, noting that sales continue to boom and there are new opportunities arising from advancing technology and business models.
Fairgoers feel positive that this year's fair is, if not the biggest, then easily one of the biggest fairs since Covid, and definitely the most exciting—and shared a couple of contenders for the semi-mythical title of "book of the show."
You made it! Welcome to Day Three of the London Book Fair. There are still plenty of panels on the docket for today at this year's Seminar Program. Here are our recommendations.
They can generate (iterative) images. They can generate (iterative) text. But how will large language models change translation—especially for literary translators? A panel at the London Book Fair suggested some possible outcomes.
Several key European markets are seeing rapid growth in English-language book sales, threatening to cannibalize sales of translated editions published in their native markets, as the TikTok generation is increasingly happy to read in English.
On the first morning of the London Book Fair, the heads of the International Publishing Association, the Federation of European Publishers, the Association of American Publishers, and the African Publishers Network gathered to discuss, and debate, the biggest issues facing the publishing industry today.
Welcome to Day Two of the London Book Fair. If you still need to decide between the more than 150 panels and discussions available on tap for this year's Seminar Program, we've got some suggestions.
A busy first day at Olympia London has found publishers abuzz with business, cautiously optimistic about AI, and dismayed over world events.
The U.K.-based nonprofit Book Aid International has partnered with PEN Ukraine, English PEN, and PEN International, one year after an initial meeting at the London Book Fair set the collaboration into motion. In addition to last year's 25,000-book shipment, 15,000 books will be donated this year to support war-affected libraries in Ukraine.
In the opening keynote session of this year's London Book Fair, Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, extolled the virtues of the company’s new status as "the largest independent publisher of adult and children’s trade books in the United States."
Even after two decades in the book business, Georgina Moore, deputy managing director of Midas, confesses she had much to learn from her own experience publishing and publicizing her debut novel on both sides of the Atlantic.
Just in time for the London Book Fair, Hello Sunshine has set up shop in the Sheraton Grand London Park Lane, a five-star Art Deco hotel just down the way from Buckingham Palace, where a new pop-up library and bookstore, Reese’s Book Club x Sheraton Lobby Library, has been installed.
Ziggy Hanaor, the founder of U.K. children's publishing house Cicada Books, offers her top tips for breaking into the American market, including asking for publicity help, using a single ISBN, and getting books to market six months before publication.
Welcome to Day One of the London Book Fair. If you need to choose which of the more than 150 panels and discussions offered by this year's Seminar Program you'll be checking out today, look no further.
The online rights database MatchWHALE, founded by Beatrice Lin, is set to add many more Korean titles to libraries and bookstores around the world.
With more than two decades of experience working in scholarly publishing, Amy Beisel has carved out a niche as a coach for publishers and their employees, helping them achieve their goals and undertake positive changes.
Amid a dispute over contract terms, Amazon has delisted e-book titles distributed by German digital distribution company Bookwire. While the exact number of delisted titles is not known, Bookwire distributes more than a million titles for publishers.
Sage Policy Profiles, a new web-based tool from Sage and Overton, lets researchers uncover and understand the influence their evidence-based research may have on public policy by identifying citations of their work. Sage associate v-p of corporate communications Camille Gamboa hopes that the tool will help scholars "better recognize the real-world impact of research."
New research from Europe on book procurement for libraries and schools finds that the process focuses too much on the cheapest prices rather than community impact, and suggests how it can be more fair—especially for small bookstores.
Kevin Hanson, president and publisher of S&S Canada, has left the company. Hanson's departure is the latest in a series of personnel changes since the acquisition of S&S by KKR last fall.
Inkitt, a German data-driven publishing company, is funding an expansion into AI-generated and personalized fiction, audiobooks, video, and games. It has raised more than $117 million total.
BookScan analyst Kristen McLean predicts romantasy should stay hot, but sees mixed signs for adult nonfiction.
