Gaiman Sued, Blurbs Deprecated, and A Book Sales Check-In
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This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. And today is Thursday, February 6, 2025. We are recording a new show, so we're going to have the first segment of this episode is going to be us talking about news and headlines as normal. Then we'll take a quick sponsor break, and you're going to hear me talk to Brenna Conner of Circona.

formerly known as BookScan, for those of you who used to know things about how books operate. I'm still learning, still am. But you can talk to me about the data she has around the book sales of 2024, trends to watch in 2025, and what's going on there. Happy to have Brenna.

Programming notes. We're going to get to this in Frontless Foyer, but on first edition this morning, my interview with Professor Shigeru Oishi went up as we talked about life in three dimensions, especially as the literature and reading parts were important to my reading of it and the formation of the book. And Rebecca has it down on your list. You teased me with saying reading this and Rick Steves next together was a real journey, but we'll save that for Frontless Foyer. But go check out the interview over there.

Coming on Patreon soon, pretty soon after this episode goes live, our most recent Deals, Deals, Deals update. It's been three months already, believe it or not. And I have combed through my collection of deals announcements that I've been collecting since November 5th, it looks like. What a different world it was November 5th. Oh boy. To talk about interesting deals. If this is your first time, you've never listened to Deals, Deals, Deals episode, I look at a

Until my eyes go cross, I threw on some Bonnie Raitt, had a whiskey, spent two hours going through my notes. What a good night for you. Yeah, it wasn't bad. I kind of enjoyed it. And then I just pick out stuff I think is interesting, and that is the only barometer, is that I thought there's something interesting about it. But always a good time, try to make Rebecca laugh, and then try to find some stuff to read. So that's what's coming up next.

there. Anything else, Rebecca, on the program that we should talk about? Well, yeah. Anybody who does want to read along with us, since we did both just Read Life and Three Dimensions, we're going to go book club long on it for the Patreon next week. So you have some time to pick that up. And I guess we put it on the Patreon too. We can put it here. If you happen to find yourselves in the Portland, Oregon area or thereabouts on March 13th,

Rebecca and I are going to be doing a live event at the Flagship Pals bookstore in downtown Portland on the most recommendable books of the century so far. We're going to team up with Pals and maybe do some, well, we're going to do at least one. Hopefully some more have a good time there. It's going to be ticketed and registration, and it's not going to be a huge lift to attend, but just to make sure that people know if they have a chair and all that stuff going on. Not available yet to register, but think about it.

Bring a friend, let a book nerd that you know in Portland or that can get there on March 13th, and it'll be in the evening, I think 7 o'clock. But more details to come. But if you're the kind of person that plans five weeks out book events, this one's for you. Put a little red circle around that date on your calendar and come hang out with us. I'm excited to meet some of y'all in person. Yeah, already thinking of the logistics there about how we're going to do that live. Okay, let's take a sponsor break and get into the news of the week.

This episode is sponsored by A Killing Cold by Kate Alice Marshall. Stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook edition provided by our sponsors at Flatiron Books. When Theodora met Connor, wealthy, charming, and a member of the powerful Daltons, she fell in love instantly.

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Someone here has a shocking secret that they will do anything to keep hidden, and discovering what happened at Idlewood may cost Theo everything. Thanks again to Flatiron Books for sponsoring this episode. Again, stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook edition of A Killing Cold by Kate Alice Marshall. Today's episode is brought to you by Flatiron Books, publisher of Ambition by Natalie Keller-Reinert.

Jules Thornton did not come to Florida horse country to make friends. She's intent on becoming a world-class writer and trainer. Chasing her dreams doesn't leave much time for things like friends or vacations. And she certainly doesn't have time for Pete Morrison, though he is handsome and he is the heir to one of a Cola's grandest horse farms.

but he also keeps beating her at events and for some odd reason, asking her out to dinner. As a new horse challenges her and her farm slips towards bankruptcy, she realizes her ambition can only take her so far. Jules will need to learn to trust her community or risk losing everything. This book is set in the world of three-day eventing. It features an underdog character who is ambitious. Make sure to check out Ambition by Natalie Keller Reinhart. And thanks again to Flatiron Books for sponsoring this episode.

Today's episode is brought to you by Sourcebooks Landmark, publisher of Babylonia by Costanza Quesadi. From the author of the best-selling Clitamnestra comes another intoxicating excursion into ancient history, bringing to life the brutal and captivating world of Assyria and the one destined to rule it all. This is a story of an orphan girl raised on the outskirts of an empire, the governor she married, and the king who loved them both. Eyebrow wiggle. And this is a story of a woman who was born in Assyria,

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You know, I love these headlines that are top X things on the planet. Because, you know, there may be a better book podcast on Venus. Who knows? That gas cloud is hard to get through. RSS feed won't penetrate. The widest possible net you can cast. So Feedspot, you found this. How did you come across this? I didn't ask you. Somebody from Feedspot emailed me and was like, hey, we put you on our list.

I bet they say that to all the podcasts. In all transparency, I think they wanted me to know that they put us on the list. So maybe we would buy some of their services. Feedspot does a variety of things. But they have ranked the 100 best book podcasts on the planet. And I'm delighted that we're number five. Do you think the email that people are like 97? I don't know.

I bet they did. Yes. You made it into the top 100. Do you think everyone was number five? Did it have some sort of LLM or algorithm? It's just like shuffled that way. Because like number one, you wouldn't believe. And like number 71, you'd be like, I'm not so excited. But five feels just about like true. It feels pretty good. You could believe it. I mean, at least the version of this list that I saw has our friend Gilbert Cruz and the New York Times Book Review podcast at number one. And that seems well-deserved to me. So-

They probably got told they were at number one. Okay. And then all the books at number seven. Yeah. I see them over there. So that's kind of fun. Speaking of things that aren't fun, you know, I don't want to be accused of anything, Rebecca. I know this about you. And, you know, in the big ones, of course, you don't want to be associated with. I think human trafficking is an underrated bad thing to be accused of. But Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer find themselves accused of

I was just going to say it. Trigger warning, I guess. Rape and human trafficking and the continued fallout really from the tortoises reporting and then Scarlett Pavlovich and other women coming forward over many years to Amanda Palmer and others about their experience. I'll leave it at that with Neil Gaiman.

You can read, as I made the mistake of, the legal documents because I wanted to know when I was writing Today in Books. I saw that in Today in Books that you had read it, and I just wanted to pat you. I'm sorry that you now have all those things in your brain, too. Yeah, it's pretty bad. And this is a civil suit, and as I wrote in Today in Books and sort of as...

A follow-on to my scolding I gave those who needed it last week, I guess, that I was doing is like the burden of proof in a civil suit is preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. And I was on a civil trial of late and I got this instruction from one of the jurors. It wasn't counter-minded – or not jurors, lawyers, not counter-minded by the judge. But one way you can think about this is 51% probability of culpability. Okay.

So it's a much different standard. Proof, it's not really proof, right? Beyond a reasonable doubt. So all you internet commenters can stick it where the sun don't shine about coming about guilty until proven innocent and so on and so forth. This is probability. And if Shapiro's reporting is grossly accurate and documented, I guess I'll use the same terms I used then. I think you have to like Pavlovich's chances in a court. I agree. Yeah.

Yeah, Scarlett Pavlovich, if you read the New York Magazine piece that Ella Shapiro reported, she's the primary focus, the primary interview there. One of the first women to come forward. She was a babysitter for Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. And if you're only engaging with the story via this podcast and other headlines, which frankly is a very sane way to do it because the details are horrific. Yeah, I mean, really. Amanda Palmer has now been looped, like,

looped into this and Pavlovich is suing her as well because Palmer introduced her to Gaiman and there is a way to read Pavlovich's story that combines the fact that Amanda Palmer was aware that other women had previously accused Neil Gaiman of similar things. At one point she tells Scarlett Pavlovich that it's been 14 women before her who have said this and yet she is still kind of introducing women and delivering them into Neil Gaiman's life. So

I think Scarlett Pavlovich has had some canny legal advice here, and I like her chances in court as well. Very glad to see that Neil Gaiman is going to face some consequences for this outside of the headlines that have happened so far. Or we may see a settlement. If I were him, I'd feel very invested in not having any more of the details of this come out than already have. They are quite damning. I don't know. I don't know about...

