#publishing-industry

#publishing-industry

Carine Abouseif, Senior Editor: As an editor, my ears always perk up when I hear a story described as "juicy." That's how we talked about contributing writer Tajja Isen's essay, " The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem," as it made its way through our editorial process. Tajja interviewed writers, book editors, and literary agents about the concept of "sales track"-a term for the number of books a writer has sold. Low sales numbers can cut down a writer's career before it's even really begun, shaping how an agent pitches their second book and whether editors will buy it.

The amount of money being spent on artificial intelligence is astronomical. Investors have lavished the top tech companies and startups alike with hundreds of billions of dollars - so much so, in fact, that an estimated 92 percent of US GDP growth now comes from AI. If trends continue in 2026, conservative estimates peg the spending from just the "largest technology firms" at $550 billion.

I think AI will probably help creativity, because it will enable the 8 billion people on the planet to get started on some creative area where they might have hesitated to take the first step, he told the PA news agency. AI gets them going and writes the first paragraph, or first chapter, and gets them back in the zone, he said. And it can do similar things with painting and music composition and with almost all of the creative arts.

The single biggest threat to the livelihood of authors and, by extension, to our culture, is not short attention spans. It is AI. The UK publishing industry worth more than 11bn, part of the 126bn that our creative industries generate for the British economy has sat by while big tech has swept copyrighted material from the internet in order to train their models.

In this story, Alice Law studies at Cambridge under the tutelage of Professor Jacob Grimes, who is widely regarded as the greatest magician in the world. He's also a trailblazing scholar. Grimes is known for his harsh, abusive nature but Alice has happily put up with his antics, volatile personality, and even bullying because she knows that her considerable talents and dedication will only take her so far

There are no guilty pleasures in childhood. It is only as an adult that I feel a certain sheepishness when recalling one of my favorite picture books, "Ann Likes Red," by Dorothy Z. Seymour, which was originally published in 1965. Wedged between the vaunted volumes of Gorey and Scarry, "Ann Likes Red" stuck out both literally, for its squat stature, and literarily, for its hazy lesson in self-assertion.

Publishers are drafting a new role: the AI negotiator. This person sits at the intersection of legal risk, platform power, and content value.

British comedian Rhys James announced that ahead of the release of his memoir, he found a plethora of AI versions circulating on Amazon.

"The writing that AI produces feels cheap because it is cheap. It feels simple because it is simple to produce. That is the whole point."

The AI industry's quest for high-quality training data has led companies like Anthropic to explore controversial practices in acquiring books for their models.

You can now say you're a bestselling author if you crack the Top 10 in Amazon's 'Bicycle Repair for Little People' category.

Nearly half of publishers have experienced an increase in referral traffic from social media platforms, indicating a growing positive relationship between publishers and these platforms.

Google is now testing summarizing stories in Google Discover with generative AI, raising concerns among publishers about reduced clicks.

"I believe the insistence on blurbs has become incredibly damaging to what should be our industry's ultimate goal: producing books of the highest possible quality," Manning wrote.