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward signs a new three-book deal with Scribner, Bantam takes civil rights lawyer Ben Crump's fiction debut, and more.
A selection of the more than 150 panels and discussions featured on tap in the fair’s Seminar Program, including sessions on AI, audiobooks, BookTok, DEI, and the Freedom to read and publish.
British publishers discuss how transatlantic collaboration can boost books’ performance and the work it takes to maintain mutually beneficial relationships.
U.S. agents expect romantasy to be hot—and debut fiction not.
The London Book Fair embraces its new status as the first major publishing event of the year.
After its parent company was sold to private equity, the British subsidiary carries on with confidence, says CEO Ian Chapman.
Watkins Media’s head of marketing says that its unique titles, which span many categories—including the occult several countercultures—are finding success in the U.S.
At 50, the U.K. press is growing its list and expanding into new formats—all while keeping a sharp focus on libraries, which publisher Joanne Grant says "have always been our main market."
The managing director of Usborne Publishing reflects on the legacy of her father, the company’s founder, who died last year.
Dan Conway, the CEO of the U.K.’s Publishers Association, says that the U.S. and British industries have shared interests—even as they compete for rights and market share.
The London indie press started with a focus on nonfiction, but in the past decade has published three Booker Award–winning novels.
Katie Arora, the U.S. sales and marketing director for Michael O'Mara Books, describes the company’s strategies for engaging the U.S. market—including finding a niche in books on the royal family.
An independent publisher considers the challenges and opportunities for small presses in her home market.
At this year’s London Book Fair, U.S. agents will be talking up works by H.S. Cross, Laila Lalami, Casey McQuiston, Richard Price, Riley Sager, and others.
The managing director of Head of Zeus argues that the U.S. market presents a big opportunity for U.K. publishers, and is worth the effort to break through.
Editor Alex DiFrancesco explains the strategy Jessica Kingsley Publishers employs when publishing LGBTQ books on both sides of the Atlantic.
The managing director of the publishing startup describes her disruptive agenda and promises a list of "strong, game-changing voices."
A U.S.-based publishing exec for John Murray Press offers five pieces of advice on working with colleagues in the U.K.
The CEO of DK U.K. explains how the shift to remote work provided a vital connection to the U.S. and introduced new practices that helped grow sales by 20%.
The British illustrated reference publisher continues to reinvent itself a half-century on—and has used its anniversary milestone as a catalyst for examining new opportunities.
Martin Goodman, publisher of Barbican Press, describes his move from the U.K. to Los Angeles and the challenges of breaking into the U.S. market with transgressive and radical books.
Audiobook companies Storytel and BookBeat reported growth in sales and subscribers in 2023. Storytel, the larger of the two and parent company of Audiobooks.com, continues to struggle to improve its bottom line following a restructuring in 2022.
Thanks to the efforts of advocates, publishers, and grassroots initiatives, Indigenous representation in children's literature has expanded and evolved.
HarperVia will publish 'The Last Dream,' the debut collection of short stories by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne, on September 24, in print and audiobook formats.
Sales for the Italian book market reached €1.697 billion at cover price in 2023, a 0.8% increase from 2022. The increase is comparable to those in France and the U.K., which saw 1% growth for the year, and behind Germany's 2.9%.
Alex Correa, CEO of Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish-language books in the U.S., says the demand for Spanish-language titles continues to grow, noting Lectorum’s 2023 print sales were up 7% over 2022.
The Association of Canadian Publishers and l’Association nationale des éditeurs de livres have launched an online campaign urging the Canadian government to fulfill its promise to increase the Canada Book Fund.
Sally Rooney and Richard Osman were among the winners at this year's Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards, which celebrate titles that passed sales landmarks in print in the U.K. Nielsen reported that 199 million print books were sold in the U.K. in 2023.
The fair, to be held March 12–14, will have a dedicated space for audiobook exhibitors and discussions focused on AI, social media marketing, and translation. The National Literacy Trust and Book Aid International are its Charities of the Year.