Luckily much, if any of this, I wouldn't be surprised to see other women come forward, join a suit or otherwise seek, you know, whatever kinds of justice that can be had at this point. Story of the year for sure. And it will continue to be a follow on effect is that Netflix is adaptation of Sandman will end after season two.

In a plausible deniability sounding kind of statement, it wasn't about anything other than saying that this is where the story ends. I guarantee you if this was super popular and this story was not out, there would be more Sandman. Take that for what you will. Well, I can't guarantee anything because I don't know. I would bet heavily on whatever odds that there would be Sandman season three if the interest was good and the story doesn't exist. Take that for what you will.

So that story continues apace. Speaking of stories continuing apace in the legal system, we really got to put on our wigs and get our little gavels today. Very legal heavy stuff. We're going to the first few here. But the man accused of attacking Salman Rushdie is scheduled to go to trial. Jury selection has begun, started, or is done. But anyway, the trial cometh. For those of you who have read Knife or just know Rushdie and his story, beginning to be interesting to see. I don't know.

Enough about the British legal system. I assume Rushdie will testify. That will be a very interesting document. I don't know how available those things are. I don't know either. I know he says in Knife that he's not particularly interested in confronting his attacker, that he's moved past the place where it seems like that would be satisfying. But I assume that he could at least be...

called to testify. Rushdie kind of writes about this at length in Knife that, you know, of course, this young man who is accused of attacking him was offered plea deals and could have pled guilty and avoided going to court, but believes very strongly in the reasons that he had, the ideology that was driving him to carry out that attack and wants to have his day in court. Quite questionable judgment in my personal opinion. Yeah.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say a lot of his judgment is questionable for a while. Yeah, I think that's fair. It's probably consistent with the rest of the way that he's thinking about things. But when this came up, I was like, oh, right, that's actually going to trial. There were hundreds of witnesses, and I believe some of it's even on tape or was recorded. So an interesting choice. Hope Salman Rushdie gets his justice. Yeah, I have nothing else to say, but interesting to see. Is that go or...

We're going to stay in Law and Order land. The Big Five and the Authors Guild are suing Idaho over a book banning law. This is a different suit against a different state. The one we talked about before, I believe, was Iowa. I have no idea where that suit states. These things take years.

and frankly, millions of dollars to wind their ways through the justice system. So that's one good reason to have the big five publishers in it, because they have the deepest pockets in this business to adjudicate and advocate for something like this. At the heart of the challenge, I'm reading here from a piece by Jim Miliot and Publishers Weekly, at the heart of the challenge is HB 710, that's the definition of sexual content, which PRH in a release characterized as exceptionally broad, vague content

and overtly discriminatory. I can think of whole branches of the federal government you could describe that way right now, but the law makes those distinctions between infants and 17-year-olds, plaintiffs argued announcing the lawsuit, leaving books to be classified as harmful regardless of the age and maturity level of the

child. Yes. Yeah. And the law itself seeks to forbid anyone under the age of 18 from accessing any library books that contain, quote, sexual content. So the definition of sexual content is overly broad here. They are not making any distinction based on how far under the age of 18 a reader is. And also, regardless of the work's literary or educational merit. So we're talking about like

Some of the great works of literature, some of the canonical works of literature that have been taught in America's classrooms over the last hundred years would be unavailable to students seeking to check them out from their library simply because they have maybe a sex scene, but also anything that one of the arbitrarily appointed folks involved in this process deems to be sexual in nature.

So, yeah. And one library, Donnelly Library, has restricted access to its collection for anyone under 18. I don't know. I don't think it's because they believe in the law, but they have to obey, right? Because they're subject to and they're an instrument of the government.

Right. And it's easier to just wall off, like procedurally easier to wall off the entire library to anyone under the age of 18 than it is to go through your collection and try to, you know, divine what's

what the state's definition of sexual content content is and then which books you need to make unavailable and just no one has the kind of personnel for that the funding to make it happen so this is what's happening is that children are just losing access to the library wholesale

Great. That's exactly what everyone needs. And, you know, I mean, so many stories, Rebecca, of people being traumatized by visits to their public library and their school library. I mean, we can't count them because they don't exist. That's why we can't count them. I've never heard one. You know, the thing is, though, Jeff, I know you're shocked to hear this. It's not about the impact of the book's content. It's about how beneficial an uneducated populace would be to the kinds of folks who want to pass these laws. Or they get it both. They can get rid of the books and have them. They can have their cake and eat it too by taking away all the books. God.

Okay. Take a breath, take an ad break. Let's talk about blurbs. We already did an ad break. It's a short news segment. We don't have time to take an ad break. We got to keep going. We have to keep going. I just wanted you to have a little spiritual reset. So I was kind of joking about this, but I'm also serious about my joking regarding blurbs. As is your way. Which is...

authors really hate blurbs that's the only thing I can say definitively about blurbs is that authors hate them because they've got to go get them they've got to solicit them there's a whole favor trading economy of blowing smoke up each other's spines and they hate it and I totally get that

Yes. And I think there's a little more nuance there. Like they hate the process of getting them because asking people to, will you read my book? And then, God, I hope that you have nice things to say about it is terrifying and vulnerable. And they...

I don't know if they hate the process of giving blurbs, but several authors this week have written about how long it takes them to read a book and write a good blurb. And they're talking about like 12 hours, you know, to read a book, to think about how you want to synthesize it, to write a good blurb. That is a time consuming endeavor for which you get no money and maybe a favor returned in advance. But authors do, at least to some authors, love getting a good blurb.

Well, of course they've got giving a good blurb. Right. Yeah. So they like being on the receiving end, especially if it's from someone that they believe is like powerful or has, you know, cachet or that will be persuasive to readers. Yeah. But there's, there's much to do about blurbing lately. Yeah.

And so I'm sympathetic to that. And Sean Manning, who has taken over the flagship imprint of Simon & Schuster, really kicked off the most recent round of Ain't Blurbs a Drag, volume number 728 since we've been doing this. The only thing we do more than we do, maybe men should read more fiction. Right. Yeah, I guess. Is saying people hate it and we don't know what the value is, so we're not going to require them. Okay, I get that.

I think one thing that always, always, I like to keep in mind the reader's point of view when we hear publishing stories like this, because I can understand why authors don't like them. And I can understand why publishers think they're a drag. I mean, again, I understand the economy. I've been a part of like the letters of recommendation economy in the academy, which is not dissimilar, frankly. But here's the deal.

They might matter. We just don't know because no one's ever studied anything. Because when you're browsing in a bookstore, and I'll use an example, Life in Three Dimensions. Sounded interesting to me. There's a blurb by Adam Grant at the top. And for books like this, if there's a blurb, if you can get Adam Grant to blurb you, you do it. And I can't quantify to you how much it matters.

But it doesn't not matter. Rebecca, am I in safe ground here at all with you? Yeah. I mean, in that particular example, I saw it in Adam Grant's newsletter. And so that endorsement, like I'd say an endorsement from a writer or thinker that I trust already is,

will make me more open and interested in a book. Something like I'm going to write about this in my newsletter is more compelling to me than a blurb. But blurbs don't mean... But blurbs are what you have. Like if you have a book... Yeah, I guess in my personal book shopping experience, they don't matter until they do. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Yeah. Yeah. Like most of the time,

I kind of know what I'm looking for, or I can get a good sense from a synopsis and the vibe of a book. Like, is this something that I think I want to pick up? But every now and then there will be a blurb that is the thing that I'm like, that tips me over into like, okay, now I have more time for this title. Now I'm going to consider it a little bit more. And that's being on the inside of the industry where I know that it's a horse trading game. Like,

This has made me, and I totally also, like you were saying, understand why authors would be like, please never make me write another blurb or ask for one again. I also hate folding laundry, but in order to have clean clothes, I gotta do it. Just because you hate it doesn't mean it's not valuable. It's just, it's a big black box. So like we might be getting a little A-B testing of the universe here. Like,

It is not the only variable because, of course, this first season that Sean Manning publishes will be titles that have never been out in the world before. Right. But how do they perform against the median list that Simon & Schuster's flagship imprint has published in the past? And maybe that could be correlated to an absence of blurbs. But also, it doesn't mean there won't be blurbs. He's not requiring them. Yeah.

But I would guess that most folks are probably still going to participate because your readers to some degree expected to see blurbs on a book jacket. What are you going to put there instead? So it doesn't just look empty. And if blurbs are marginally meaningful to readers like us who know that for the most part, they're like to some degree they are BS or at least built on favors, then

I think they are significantly more meaningful to casual book buyers. And like, anecdotally, in my bookseller years, I got things like, oh, well, you know, I like this other author and he blurbed this book or people even being like, well, it says it was a New York Times bestseller. And you want to be like, it's not that hard to get that sticker on that book. Exactly.

It's not that hard to get Gary Steingart to blurb your title. Right. But like the rank and file reader who's going to pick up six to 10 books in a year and is trying to weed through them, if they're not looking at something like Goodreads or, I don't know, subscribing to Book Riot's newsletter, I think blurbs can be an additional piece of data on that physical book that they're looking at in the bookstore in addition to where is it in the store? What does the book look like? What's the synopsis? And I wish we had data. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know what's going on. You know Simon's not going to be like, you know what? Okay, we've got a bunch of historical data about our blurbing practices. Here's a cohort of 3,000 books we published in the last 10 years that had three to seven blurbs. Yeah. Let's see. And then we're going to do them against – and again, books are so different because each skew is different. But like here's the – I'll just say as an example, right? So this is what I had. I was interviewing Rebecca Romney for first edition this morning. It'll come out when it comes out. Mm-hmm.

out. There's one on the cover. Rebecca can't see it. Oh, yeah, I can. Look at that camera. It's backwards though, too. But the first one is Elizabeth Gilbert. So here's where I think it matters. People have heard Elizabeth Gilbert. Yes. Right? And this book by Rebecca Romney is about a book collecting memoir. You know, for someone browsing at a bookstore, okay, they like books, but they may not know this person. Rebecca Romney is actually a lot more famous than a lot of people you might encounter on a bookstore. She says, I love this book and it will live on my own bookshelf forever.

If social proof matters, that matters. Now, I can't tell you how much. And I'm not saying you shouldn't get rid of them. But for authors to be like, great, I don't have to do that anymore.

That's kind of saying, you know, I'd like to stop eating vegetables. Well, you can, but you don't know what the costs are going to be over. Yeah, this Elizabeth Gilbert example is perfect for what we're talking about, though, because she is such a big name that she is very recognizable. And so I think it's likely that there is a very A-list group of authors that if they blurb your book, people would perceive that as meaningful. It could swing the sails. If you are...

No.

Does it do you any good? I don't know. The thing I would really love to see is and it would be too expensive to do it. But like, let's dream is a publisher being like, OK, we're going to print 100,000 copies of this book. 50,000 copies are going to have blurbs on them and 50,000 aren't. And we're going to distribute them the same way we always distribute them. And then we're going to see what happens. Yeah. And sell more of the blurbed ones or not. We'll never get it, but it's a beautiful dream.

And in the cost-benefit analysis, it could well be, and I don't have a horse in this race about being right about something, that the cost, quote unquote, the effort, the wrangling, the whole thing that goes, it may be less than it's worth. That I could well believe. I mean, I know it can be quite a few because for every, you know, there's five on this from Romney and she's pretty well connected, so probably it's not as hard for her, but

Probably for every blurb that appears, what's the matriculation rate? One out of three people actually read the book. They say yes. They even open the email. Oh, yeah. I have no idea.

And I don't like that. I think that's a mistake that publishing makes over and over and over. Yeah. And, you know, Sean Manning makes a good point here that like we don't see this as a requirement or even something that pops up in other artistic industries. You don't get like quotes from Steven Soderbergh on movie posters for someone else's film.

And you don't, the same thing doesn't happen with music. So I understand reaching for like, people don't have to do this in other industries where they're trying to like sell their thing, but also music and especially movies are,

Yeah.

Yeah, and we've talked about this before. The book itself, to a first approximation, is the marketing material, right? Right. Both on social media and in the store and online when you're browsing stuff. So like this is where you have something to put places. Now, again, I remember someone on Blue Sky was talking about this.

And they were saying like, this feels like a newish phenomenon because back in the 90s when they were coming of age as I was too as a book collector reading frontless literary fiction, this wasn't as common, especially on an established author's like third novel. So I went on my bookshelf and I looked at like, I've got some late Morrisons, right? The Mercies, the Loves, the Paradise. You know what's on the back of those, Rebecca? Do you know off the top of your head?

No, just a picture of Toni Morrison. Just a huge fucking picture of Toni Morrison. Well, that's God level. You're Toni Morrison. Who's going to blurb Toni Morrison? Okay, but even then I looked at like Jonathan Franzen. But the one that I saw was Rush D's Satanic Verses. I have a first edition that I collected a while ago on that.

And there was some for like two things about satanic versus blurbs and then praise for the earlier work. And praise for earlier work, once you can get it, that makes a ton of sense. Yes. I think if you can get an author that somebody adjacent to that book's target demo has heard of, you should do that. And then once you have, but the other thing that's happened that's not talked about as much in this blurb suck and why there's so many blurbs.

Yeah.

And when I've picked up my old paperback of remains of the day that's 20 years old, it has pages of quotes from book reviews in the front of the book. Most of those publications either don't exist anymore or their book sections don't exist anymore. And some publishers have moved to quoting online reviews. Like Book Riot gets quoted in some of these things sometimes. But it is harder to find...

the big names that you could pull a New York Times book review or name, you know, Mishiko Kakutani, like in the praise for previous work. And if you have less of that, then you want to fill that space with something else to market and blurbs by other writers. Um,

who have to then go out and read the book is one of the options. So again, I don't really care. Blurbs have moved me. I mean, here's the thing. It's the ones I don't remember that are actually the most interesting to me. I remember a couple like Tinkers by Paul Harding. There was a Marilyn Robinson blurb on it that got me to pick it up at Strand a million years ago. I'm sure there's been others.

I do think it matters at the margin. It may not be worth the... The juice may not be worth the squeeze. I don't know why the thumbs down on the Riverside AI got that. Maybe that's a bad opinion. Like, that's what the LLMs are thinking of me right now. Like, I didn't do anything with my hands. It's reading your nonverbal. It's like, you know what? If you're not picking up Rebecca's vibes, I'm going to give you a thumbs down representation so you need to move on. That's what's really happening right there. It's kind of funny, actually. Fun with new software. But yeah, so like, I don't know. But it does seem very one-sided. It's like, we're pretty sure...

This is bad. Though, on the other hand, I like shaking things up and trying things a little bit differently. Yeah, try it. Let's see what happens. And authors, I'm glad that we're hearing from authors. That's interesting. I didn't know, would it take you 12 hours? If you're friends with somebody, are you going to read 50 pages and be like, this is good enough? Let me sign my name to it. It's a lot of pressure. And it is kind of, on the other side, it's fun to read the tea leaves of these. I texted you recently about a book that I was...

picking up and was a little concerned about. And then I realized that all the blurbs connected to it were people that this person had edited in a significant capacity. And I was like, oh, I see what's happening here. I don't trust this. Lots of conflicts of interest in the blurbing economy. Yeah. I mean, it's caveat emptor as always, but I do think that it's probably... I guess at this moment, I'd be willing to buy blurb stock.

if it was made available. Oh, yeah. I think the price is too low. I think I would too. And I think that's one of those things like nobody wants to admit that marketing works on us, but marketing works on us. And so there's some social incentive to say like, I don't care anything about blurbs. I never pay attention to it. But like,

We've all gotten got at some point. Which, as we know from behavioral psychology, is like you then are probably more susceptible because you think you're so insusceptible. A little Dunning-Kruger for you. Yeah, there you go. Let's do front list for you. Rebecca, you're up first. Oh, I am up first. Okay. Well, let's talk about The Loves of My Life by Edmund White is my first one. Wow. It is a sex memoir. Edmund White is...