German book trade magazine ‘Buchreport’ has ceased publication indefinitely. The ‘Spiegel’ bestseller lists, for which the magazine was responsible, will now be published by the trade magazine ‘BuchMarkt.’
With 'Buchreport' parent company Harenberg Kommunikation filing for bankruptcy and putting the magazine up for sale, some fear that the 'Spiegel' bestseller lists compiled by 'Buchreport' may disappear.
The annual Spanish-language fair attracted 857,000 attendees from around the world.
Sourcebooks and Penguin Random House North Asia have launched Callisto China, a new publishing house that will publish Chinese-language translations of Callisto titles in China.
The Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair kicked off on November 17 as the Chinese children's book market looks to put an end to slowing sales.
On February 1, Kwame Scott Fraser will step down from his role as president and publisher of Toronto-based independent publishing house Dundurn Press to focus on book acquisitions. The company has begun a search for his successor.
Officials expect 45,000 attendees at the fair, including a large number of international publishers; the fair will run November 17–19.
The Publishers Conference, which precedes the Sharjah International Book Fair, was held in the U.A.E. last weekend, and attracted more than 1,000 delegates from 106 countries.
The 2024 London Book Fair Author of the Day program will feature mystery writer Richard Osman, novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, Waterstones Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, and illustrator Flavia Z. Drago.
In Mexico, where there are 68 Indigenous languages but only 5.4% of the population speaks any of them, publishing books in such tongues as Seria and Zapotec pose challenges for publishers.
The cofounder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival says the event focuses on reaching a large but underserved audience.
The founding editor of Words Without Borders discusses some of the most exciting work being published in Spanish today.
As demand for Spanish-language books grows, publishers are finding diversity in Latin American markets.
Juan Milà is editorial director of HarperVia, an imprint at the HarperOne Group in the U.S., dedicated to publishing international voices. We spoke with Milà about the latest literary trends in the U.S., and around the world.
The most important book fair covering the Spanish language takes place November 25–December 3 in Mexico.
After another successful year of creating new relationships and building on long-term collaborations, Sharjah—the crown in the Arab book world—is back with the 42nd annual edition of one of the book world’s most anticipated events of the year.
How do booksellers keep up with the latest trends in a fast-changing world? It used to be simple: just read the newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. But now, with the rise of social media, blogs and podcasts, booksellers need to be more alert and adaptable than ever.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the Arabic book market is poised for a remarkable transformation driven by the escalating influence of AI, which I believe holds the promise of revolutionizing the reading experience for Arabic audiences by offering highly personalized book recommendations based on individual preferences, past choices, and real-time feedback.
Since 2011, the Sharjah Book Authority has been offering grant support for publishers looking to acquire rights while at the Sharjah International Book Fair.
The conference begins on November 7 with three preconference workshops. Entrepreneurs Need Libraries: How to Develop Your Entrepreneur Center will be collaboratively taught by librarians from the U.S. and Egypt.
In May this year, in a significant move aimed at promoting literature and the written word, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, announced the establishment of a dedicated Board of Directors for the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA). This decision reaffirmed Sharjah’s commitment to fostering a culture of reading and enhancing the emirate’s position as a global hub for the publishing industry.
The second Sharjah Booksellers Conference the U.A.E., held May 1-2, attracted some 200 booksellers and another 100 publishing professionals from across the world.
Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi has become the de facto ambassador for Arabic publishing around the world. As the recently appointed Chairperson of the new board of directors of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, and immediate past president of the International Publishers Association, she is in the leading position to help shape how the world engages with the Arabic language and literature, both at home in the U.A.E. and abroad. She spoke with us prior to this year’s fair.
Núria Cabutí is the CEO of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the largest Spanish-language publishing house in the world, which is based in Barcelona.
In September 2022 the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) announced two significant new awards for publishing rights professionals, to be presented each year at the Sharjah Publishers Conference. In 2022, Mauro Spagnol of Books-Everywhere was the inaugural winner of the category for an independent. rights professional.
Author MA Bennett is half Venetian, born in England and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She studied history at Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialised in the study of Shakespeare’s plays as a historical source, before going on to study art. She has since worked as an illustrator, an actress, and a film reviewer. She has also designed tour visuals for rock bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones.
Simon & Schuster (S&S) has recently been acquired by private equity firm KKR, ending a long process for S&S’s current owner Paramount who put the publishing company on the market back in 2020, with an acquisition bid by Penguin Random House blocked by U.S. courts late last year. Despite the long uncertainty surrounding their ownership, S&S has reported some extremely buoyant results over the past few years, with double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2023. In the U.K., S&S was named Publisher of the Year at the 2023 British Book Awards for the second year running and Children’s Publisher of the Year. Prior to the book fair we asked Ian Chapman, Chief Executive and Publisher, Simon & Schuster U.K. and International, how things are going.
Felix Francis is a British crime writer and Dick Francis’ younger son. He was a science teacher before quitting to look after his father’s literary affairs.
Elizabeth S. Moore has worked as a journalist since she won the Decanter Young Wine Writer of the Year at seventeen, writing columns and articles on restaurants, politics, South Africa and all things foodie.
Nielsen BookData, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic data and retail sales monitoring for print books, has partnered with the Emirates Publishers Association (EPA) to digitize title listings and boost the growth of the U.A.E.’s publishing industry.
This year’s winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s (ABC) International Excellence Award will be announced on October 30 at the 2023 Sharjah Publishers Conference, the first time that this prestigious award has been presented in the Middle East.
A new project set up to promote the translation and distribution of books from the Arabic-speaking literary scene into Europe, LEILA is funded by a European Union program and designed and implemented by iReMMO and ATLAS in France, BOZAR in Belgium and Federation Tunisienne des Editeurs in Tunisia.
Lightning Source Sharjah, the print-on-demand joint venture between Ingram Content Group’s (Ingram) Lightning Source LLC and the Sharjah Book Authority, is making more books accessible in the Arabic language and changing the way books are distributed in the Middle East.
A primary goal of the NYU Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts is teaching our students to understand the globalization of publishing and the needs and challenges of colleagues around the world.
A key objective and strength of the Sharjah Publishers Conference has been to connect publishers from the global publishing community with the African publishing world. This year’s African presence has increased again, with participants from 18 African countries (excluding North Africa/Arab countries), many of them Francophone, including Benin, Burkino Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius and Zaire for the first time, along with many returning participants.
Despite the state of world affairs, business appeared brisk, and the fair seemed to continue to bounce back from the pandemic, reporting 105,000 trade visitors from 130 countries.
Markus Dohle is the former global CEO of Penguin Random House. This past summer he was announced as one of the international members of the new board of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA).
RX, which owns the London Book Fair, has announced that Adam Ridgway, previously commercial director at RX, will take over as fair director. He replaces Gareth Rapley, who was in the position for two years.
At the recent Bologna Children's Book Fair, publishers from India's OM Books, France's Lizzie, and Spain's Grupo Planeta discussed how Indian diaspora populations and Francophone and Spanish speakers abroad have fueled sales growth.
The Bologna Children's Book Fair hosted several discussions focusing on the impact of AI on the publishing industry, ranging from those advocating for regulation of AI to others addressing how it can be harnessed to foster creativity and efficiency.
The 2024 winners of the seven categories of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, honoring excellence in Arabic-language publishing, come from the UAE, Tunisia, Germany, Egypt, and China. Each receives prize money of 750,000 UAE dirhams, approximately $204,000.
The third International Booksellers Conference will be held on April 27-28 in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. More than two hundred booksellers and publishing professionals from the region and around the world are expected to attend.
Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare' was the top-selling English-language print book in Canada in 2023, according to BookNet Canada. Total sales in the country topped C$1.1 billion last year.