In his mid-80s, born in 1940, this is a memoir of his sexual life as a gay man in America. Coming of age in the 50s and 60s, what that was like, up through the 70s, and then the AIDS crisis, and then now he is 85, and he's been married for quite a long time. It seems like there is a monogamish situation going on there. I listened to this, and let me tell you, it's spicy. Yeah.

which I knew it was going to be. And I was thinking, what am I doing listening to this audio? Oh, that much, huh? I should read this in print because I couldn't like, but it's just, it's like, it's just so much more visceral. It's not him narrating it, but like when you feel like someone is telling you their story and it is quite racy and graphic, it was just, I'm making croissants in my kitchen on a Saturday morning and listening to people do things to each other. Yeah.

It's really interesting, though. As I have had a couple of days to process it,

It's not linear, so it's not moving in like through his life in an organized fashion. Most of the chapters are about a particular relationship or a particular lover that he had. Some of them are about phases of life that he went through. And it's really interesting to hear a person who came of age at a time where it was deeply forbidden publicly to be gay, who had to hide it.

And then has lived through everything that has happened here in the last 80 years of like being able to be much more open and coming to a place where like a grinder is a thing that exists, processing what sex means to him, what it means to him in the context of relationships, but also just as an experience of that he has had as a person. And he talks about having had thousands of lovers and, and,

how that situates him inside these you know broader cultural changes it's really something i think it's quite brave to have like to have put it all like really put it all out there um

I have a lot of admiration for the work that he did. And like, dude must have kept a lot of journals. It's like there are details about encounters that either were very potent and memorable or he's got great journals from the last like 60 years of his life. I kind of was more interested in the making of the book than I was in... I mean, like we're all adults here. People have had sex. So like what...

How did he capture... The bookkeeping? The bookkeeping of our situation? Yes, yeah. Presumably, he didn't know 40 years ago that he was going to write this kind of book near the end of his life, but he's...

all of this stuff. No, really interesting. I'm glad that I read it. Just know if you listen to it, you're going to blush a little bit probably. And then I'm almost done with On the Hippie Trail. It's a dude fest in my front list foyer this week, I just realized. On the Hippie Trail by Rick Steves, which is his travel journal from 1978 when he was just a ripe little 23-year-old girl.

Going on a trip with his buddy Gene from Istanbul into India and Nepal. He's like so wide-eyed and so in awe of everything that he experiences.

And the Rick Steves voice is already there, like fully formed. I've been reading sections of it out loud to Bob and he's like, yeah, I can hear Rick Steves. I can almost feel the fanny pack on my waist as I'm listening to this right now. Yeah. And like speaking of keeping your journals, like this is the text with some light editing of his journal. And so he says in the introduction, like I was, you know, this was 50 years ago and I was much less culturally sensitive. Also, I was 23. Yeah.

So you get like the language in it of how a young white man is experiencing being in places that there are not many white people at the time, where the wealth of an American goes really far. And he's encountering poverty, but he's also encountering really, you know, beautiful things. It's great. It's so great. I'm ready. I'm like very excited for you to read it. And it

it intersected with life in three dimensions by Shigeru Oishi, which you've been talking about for a few weeks and I'm finally on with where he's looking at the body of research about what makes a good life and that we have a lot of research about happiness. We have a lot of research about having a meaningful life. And Oishi is proposing that the third dimension is psychological richness, a variety of experiences, um,

I thought there was really fascinating tension between the kinds of things that contribute to happiness and how some of those are in conflict with the things that contribute to psychological richness. And if you're trying to have a blend of all three in your life, how do you develop that?

But one of them, like one of the components of psychological richness is real openness to experience, curiosity about people, curiosity about different places. And I was reading them at the same time, like, you know, Rick Steves in the morning or she in the evenings and thinking, oh, my gosh, Rick Steves embodies all of this. And I hit like page 65 and he refers to Rick Steves of like and Rick Steves is a great example of.

Oishi, come sit by me. I know. It's so weird. I mean, there's Ishiguro. There's Oliver Sacks. There's Toni Morrison. There's Toni Morrison and Oliver Sacks in the same paragraph? It's wild, yeah. Come on. Yeah, it really resonated with me. I thought a lot about it of late. Me too. And I talk to Oishi about Oliver Sacks. And then there is not only just literary references, but then later in the book, thinking about aesthetics experiences and avenues towards leading a psychologically rich life. And not all books are created equal, right?

And I think it's actually helped me think about different uses of different kinds of reading experiences. Like, you know, some books I'm looking for meaning. Maybe it's this kind of a book, frankly. Some books I might be looking for happiness. See Dan Brown or other kinds of books like that. And then I think the thing you and I look for, like if we look at We Do Not Part, for example, something we talked about recently on the Patreon, very hard to talk about that as a happy-making book. Mm-hmm.

Not entirely clear to me. It's a meaning-making book for me, but it certainly is interesting. And I'm using interesting kind of interchangeable with psychological righteousness. I don't know exactly. For me, to a first approximation, interesting does the deal. But that is definitely the case.

That is definitely scratching that particular itch. And that's really helpful to me to think about different kinds of recommendations for different people, different kinds of reading moments. Frankly, our cultural and artistic moments writ large, right? Me throwing on, I don't know, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Legend for the 10,000th Time, is a different listening experience to me trying something new. And they're not necessarily better or worse. It kind of depends on what you want and where you are.

But I think that can be helpful in thinking about what we're looking for and why we may react to things differently. I think probably we have reading personalities if I'm really putting my card on the table. And personalities can be manifold, but I think there are people that read largely for happiness. There is the kind of person that only does business audiobooks. I think they're solving for meaning. And then...

For other kinds of people, it might be something else. It might be more exploratory or curiosity-seeking. I'm really looking forward to having a longer conversation about it. Are we doing it on Patreon or in regular show? What are we doing? We're going to do that on the Patreon. Just get into our notes, talk about life in three dimensions. I was joking with a friend that the alternate subtitle should be Validation for Sagittarius. It's like...

I don't know what that means, but I'm here to support you in that. Just, I love it when science confirms the choices I've made about my life. I mean, I'll speak for myself. I felt extremely seen in that book. Or like it was very validating to like, this is how I, I mean, one example, and I think I talked to Professor Oishi about this is Michelle and I, for example, have a very different experience, generally speaking, in watching a movie that wasn't very good. Yeah.

She will get a little pissed off about it or just sort of, you know, like it was a waste of time, whatever. I don't have, I will not like it just as much, but I won't feel as like the time is wasted as much because I will start thinking about it. And like, why is that? And what's going on? Like, I don't find it personally a funny because most things, that's why I say I like most things I read, but I don't really mean like.

Actually, don't mean like. Yeah, there's some component of richness or interestingness. I think when we talk about interesting messes, we're talking about this. That's right. That's right. So more to come on that, but a great... Thank you, Adam Grant, for bringing this to...

to my awareness and you for stumbling on it at the same time. And here we are. Here we are. My two reading experiences, I'm reading ahead a little bit for first edition, so I'll have more to say about them. But I texted you or DMed you a Tilt by Emma Patee, which is coming out March 18th from Mary Cerucci Books, was engineered in a lab to screw me up. Because here's what it's about. Say more. It's set in Portland, Oregon. Okay. And the...

The synopsis is a woman. It's fiction. I should say it's a novel. 226 pages. I read it in one sitting. I know. It starts out in the Ikea. So it's real, like really using the real Portland topography, um,

and street level, like all that kind of stuff. That's wild. So you can totally picture this. Yes. She's in Ikea. She's nine months pregnant and she's having a moment, let's say. I don't want to spoil too much in Ikea. And then the big one, the big earthquake happens. The one that everyone who lives on this part of the coast, after reading Catherine Solch's article in the New Yorker a few years ago,

What we mostly try to do is try not to think about it. I'd say 7% of my CPU time is given to keeping that at bay. Just suppress the awareness that this is a thing coming for you. The big one happens and it's bad. And she wants to make her way to her husband who's working downtown.

And there's a map in the beginning of the book of like the neighborhood she go through. And I asked Emma, cause there's this one part I'm like, I think, I think your main character walked by my house. Whoa. Because she gets from one place to another. I'm like, it's, if it's not by my house, it's within a block. Cause it's in this neighborhood. Yeah.

And I got to say, a little close to home, MFT. I mean, literally. I read it like a house on fire. It's hard to recommend because it's so visceral and can be so upsetting, but pretty amazing. And I talked to her for first edition. That's going to come out when the...

when the thing comes out. But like, she went street by street and she's a climate journalist and she did all the research about earthquakes and what would happen to this overpass and what would happen to this street and which kinds of buildings would be destroyed and which would have survived. Like, it's kind of amazing. Wow. For a debut novel, it's really remarkable. It's literary fiction, I would say, ending some of the choices made. It's not like you can... There's a James Patterson version of this and there's what she did and I, of course, am much more interested in what she did. So...

Kind of amazing. I have to say it. That opening sounds like Station Eleven. Is that a fair comp? I mean, sort of. This happens over the course of like one day. So Station Eleven is... But yeah, there is a moment. And Emma said that she was in Ikea and had this thought of, what if the big one hit right where I am right now? So it's very much like, let's start from this seed. Where Station Eleven... That's just the very beginning of Station Eleven. Yeah, it's the very beginning. And you do follow people through and much more in the series. Yeah.

I think the vibes, though, I'm not even sure it's the vibe, but the same kinds of stakes exist in both. I'll put them that way. So anyway, as you can tell, it rocked my world literally, figuratively. Hopefully not literally for a while. That's bonkers to be like. I know. I can't imagine that going on a walk in the neighborhood is not different in some way now. Yeah, I can't talk about it.

Too close. The other thing I'm through right now, I'll be done by next week, also a first edition to come, Bibliophobia by Sara Chihaya is a memoir that came out this week. It's available now. About her life as a reader and how it has and has not participated in, helped, exacerbated her experience of mental illness. Very interesting topic. I don't think the Yay Books crowd would love this. Okay. Because...

Books can't do everything, Rebecca. They cannot heal you. They are not magic.

They are a tool and like anything have their uses and abuses and insufficiency. Use wrong tool for the trade. But even thinking of books as a tool is something that Chahai is very now skeptical of. This idea that reading fiction makes you better. So I'm very interested to talk to her about it. Yeah, it's slim. I think it's 190 pages or so. She's a really good writer. So the sentence level stuff is interesting as well. I'm only like a third of the way through that. I've got some other stuff, but I don't want to do too much reading ahead because that's boring for everyone.

All right. So let's take a sponsor break. And Brenna and book sales coming up next. Rebecca, thanks. Thank you. Every idea starts with a problem. Warby Parker's was simple. Glasses are too expensive. So they set out to change that. By designing glasses in-house and selling directly to customers, they're able to offer prescription eyewear that's expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable. Warby Parker glasses are made from premium materials like impact-resistant polycarbonate and custom acetate.

And they start at just $95, including prescription lenses. Get glasses made from the good stuff. Stop by a Warby Parker store near you. All right, I'm pleased to welcome Brenna Conner back. Actually, last time you were on First Edition, this time you're going to be on the BR podcast. I don't know why. Just that's what we're doing. From Sir Conner to talk about book sales. Brenna has pulled up some data to talk about. I've got some observations. You've heard Rebecca and I talk in the show about what's going on.

I guess, Brenna, let's start with the big picture. So 1% unit sales, prices have gone up. I was just reading Harper Collins, their earnings were up 19%. On an A through F grading scale for the book industry this year in terms of sales, what grade are you giving it? That's a great question. I would give it a B+. B+, okay. You want to say some more about that? Yep. As you mentioned...

Print book unit sales grew 1% in 2024 compared to prior year. And to put that in context, this is the first year of growth that we've marked since 2021 in our data set, which is great. So this return to growth.

And the other thing I want to know is that at Sarkana, we track many industries outside of books. So I get to see performance across many different industries. We break those out into what we call discretionary industries or general merchandise. So things that don't involve food or, you know, housing costs. And then we also can see sales for CPG. So that does include food along with other products that you might buy at the grocery store or Target. Right.

So when we look at all of our general merchandise categories or the categories that consumers are spending discretionary dollars on, overall, there were only a handful of industries that posted growth. Books was among one of them. So even though the 1% may sound not very exciting-

It's notable because it's a standout and it books did outperform other discretionary categories Well that that is a good so there's kind of two curves were graving on because you're looking at GDP growth I think it probably underperformed I guess unit sales is different than gross dollars and

But you look at inflation or other things like that, underperforms are the top line. But within discretionary sales, that's because everyone's buying eggs. At my grocery store, my eggs were $8 a dozen, Brenna. You are absolutely right. That is for sure part of the story. So higher costs for CPG items, food, along with things like paper towel or toilet paper.

That is taking a higher share of wallet for many consumers, leaving fewer dollars to spend on discretionary categories such as books. But because books outperformed, what this tells me is that consumers are prioritizing books among other things they buy. And within that growth, particularly strong was adult fiction. And it will be no surprise to listeners of this show that the categories you pulled out are fantasy, thrillers, and romance books.

Those three together, if you spell them, if you mix them up and jumble, they actually spell BookTok. I don't know if you know this. If you do bananagrams, they spell BookTok. Is that what you're seeing too? Absolutely. Adult fiction led the growth for the print book market in 2024. The categories that drove the highest gains are all coming from BookTok.

So book talk authors are really leading that growth and then the categories that you mentioned are very popular in book talks We're looking at authors like freedom McFadden and thrillers Sarah J Maas in fantasy Rebecca Yaros for romantic II those are the names those are the names And if I recall you all at Sir Connor you kind of is it you guys that break down the list of here the the authors we consider like book talk authors and

Is that how you do that, right? I do. Yeah. So the way that I do that is I primarily reference the list that BNN has on their website. They have a collection of titles that they call BookTok titles. So that's my go-to place to identify BookTok authors. And then I also use other industry news outlets, including BookTok.

Riot, I'll mention others like PW to kind of fill in the blanks for the things that aren't appearing on that BNN list. So I can mark an author as a BookTok author and then collectively I can look at that

author grouping to see overall performance compared to the rest of the market. And how many authors is that list? I'm up to over 200. I thought I had 200 in my head. So it's a pretty robust list. Yeah, that makes sense. And I'm guessing like I know this is your proprietary data. So like but it's kind of one it's like a power law thing, like the top 10 or 20 are probably a huge percent. And then it really falls off as you get towards 100 and 150 from there. I kind of have this question and thought, and I don't know that it's provable.

It's related to something you said you really want to talk about, which is the decline specifically in kids' fiction sales, strength and nonfiction. Just so I get my terms right, does kids, as you're describing, does that cover YA? So we have three what we call aggregates. So three major parts of the market. So we have the adult aggregate that includes adult fiction, adult nonfiction. Then we have kids aggregates.

Kids fiction, kids nonfiction, and then YA is the third. Oh, separate. So the kids you want to talk about does not include YA. Okay, gotcha. Just want to make sure about that. Yep. And I mentioned that adult fiction drove a lot of the growth in 2024, and then that leaves the underperformers. The kids market was an area that underperformed in 2024, and this marks the third year of declines for kids book sales. Oh.

I can go deeper. So what, yeah, okay, what in that? Like, so I'm just seeing the note you have two and a half million units for kids fiction. So what percent is that? I didn't see an aggregate. Do you know off the top of your head? Like, what does that represent as a percent of the market for kids fiction year over year?

So the children's market accounts for roughly one third of overall sales for the print market. So it's an important part of the market. And within all of the metadata that we have attached to the title level data, we have minimum and maximum age ranges. So this allows me to break down the kids market by age ranges and

When I look at the performance of sales by age range, I can identify it's the middle grade reader. So this is middle grade readers ages 9 to 12 that are the biggest underperforming segment that are contributing to the steepest losses in the kids' book market. So...