Former Penguin Canada publisher Nicole Winstanley has been named president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Canada, succeeding Kevin Hanson, who left the company last month.
Next month’s Bologna Book Fair, the world’s largest rights fair devoted to children’s books, offers an extensive lineup of programming throughout the fair’s four days. Here are some of the highlights.
The Bologna Children’s Book Fair expands its global reach while remaining focused on its flagship program.
A extensive new study published by RISE Bookselling and the European and International Booksellers Federation covers six areas where bookstores can implement changes to best mitigate their impact on the environment.
Two panels at the London Book Fair on Thursday emphasized the ongoing challenge of giving opportunities to women and working-class people to write, publish, and advance themselves in the publishing and creative industries.
The European and International Booksellers Federation, International Authors Forum, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, International Publishers Association, and PEN International jointly released a statement on March 14 in response to "the increasing efforts to restrict books."
Panelists from Audible, Bookwire, Penguin Random House, Spotify, and Storytel discussed the state of audiobooks, noting that sales continue to boom and there are new opportunities arising from advancing technology and business models.
Fairgoers feel positive that this year's fair is, if not the biggest, then easily one of the biggest fairs since Covid, and definitely the most exciting—and shared a couple of contenders for the semi-mythical title of "book of the show."
You made it! Welcome to Day Three of the London Book Fair. There are still plenty of panels on the docket for today at this year's Seminar Program. Here are our recommendations.
They can generate (iterative) images. They can generate (iterative) text. But how will large language models change translation—especially for literary translators? A panel at the London Book Fair suggested some possible outcomes.
Several key European markets are seeing rapid growth in English-language book sales, threatening to cannibalize sales of translated editions published in their native markets, as the TikTok generation is increasingly happy to read in English.
On the first morning of the London Book Fair, the heads of the International Publishing Association, the Federation of European Publishers, the Association of American Publishers, and the African Publishers Network gathered to discuss, and debate, the biggest issues facing the publishing industry today.
Welcome to Day Two of the London Book Fair. If you still need to decide between the more than 150 panels and discussions available on tap for this year's Seminar Program, we've got some suggestions.
A busy first day at Olympia London has found publishers abuzz with business, cautiously optimistic about AI, and dismayed over world events.
The U.K.-based nonprofit Book Aid International has partnered with PEN Ukraine, English PEN, and PEN International, one year after an initial meeting at the London Book Fair set the collaboration into motion. In addition to last year's 25,000-book shipment, 15,000 books will be donated this year to support war-affected libraries in Ukraine.
In the opening keynote session of this year's London Book Fair, Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, extolled the virtues of the company’s new status as "the largest independent publisher of adult and children’s trade books in the United States."
Even after two decades in the book business, Georgina Moore, deputy managing director of Midas, confesses she had much to learn from her own experience publishing and publicizing her debut novel on both sides of the Atlantic.
Just in time for the London Book Fair, Hello Sunshine has set up shop in the Sheraton Grand London Park Lane, a five-star Art Deco hotel just down the way from Buckingham Palace, where a new pop-up library and bookstore, Reese’s Book Club x Sheraton Lobby Library, has been installed.
Ziggy Hanaor, the founder of U.K. children's publishing house Cicada Books, offers her top tips for breaking into the American market, including asking for publicity help, using a single ISBN, and getting books to market six months before publication.
Welcome to Day One of the London Book Fair. If you need to choose which of the more than 150 panels and discussions offered by this year's Seminar Program you'll be checking out today, look no further.
The online rights database MatchWHALE, founded by Beatrice Lin, is set to add many more Korean titles to libraries and bookstores around the world.
With more than two decades of experience working in scholarly publishing, Amy Beisel has carved out a niche as a coach for publishers and their employees, helping them achieve their goals and undertake positive changes.
Amid a dispute over contract terms, Amazon has delisted e-book titles distributed by German digital distribution company Bookwire. While the exact number of delisted titles is not known, Bookwire distributes more than a million titles for publishers.
Sage Policy Profiles, a new web-based tool from Sage and Overton, lets researchers uncover and understand the influence their evidence-based research may have on public policy by identifying citations of their work. Sage associate v-p of corporate communications Camille Gamboa hopes that the tool will help scholars "better recognize the real-world impact of research."
New research from Europe on book procurement for libraries and schools finds that the process focuses too much on the cheapest prices rather than community impact, and suggests how it can be more fair—especially for small bookstores.
Kevin Hanson, president and publisher of S&S Canada, has left the company. Hanson's departure is the latest in a series of personnel changes since the acquisition of S&S by KKR last fall.
Inkitt, a German data-driven publishing company, is funding an expansion into AI-generated and personalized fiction, audiobooks, video, and games. It has raised more than $117 million total.
BookScan analyst Kristen McLean predicts romantasy should stay hot, but sees mixed signs for adult nonfiction.
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward signs a new three-book deal with Scribner, Bantam takes civil rights lawyer Ben Crump's fiction debut, and more.
A selection of the more than 150 panels and discussions featured on tap in the fair’s Seminar Program, including sessions on AI, audiobooks, BookTok, DEI, and the Freedom to read and publish.
British publishers discuss how transatlantic collaboration can boost books’ performance and the work it takes to maintain mutually beneficial relationships.
U.S. agents expect romantasy to be hot—and debut fiction not.
The London Book Fair embraces its new status as the first major publishing event of the year.
After its parent company was sold to private equity, the British subsidiary carries on with confidence, says CEO Ian Chapman.
Watkins Media’s head of marketing says that its unique titles, which span many categories—including the occult several countercultures—are finding success in the U.S.
At 50, the U.K. press is growing its list and expanding into new formats—all while keeping a sharp focus on libraries, which publisher Joanne Grant says "have always been our main market."
The managing director of Usborne Publishing reflects on the legacy of her father, the company’s founder, who died last year.
Dan Conway, the CEO of the U.K.’s Publishers Association, says that the U.S. and British industries have shared interests—even as they compete for rights and market share.
The London indie press started with a focus on nonfiction, but in the past decade has published three Booker Award–winning novels.
Katie Arora, the U.S. sales and marketing director for Michael O'Mara Books, describes the company’s strategies for engaging the U.S. market—including finding a niche in books on the royal family.
An independent publisher considers the challenges and opportunities for small presses in her home market.
At this year’s London Book Fair, U.S. agents will be talking up works by H.S. Cross, Laila Lalami, Casey McQuiston, Richard Price, Riley Sager, and others.
The managing director of Head of Zeus argues that the U.S. market presents a big opportunity for U.K. publishers, and is worth the effort to break through.
Editor Alex DiFrancesco explains the strategy Jessica Kingsley Publishers employs when publishing LGBTQ books on both sides of the Atlantic.
The managing director of the publishing startup describes her disruptive agenda and promises a list of "strong, game-changing voices."
A U.S.-based publishing exec for John Murray Press offers five pieces of advice on working with colleagues in the U.K.
The CEO of DK U.K. explains how the shift to remote work provided a vital connection to the U.S. and introduced new practices that helped grow sales by 20%.
The British illustrated reference publisher continues to reinvent itself a half-century on—and has used its anniversary milestone as a catalyst for examining new opportunities.
Martin Goodman, publisher of Barbican Press, describes his move from the U.K. to Los Angeles and the challenges of breaking into the U.S. market with transgressive and radical books.
Audiobook companies Storytel and BookBeat reported growth in sales and subscribers in 2023. Storytel, the larger of the two and parent company of Audiobooks.com, continues to struggle to improve its bottom line following a restructuring in 2022.
Thanks to the efforts of advocates, publishers, and grassroots initiatives, Indigenous representation in children's literature has expanded and evolved.