The theory of the case I have, I know you have the data, but the narrative is harder to know. Here's my theory of the case, and we can talk about- You can share it, and I also have a narrative as well. Yeah, yeah. Let's see who wins or people can think. I imagine that we have quite a bit of overlap. So a couple of things, and I don't know how, if this is the pie, I don't know how I'd split the pie, but the book banning stuff has to matter. It has to matter in some way, whether people, libraries aren't buying as many books,

parents are excited about by is just a chilling effect. We say this about free speech and I think I was saying about book market, that's gotta be one thing. I think that grades, that age group still coming out of COVID, I'm not sure how much they're reading for fun. For sure. How much is this sort of discretionary within their households? And the third thing I would say, and I don't know how to quantify this, but I feel like maybe kids books specifically middle grader and below are

I wonder if Barnes & Noble outperforms its marketplace because you go and you're browsing around. And I know that Barnes & Noble is carrying fewer middle reader titles, right? Fewer first front list debut things that are unproven. That's sort of across the board for Barnes & Noble. Like one of the trade-offs of their turnaround is it's a rich get richer because they want to carry more stuff that sells, which is a bookstore I totally understand. Right.

But it crowds out some of these other places and debut middle reader. I've had middle readers in my household now They're old and grow it out of it. It's hard to find you don't know So you're going to Barnes and Noble Browse around trying to find something if they don't have as many titles You're not gonna buy as many things. So those are my things kovat. Oh hangover censorship chilling effect Stocking at Barnes & Noble. What else would you add to that? Or what do you think of my theory of the case? I

I would add something related to reading scores, which has been in the news as of late. But first, let's talk about the pandemic piece of it, because that is certainly something that is a factor. So it's partly a pandemic story.

In the sense that we know that there was a lot of disruption for kids during the pandemic. We know that a lot of kids got more screen time during the pandemic. We know that when schools reopened, that screen time wasn't reversed.

So the kindergartners that were given iPads when schools was closed, kindergartners are still getting iPads now. There's more screen learning happening in school than there was pre-pandemic. And I sense that there's more screen time happening at home.

So that's one factor. Reading for fun is absolutely one of the points here as well. I think there's been a drop in kids reading for fun and there's been a drop in parents prioritizing reading time at home.

And the point that I want to bring up related to reading scores is from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This is a government-funded study that tracks children's

test scores as it relates to both reading and math. And pre-pandemic, those scores had started to fall a little in reading. They did one study in 2019. They did a subsequent study in 2022. During that time, there was a drastic drop in reading scores because of the pandemic. The 2024 results were just released last week, and there's another drastic drop. Wow.

So the reading scores is also on the decline. And this is obviously a major concern for educators and it should be a major concern for parents as well. And not for nothing, the future, if we want to put dollars behind it, the future book sales of the industry, right? Because those kids grew up to be adults and they grew up to be the adults that buy these things that are, you know, higher, a bigger part of the market. And that's a decades long trend.

I do wonder too, and the reason I asked about YA, because I had this theory of the case, I wondered if, do you know what the YA segment did last year? How is YA performing? So YA started the year really strong up until about mid-year and then it started to drop. So when I look at the overall sales for 2024 for the young adult segment, it was down about 5%.

But I suspect that many of the readers who were driving growth in the first half of the year started to read up into adults. That was my theory. This is anecdotal, Brenna. So I have a 13-year-old in my house. Okay. And his friends that like to read books, and I'll say they're mostly...

young women, girls, whatever you call a 13-year-old at this point, they're reading Sarah J. Maas. They're reading Rebecca Yarrow. So I think it's pulling those way A dollars up into, I guess,

Fourth Wing is supposed to be new adult or something. I don't know. I can never keep track of what that's supposed to be. But they're reading up into adult. Do you all put Fourth Wing as adult? Does that fall in the adult fiction category for you? So I'll mention that we don't do the categorization. That comes from publishers. And that publisher does categorize Fourth Wing as adult. I would think that would make sense, having read Fourth Wing and a couple of the scenes that are in that particular one. So yeah, that would make sense to me. Is those things really...

picked up steam with Onyx storm coming out in January, probably pulled people into iron flame and fourth wing and the attendant books and their romantic at large, I should say there's other things in there. And that's kind of the inverse of when say hunger games was huge. It pulled adult reading down, not down,

into the young adult reading, right? A lot of adults were reading young adult, Twilight, other things like that. So those, there's a little bit of a, where is the hot property can pull people from one age group to another. I also think it's interesting, like the books that sell in kids and they, you know, they're huge sellers, the Dogmans, the Diary of the Wimpy Kids and all those,

Those are fun to read. They are, but they don't have crossover appeal to older kids into adults. Like some middle grade series we've seen. I mean, Harry Potter, of course, being the prime example of that. So there isn't really like Percy Jackson. There's a book and just kind of not a hit and hits drive like in movies and music. They can drive a lot. And the hits right now are all happening in this liminal book talk, romanticy romance, and then McFadden to space romance.

at the same time. So what's the... If the argument... So fiction for kids is going down, but then there was a pretty good swing towards nonfiction. So what's the story there? If fiction is doing well, why are the kids' nonfiction growing exponentially?

again, marginally, but still not having the same decline. Yep. So kids nonfiction grew, I think it was just like a quarter of a point in 2020. So it didn't do especially well, but it did post-growth. So that's great to see. The things that are driving the growth in nonfiction are all educational materials. And I suspect these are more parents, more families,

looking to books to help close that learning gap from the pandemic to kind of supplement learning at home. When I slice the educational materials by age range, I can see that for the ages that are driving growth in readers. So these are books that help

children build their reading skills as they're, you know, learning to read. And in first grade and second grade, the growth in readers is skewing younger. So it is these younger children who are, you know, parents of younger children buying readers. And then when I look at subjects like math and science, it's skewing older. Well, that would make sense to me. I mean, if we go back to sort of a COVID theory of the case,

of some with those middle grade and younger, maybe one third thing is they're getting from their teachers, here's your maps testing, here's your kids' lack of reading skills by age group. And one thing I would do is then say, okay, how can we supplement that outside of the classroom? And that's when you would start picking up the reading skills. And then you need to have those so you can help with math and science when you're a little bit older in that sense. There is a identifying that there's a

a deficit of some kind. And you're not going to say, well, let's just read some chapter books for fun. We need to actually learn how to read a little bit. So I wonder if that will change a little bit over time. We talked about some of this already. I'm going to jump down to digital formats. Yeah. One thing to add just before we move on that you brought up was related to kind of the number of middle grade books that are available. I did want to touch on that because I have looked at that in our data.

I will mention that I can't do things like breakout specific retailers. So I can kind of look at the universe as a whole. And the metric that I use to understand the number of books kind of out there and available is called item count. So item count is a measure that tells me the number of unique ISBNs that are falling within a certain category. So when I look at item count within the middle grade market,

I can tell you that there has not been a decline in item count for the number of middle grade titles available across the entire market. So I think this is a theory that some have specifically because BNN was in the media a few years back saying that they were reducing their shelf space for middle grade front list. But in terms of what I'm looking at in the data, I can't attribute that decline to that particular trend.

Yeah, so publishers are publishing about the same number of books. I'm just wondering, is B&M carrying them? Right, I guess as an example, maybe they're Amazon only or digital only. Maybe you can get on the B&M website. I mean, a lot of these, there's been one that's opened in Portland. I think actually two smaller format B&M's.

and they just don't have as much shelf space. So I'd be curious to know, maybe they have one copy or I don't know. That's a good point though, but I hadn't thought about, okay, are the aggregate number of available titles declined? If they're not, then it's either people aren't buying them or they're not available to buy in a different kind of way. So I guess that's maybe a way of going into digital sales because digital, there's never a supply problem. There's never a shelf space problem with digital and audiobook and ebook.

So you're seeing double digit sales growth in digital format. So that's aggregate eBooks in audiobooks. I mean, I'm assuming audiobooks are still growing much faster than eBooks, eBooks plateauing. Kind of what's the mix there that you're seeing? Yeah. So what we've talked about up until now is really specific to the print format and in looking at digital performance.