HarperVia will publish 'The Last Dream,' the debut collection of short stories by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne, on September 24, in print and audiobook formats.
Sales for the Italian book market reached €1.697 billion at cover price in 2023, a 0.8% increase from 2022. The increase is comparable to those in France and the U.K., which saw 1% growth for the year, and behind Germany's 2.9%.
Alex Correa, CEO of Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish-language books in the U.S., says the demand for Spanish-language titles continues to grow, noting Lectorum’s 2023 print sales were up 7% over 2022.
The Association of Canadian Publishers and l’Association nationale des éditeurs de livres have launched an online campaign urging the Canadian government to fulfill its promise to increase the Canada Book Fund.
Sally Rooney and Richard Osman were among the winners at this year's Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards, which celebrate titles that passed sales landmarks in print in the U.K. Nielsen reported that 199 million print books were sold in the U.K. in 2023.
The fair, to be held March 12–14, will have a dedicated space for audiobook exhibitors and discussions focused on AI, social media marketing, and translation. The National Literacy Trust and Book Aid International are its Charities of the Year.
German book trade magazine ‘Buchreport’ has ceased publication indefinitely. The ‘Spiegel’ bestseller lists, for which the magazine was responsible, will now be published by the trade magazine ‘BuchMarkt.’
With 'Buchreport' parent company Harenberg Kommunikation filing for bankruptcy and putting the magazine up for sale, some fear that the 'Spiegel' bestseller lists compiled by 'Buchreport' may disappear.
The annual Spanish-language fair attracted 857,000 attendees from around the world.
Sourcebooks and Penguin Random House North Asia have launched Callisto China, a new publishing house that will publish Chinese-language translations of Callisto titles in China.
The Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair kicked off on November 17 as the Chinese children's book market looks to put an end to slowing sales.
On February 1, Kwame Scott Fraser will step down from his role as president and publisher of Toronto-based independent publishing house Dundurn Press to focus on book acquisitions. The company has begun a search for his successor.
Officials expect 45,000 attendees at the fair, including a large number of international publishers; the fair will run November 17–19.
The Publishers Conference, which precedes the Sharjah International Book Fair, was held in the U.A.E. last weekend, and attracted more than 1,000 delegates from 106 countries.
The 2024 London Book Fair Author of the Day program will feature mystery writer Richard Osman, novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, Waterstones Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, and illustrator Flavia Z. Drago.
In Mexico, where there are 68 Indigenous languages but only 5.4% of the population speaks any of them, publishing books in such tongues as Seria and Zapotec pose challenges for publishers.
The cofounder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival says the event focuses on reaching a large but underserved audience.
The founding editor of Words Without Borders discusses some of the most exciting work being published in Spanish today.
As demand for Spanish-language books grows, publishers are finding diversity in Latin American markets.
Juan Milà is editorial director of HarperVia, an imprint at the HarperOne Group in the U.S., dedicated to publishing international voices. We spoke with Milà about the latest literary trends in the U.S., and around the world.
The most important book fair covering the Spanish language takes place November 25–December 3 in Mexico.
After another successful year of creating new relationships and building on long-term collaborations, Sharjah—the crown in the Arab book world—is back with the 42nd annual edition of one of the book world’s most anticipated events of the year.
How do booksellers keep up with the latest trends in a fast-changing world? It used to be simple: just read the newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. But now, with the rise of social media, blogs and podcasts, booksellers need to be more alert and adaptable than ever.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the Arabic book market is poised for a remarkable transformation driven by the escalating influence of AI, which I believe holds the promise of revolutionizing the reading experience for Arabic audiences by offering highly personalized book recommendations based on individual preferences, past choices, and real-time feedback.
Since 2011, the Sharjah Book Authority has been offering grant support for publishers looking to acquire rights while at the Sharjah International Book Fair.
The conference begins on November 7 with three preconference workshops. Entrepreneurs Need Libraries: How to Develop Your Entrepreneur Center will be collaboratively taught by librarians from the U.S. and Egypt.