There's been double digit growth for both ebooks as well as audiobooks in 2024. And when I look at these three formats and compare them, audiobooks has the highest growth rate, up 25% compared to prior year. Unbelievable. One of these years, it's not going to be 15 plus percent. I don't know what year it's going to be. Maybe I'm going to be 95 years old.

but an astonishing run. So if you put those together, because my memory of this is that digital is sort of a third-ish of the whole book market in unit sales or dollars? I don't remember which one this is. In units, in our data, when I combine kind of all of the formats into one view, I'm looking at 40% of the market for digital and about 60% for print. Right. Right.

Wow. And do you see, I don't know how granular data gets, do you see sort of the same trends in the digital that you see for adult in terms of mix of titles and authors and stuff? Definitely. And a lot of it's coming from BookTok. So BookTok is extending, you know, beyond just print and is impacting sales for eBooks for sure. Yeah.

as well as digital audio. But I will say that when I look at digital audio, there's more varied areas of growth compared to what I'm looking at for eBooks. So one story there is biography. In our print dataset, biography has been on the decline, but growing in digital audio, which is- Well, when you're growing 25%, you're going to have pockets of growth in a lot of different places. That's so much growth, there's a lot to spread around. I mean, frankly, I think

almost all of my nonfiction reading, again, I'm sprinkling in anecdata here, is on audio. And biography and memoir and autobiography too, because I want to hear the person read it. Like I read the Pacino thing, it was amazing. It was just unbelievable on audio. I can't imagine doing it in print, honestly, on something like that. Holiday, we're a few weeks out from the holiday season being over. So there are a couple of trends here.

I'm glad you put this in there because I didn't even think to ask because I don't know what to put in the Taylor Swift heiress tour book target thing. I'm assuming target doesn't report any of that stuff to you around that book. Target does. Yeah. Oh, okay. So what, if anything, can you say about that book sales?

So the heiress tour book was released on Black Friday. It was a Target exclusive, so you could only get it in store at Target on Black Friday. No pre-orders, no digital, just the printing day and date. What a weird. Were you surprised by that strategy when they released it?

I wasn't surprised because it's a way to bring foot traffic in store, Black Friday specifically. And then it was available online the following day on Super Saturday. So that made sense to me. I went to my Target that morning to...

assess the situation. My target did not have a line of people outside. They had the books in stock when I arrived around 8:30 in the morning, but I did hear reports that that was not the case, that there were some targets that did have lines that were sold out very quickly, but the book itself sold very well. It was one of the fastest selling books in the adult nonfiction market over the last few years.

And in terms of the other things that did well for holiday for the total book market overall, besides just the heiress tour book, a whole lot of other Taylor Swift books sold quite well, both in the kids market. There were also a couple other biographies, you know, Taylor Swift sticker books, Taylor Swift little golden book. These were all items that did well in the fourth quarter. Yeah.

You have family journals as something that did well in the holiday. What is a family journal? I don't know if I could pick one of these out of a lineup. Yep. So this is, these are journals that you gift to someone in your family to encourage them to share their story. Oh, grandma, tell us about the old days, that kind of stuff. So this is,

This includes titles like Mom, I Want to Hear Your Story, Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story. These were originally self-published and then source books picked them up. So I believe source books will be published. They're so smart. Source books always over there. They're like vultures with a huge brain. That sounds bad, but they're really looking around and seeing what's out there to pick up.

Sourcebooks is incredibly nimble and data-driven and it's paying off for their business. It really is. When I look at publisher performance,

And every quarter I track kind of the fastest growing publishers. Sourcebooks has made this fastest growing publisher list for my quarterly tracking for the last nine quarters in a row. They are doing incredibly well. It's like them and Red Tower probably or Entangled or something like that, I would imagine. Let's look ahead to 2025. Yes. Got some stuff you want to talk about here.

Makes sense to me, escapism, right? So 2025 has felt like nine years already, and we're 20, you know, 39 days into at this point. Is that macro economic stuff, political? Is that why you're saying escapism? So some of this is related to the categories that are doing very well in Big Talk. So fantasy, romance, and thriller, these are all kind of books reading to escape. But beyond that, I'm also seeing growth in things like science fiction and horror and

And I think that those trends will continue and there will be a greater appetite for reading stories that kind of allow you to escape into another world or, you know, live a different perspective to pull you out of the everyday stress of 2025.

Rebecca and I just recorded, it was for Patreon, a Deals, Deals, Deals episode. And I was telling, she hadn't heard of Myrtle. You saw this, I see a brain teasers on here. I was a little surprised by that, but it's like kind of not a book story. I mean, it is technically a book, but we don't lump it in here. But you have logic and brain teasers is something. Is that a Myrtle story or what the hell's going on with that? Why is this a thing all of a sudden? It's Myrtle and Myrtle is coming out of BookTok. Yeah. So I think that this...

This is the first thing that I've seen come out of book talk that is specific to the adult nonfiction market. And I think that this could be maybe the first of others where readers and consumers are looking to books to kind of just have fun with logic and brain teasers. Well, I can tell you by deals coming out and deals have been signed, there's, I think, I

I can't remember the woman's name who wrote Myrtle, but there's been a second volume. Then there's going to be lookalikes and coattail kinds of things happening. There's a fantasy one coming out. Again, I'm not on BookTok, but I saw this in a store, I think a year ago. And I was like, that's kind of cool. And I bought one. So it's something that you can pick up there. It makes a lot of sense. Now that I feel like...

I wonder too how much the habit formation around doing games daily that's brought on by like the New York Times, Wordle and Connections.

And then Sudoku before that and Crossword Purges was large. Like this is an evolving story. Like this might just be what's up next in some degree. Like people are conditioned to have stuff in their life. That's a good point. And that's something that our toy industry analyst has called out in her data. A lot of the growth coming in the toy market is not coming from children. It's coming from adults. One of the hot toy items of holiday 2024 was the Lego botanical building sets. I see those everywhere. Yes.

So that might be a part of this bigger desire from adults to kind of lean into things to occupy their minds that are fun. Yeah. So you're thinking maybe, so you're like, you're not giving up on kids market for 2020. I'm not getting up, giving up on kids.

I am optimistically thinking that kids will return to growth in 2025. And there's a few reasons for that. The first is that while kids sales overall underperformed for the whole year in 2024, in Q4, they posted growth. So there was some growth coming at the end of 2024, which makes me hopeful. And that came across all age ranges, including middle grade. So I'm really rooting for

for the kids market and really hoping that more parents are prioritizing reading time at home over other activities. I don't think anyone really knows what's going to happen with TikTok in their ownership situation. We're in this weird limbo period where technically maybe they're supposed to not be available in the US, but they are. You can't get a new app, but if you have an existing one, you can log in.

My base case is if BookTok goes away, TikTok goes away, but for our purposes of BookTok here, there will be some momentum behind those titles. I just wonder if like, is Onyx Storm big enough now? I guess Fourth Wing, Empyrean Saga. I'm not sure what everyone knows this as at this point. And McFadden and Moss. The ones that have already been big will be big. I think they have enough escape velocity.

But it's such an interesting thought experiment to be like, what does the book market look like if it goes away? What happens? I know you don't have a crystal ball that's any better than mine, except that your old crystal balls have better data in them. Like, what's your sense? Do we go back to 2019 in terms of like, what happens if BookTok goes away? What's your idea about that? That's a good question. So I think BookTok has been obviously really good for book sales, but it's also been this tool that has grown exponentially

interest in reading among many consumers, particularly younger consumers who are using TikTok. And I think that this new group of really engaged readers is not going to stop buying books and they won't stop reading just because TikTok goes away. I think they find new platforms for discovery. Yeah.

So in terms of what that looks like for sales, maybe if these platforms are more varied than the TikTok or the group of authors that it's outperforming in adult fiction becomes less top heavy and more varied.

Yeah. Like, for example, I think the genres of romanticism and commercial romance, just to pick two that have really benefited, they have like mind share and literal footprint share in bookstores, right? Where you can see those covers, that looks like a romantic table, that looks like a commercial romance table. So there's discovery ability, like, I know what those are, I've been trained to know what this sort of packaging is. And that's great for readers that like that kind of stuff.