In May this year, in a significant move aimed at promoting literature and the written word, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, announced the establishment of a dedicated Board of Directors for the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA). This decision reaffirmed Sharjah’s commitment to fostering a culture of reading and enhancing the emirate’s position as a global hub for the publishing industry.
The second Sharjah Booksellers Conference the U.A.E., held May 1-2, attracted some 200 booksellers and another 100 publishing professionals from across the world.
Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi has become the de facto ambassador for Arabic publishing around the world. As the recently appointed Chairperson of the new board of directors of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, and immediate past president of the International Publishers Association, she is in the leading position to help shape how the world engages with the Arabic language and literature, both at home in the U.A.E. and abroad. She spoke with us prior to this year’s fair.
Núria Cabutí is the CEO of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the largest Spanish-language publishing house in the world, which is based in Barcelona.
In September 2022 the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) announced two significant new awards for publishing rights professionals, to be presented each year at the Sharjah Publishers Conference. In 2022, Mauro Spagnol of Books-Everywhere was the inaugural winner of the category for an independent. rights professional.
Author MA Bennett is half Venetian, born in England and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She studied history at Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialised in the study of Shakespeare’s plays as a historical source, before going on to study art. She has since worked as an illustrator, an actress, and a film reviewer. She has also designed tour visuals for rock bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones.
Simon & Schuster (S&S) has recently been acquired by private equity firm KKR, ending a long process for S&S’s current owner Paramount who put the publishing company on the market back in 2020, with an acquisition bid by Penguin Random House blocked by U.S. courts late last year. Despite the long uncertainty surrounding their ownership, S&S has reported some extremely buoyant results over the past few years, with double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2023. In the U.K., S&S was named Publisher of the Year at the 2023 British Book Awards for the second year running and Children’s Publisher of the Year. Prior to the book fair we asked Ian Chapman, Chief Executive and Publisher, Simon & Schuster U.K. and International, how things are going.
Felix Francis is a British crime writer and Dick Francis’ younger son. He was a science teacher before quitting to look after his father’s literary affairs.
Elizabeth S. Moore has worked as a journalist since she won the Decanter Young Wine Writer of the Year at seventeen, writing columns and articles on restaurants, politics, South Africa and all things foodie.
Nielsen BookData, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic data and retail sales monitoring for print books, has partnered with the Emirates Publishers Association (EPA) to digitize title listings and boost the growth of the U.A.E.’s publishing industry.
This year’s winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s (ABC) International Excellence Award will be announced on October 30 at the 2023 Sharjah Publishers Conference, the first time that this prestigious award has been presented in the Middle East.
A new project set up to promote the translation and distribution of books from the Arabic-speaking literary scene into Europe, LEILA is funded by a European Union program and designed and implemented by iReMMO and ATLAS in France, BOZAR in Belgium and Federation Tunisienne des Editeurs in Tunisia.
Lightning Source Sharjah, the print-on-demand joint venture between Ingram Content Group’s (Ingram) Lightning Source LLC and the Sharjah Book Authority, is making more books accessible in the Arabic language and changing the way books are distributed in the Middle East.
A primary goal of the NYU Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts is teaching our students to understand the globalization of publishing and the needs and challenges of colleagues around the world.
A key objective and strength of the Sharjah Publishers Conference has been to connect publishers from the global publishing community with the African publishing world. This year’s African presence has increased again, with participants from 18 African countries (excluding North Africa/Arab countries), many of them Francophone, including Benin, Burkino Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius and Zaire for the first time, along with many returning participants.
Despite the state of world affairs, business appeared brisk, and the fair seemed to continue to bounce back from the pandemic, reporting 105,000 trade visitors from 130 countries.
Markus Dohle is the former global CEO of Penguin Random House. This past summer he was announced as one of the international members of the new board of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA).
PW NEWS