I think would be interesting to see is like, is there a reset on what's hot? Like, could we get something else that's interesting and people are really buying their one effect and

I'm attributing to the whiteness of the best sellers list, especially for adult, is the algorithm and the reinforcing nature of the algorithms, right? Popular becomes more popular, becomes more popular. You had a good note for me before we started recording that you wanted to tell me that it's not all is lost. There's something to look forward to, be happy about in the best selling authors of the year. Brenna, hit me with it so I don't get out of here being very sad.

For sure. So I looked at the author performance in 2024 versus 2023 to identify the authors with the most growth. So this isn't necessarily best selling, but those with the highest amount of growth. And I'm looking at the top 20 list right here. A lot of them are book talk authors. We also have authors like Taylor Swift. Yeah, right.

But the number 13 highest growing adult author in our data is Percival Everett. Yeah. So in 2023, he had less than 50,000 in unit sales. And in 2024, that number is over a half a million. 10X. 10X.

And still selling quite well, I'm seeing, even into the new year. I guess probably it'll be interesting once awards season is finally over. We still have the Pulitzers in April and NBCC and then the Booker Prize still to go. I wonder how much it'll have once the 2024 awards season is over. I wonder if this is going to be...

I don't know. Does it get on the paperback favorites table for the next 10 years? I guess kind of wondering about James right now. I would like to see it have a long tail. I would like to see a long too. And I guess I'd be especially interested when the next book comes out. Does it have any kind of, you know, follow on effect there? Brent,

Brenna, anything else that jumps out to you? What questions or curiosities do you have going into 2025 about what's going to go on with book sales? Yeah, so I think a lot of our discussion has been focused on 2024 so far, but there were a couple of major things that happened in our data so far in 2025 in January that I just reported on. So one, I think you had mentioned this on an earlier podcast that Onyx Storm did break sales records in terms of the fastest selling title. So that's one notable story.

The other notable story, I'm not sure if you talked about this, was this, the title Inner Excellence and how A.J. Brown was seen reading it on the sidelines. Yes, we didn't talk about it on the show, but I linked to it in Today in Books. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my spouse told me about this kind of after the game. And I thought, oh, I'm going to add this to my list of things to watch when the date is posted the following week.

the date is posted the title was the number one bestseller of the week amazing it's incredible so this title had up until the eagles game a lifetime lifetime sales of just 6 000 units

In the few weeks following the Eagles game, that went up to 160,000. So it's multiplied by 26 times in the span of just a few weeks because this NFL superstar was seen reading it on the sidelines. So the power of NFL fans is wild.

And that's why the Taylor Swift, Travis Kelsey story is so huge, right? Like we see it right now. We just, we talk about Taylor Swift. Now we're talking about the NFL, like those two things together, pretty powerful. I told the story in the pod the other day about me being in a bookstore and this woman,

trying to find a book that was out of stock. Let Them by Mel Robbins. Has that been on your radar at all? Oh, yes. Did you follow that? Yeah, I did. That was the week that it came out was the number one overall bestseller and it continues to sell pretty well. And then I went and listened to the podcast because I was curious about this idea of the Let Them Theory and what it meant. And I can see it resonating with a lot of people. That title has been driving growth in self-help motivational books.

which is a category that does well at the start of the year because it aligns with resolutions and things like that, but it's that title.

In particular. And then the other notable call out that I've seen so far in January is that dystopian fiction is back on the bestseller list. And you can peg this to immediately following the presidential inauguration. So that's when it kicked off. It wasn't after November. It was like the inauguration really. It's real now. Okay. I have to deal with this at some point. Yes.

And it's usual suspects, right? Handmaid's Tale, 1984, Brave New World, that kind of stuff. Fahrenheit 451, yes. And I just had, I had a call with some booksellers yesterday and in my conversation with them, they told me that it's all younger consumers that are coming into the store and asking for these titles. You know, I hadn't thought about that because the first time, I got a little salty about this in Today in Books saying, really, we're doing this again eight years later. You know, this didn't help the last, you know,

Again, my politics are on the table, so whatever. Brenna, you don't have to nod your head or anything. But just like, I didn't think, though, that there were 16-year-olds last year or 12-year-olds that are now 20. You know, and they're prime sort of early reading years. And I hadn't considered that. Okay, you guys, it's all right if you can go read this now. That's fine. If you're 47 like I am and you've already read 1984, you don't need to go read it again. Go read Octavia Butler. Go read Kindred. Go read one of those, something else like that. Try something different.

Brenna, this was terrific. Let's check in mid-year and see if you're right. Definitely. Yeah. I will be sure to remember the things I got right and then forget the things that you got wrong. So we'll come out ahead. I do keep a tally for the things I get right. You do? And I tend to promote those things because it's important. Okay, good. Well, email is forever. I'm looking at it right now. You can't unsend at this point. Brenna Connor for Circona, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening today. Now please enjoy this audiobook excerpt from A Killing Cold by Kate Alice Marshall. Thanks again to our sponsors at Flatiron Books. I've never liked the way snow makes the world go quiet, stifling sound and creating the illusion of stillness. I can't shake the feeling that the silence is one of waiting, of watching.

The car crunches implacably along the narrow road. The trees around us are mostly hemlock, wearing capes of snow to conceal their green. Beech and sugar maple appear here and there, branches winter-stripped and grasping. Connor's family owns this land, all the way to the mountain peak. Not for now, Connor says for the third time since we left the small town at the base of the mountain.

Once you're out of Datura, it's only about 20 minutes, even with the weather. It's a flower, you know, I note idly. Datura, also known as Devil's Weed. The Victorians said it represented deceitful charms. Connor gives me a look I've come to know so well. Half pleased, half puzzled. I've always liked to know the names of things. It's the next best thing to knowing my own.

I'm bunching my scarf in my hands again, twisting it up like a cheap rag. It was a gift from Connor, which means it's anything but. Sometimes I play a game where I guess how much something cost, and then I double it, and then I look up the actual price. I'm usually still a bit low. Red cashmere and wool blend scarf, $490. I wad it up in a ball in my lap.

They'll love you, Connor says, noticing my expression. Connor is a man used to being loved. I've known it since the moment I saw him. No scars on that heart, I thought at the time, though later I discovered I was wrong.

"'I'll settle for grudging approval,' I tell him, flicking him a smile to show I'm not nervous, though of course I am. There's a diamond on my finger that cost as much as a down payment on a house, and I've never met my fiancé's family, other than his sister, Alexis, who swooped into town two months ago for less than 24 hours and greeted me with plastic politeness. We'd been together only three months at the time, which makes this not even half a year and already engaged.'

I'd be worried if Connor's family wasn't skeptical. Hell, I'm skeptical. The person you have to impress is Grandma Louise, Connor says. His voice thrums with nerves despite his words, his fingers drumming on the wheel in an uneven rhythm. Mrs. Dalton, to you, obviously. Granddad's in charge of the business, but Grandma's in charge of the family. If she likes you, you're in.

And if she doesn't like me, I ask. Oh, we just take you up to the top of the mountain for a ritual sacrifice. He assures me, deadpan, and I roll my eyes at him. Don't worry, Theo. She'll like you. My heart thuds hard. Just once, and I'm sick with a feeling that might be dread or hope.

I need Connor's family to like me because I need Connor. I need the soft touch of his hands and the smell of his skin, and it feels impossible that I didn't know him at all this time last year. Connor hasn't had to worry about impressing my family. There isn't anyone to impress. I told him that my parents are dead. It's what I tell everyone.

It might even be true. The only thing you need to worry about- Connor begins, and then he swears as a dark shape bursts from the tree line. Connor slams on the brakes, twists the wheel, instinct overtaking sense. The wheels lose their grip and the car swings sideways, sliding alarmingly before coming to a lurching stop two feet shy of the thing we nearly hit, a deer. The buck's antlers branch to ten long points.

Steam rises from its heaving flanks. It stands with its legs splayed, head down, and for a moment I think it's going to charge the jeep, but then I see the bright crimson rimming its nostrils, pattering onto the snow beneath it. The black shaft of an arrow protrudes from its ribs, a slash of red and yellow fletching at the end.

Thank you for listening to this clip provided to you by Macmillan Audio. To hear more, look for this title wherever audiobooks are sold.