Gaiman Sued, Blurbs Deprecated, and A Book Sales Check-In

Summary

Book Riot - The Podcast: Gaiman Sued, Blurbs Deprecated, and A Book Sales Check-In

Release Date: February 10, 2025

In this episode of Book Riot - The Podcast, hosts Jeff O'Neill and Rebecca Schinsky delve into significant developments in the literary world, offering insightful discussions on legal battles involving prominent authors, the evolving role of blurbs in publishing, and a comprehensive analysis of book sales trends with guest Brenna Connor from Circana. The episode skillfully navigates through complex topics, providing listeners with a thorough understanding of the current state and future directions of the book industry.

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1. Legal Battles in the Literary World

a. Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer Lawsuit

The episode opens with a heavy discussion on the civil lawsuit filed against renowned authors Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. The hosts highlight the seriousness of the accusations, which revolve around human trafficking and rape, as reported by Scarlet Pavlovich, a primary accuser.

• Jeff O'Neill explains the nature of civil suits, emphasizing the lower threshold of proof: “the burden of proof in a civil suit is preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt” (09:35).
• Rebecca Schinsky provides context about Scarlet Pavlovich's role and her experiences, noting, “Scarlet Pavlovich has had some canny legal advice here, and I like her chances in court as well” (10:33).

The conversation reflects on the potential consequences for Gaiman, suggesting that the ongoing legal troubles could lead to significant repercussions both legally and reputationally.

b. Salman Rushdie's Attacker Trial

Moving forward, the podcast discusses the forthcoming trial of the individual accused of attacking Salman Rushdie. The hosts express curiosity about the proceedings and Rushdie's potential testimony.

• Jeff O'Neill remarks, “it's a very interesting document. I don't know how available those things are” (13:22).
• Rebecca Schinsky shares insights from Rushdie's memoir, noting his reluctance to confront his attacker but acknowledging the complexity of the situation (14:00).

c. Authors Guild's Lawsuit Against Idaho

A significant segment is dedicated to the Authors Guild's lawsuit against Idaho over a stringent book banning law, HB 710. This law categorizes books containing "sexual content" as harmful to minors, leading to extensive restrictions.

• Jeff O'Neill discusses the broad and vague definitions within the law, stating, “the law makes those distinctions between infants and 17 year olds, plaintiffs argued” (15:32).
• Rebecca Schinsky elaborates on the impact, explaining how the law indiscriminately bans books based on a broad definition of sexual content, severely limiting access to educational and literary materials for minors (16:22).

The hosts express concern over the chilling effects of such legislation, highlighting the diminished access to diverse reading materials for young audiences.

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2. The Changing Landscape of Book Blurbs

The podcast transitions to a critical examination of the role of blurbs in the publishing industry. Blurbs, endorsements or quotes on book covers from notable figures, have long been a staple in marketing literature.

• Jeff O'Neill introduces the topic by acknowledging the mixed feelings authors have towards blurbs: “authors really hate blurbs because they've got to go get them, they've got to solicit them” (17:44).
• Rebecca Schinsky adds depth to the discussion, highlighting the vulnerability authors feel when soliciting genuine endorsements: “asking people to, you read my book and then, God, I hope that you have nice things to say about it is terrifying and vulnerable” (18:20).

The hosts explore the efficacy of blurbs, debating whether they genuinely influence readers or are merely a byproduct of industry practices.

• Jeff O'Neill points out the potential marketing value, especially when endorsements come from highly recognizable figures: “If there's a blurb by Adam Grant, you do it” (20:38).
• Rebecca Schinsky concurs, noting that while blurbs might not always influence her directly, they can tip the scales for other readers: “every now and then there will be a blurb that is the thing that I'm like that, that tips me over into, like, okay, now I have more time for this title” (21:10).

The discussion underscores the complex relationship between publishers and authors regarding blurbs, balancing marketing benefits against the authors' reluctance to engage in what can be a time-consuming and pressured process.

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3. Book Reviews: Front List Foyer

In the Front List Foyer segment, the hosts review and discuss several notable books:

a. "The Loves of My Life" by Edmund White

A candid memoir that explores Edmund White's extensive sexual life as a gay man in America, spanning from his youth in the 1950s to his current life in his mid-80s.

• Rebecca Schinsky describes the memoir as “spicy” and delves into its non-linear narrative, which focuses on specific relationships and phases of White's life (32:18).
• She praises White's bravery in sharing intimate details, asserting, “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” (33:40).

b. "The Hippie Trail" by Rick Steves

A travel journal from 1978, documenting Rick Steves' journey from Istanbul to India and Nepal, offering a nostalgic glimpse into his early adventures.

• Rebecca Schinsky highlights the vivid descriptions and Rick Steves' authentic voice, noting how the book intersects with academic research on a meaningful life (35:47).
• The review emphasizes the book's ability to convey the essence of Rick Steves' character and the broader cultural context of his travels (36:00).

c. "Bibliophobia" by Sara Chahaya

A memoir that examines the complex relationship between reading and mental illness, challenging the notion that books can serve as a panacea for personal struggles.

• Jeff O'Neill introduces the book as a skeptical take on the healing power of literature, stating, “books can't do everything, Rebecca. They cannot heal you” (42:10).
• Rebecca Schinsky adds that the memoir is a critical exploration of how books can both help and hinder mental health, suggesting an engaging and thoughtful read (43:08).

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4. Book Sales Check-In with Brenna Connor

Guest Brenna Connor from Circana provides a detailed analysis of book sales trends for 2024 and offers projections for 2025. Her insights are crucial for understanding the market dynamics influenced by factors like BookTok, digital formats, and shifting consumer behaviors.

a. Overall Market Growth

• Brenna Connor reports a 1% increase in print book unit sales for 2024, marking the first growth since 2021: “This return to growth and the other thing I want to note is that at Circana, we track many industries outside of books. So I get to see performance across many different industries.” (48:31)

b. Impact of BookTok on Sales

• The BookTok phenomenon, originating from TikTok, continues to significantly influence adult fiction sales, particularly in fantasy, thrillers, and romance genres: “Adult fiction led the growth for the print book market in 2024. The categories that drove the highest gains are all coming from Booktok.” (50:55)
• Jeff O'Neill highlights the prominence of authors like Frida McFadden, Sarah J. Maas, and Rebecca Yarros, attributing their success to BookTok’s influence (51:21).

c. Decline in Middle Grade Kids Books

A troubling trend identified is the third consecutive year of declining sales in the middle grade (ages 9-12) segment.

• Brenna Connor attributes this decline to increased screen time during and post-pandemic, reduced reading for pleasure, and a decrease in parental prioritization of reading time at home: “a lot of kids got more screen time during the pandemic... there's a drop in kids reading for fun” (57:16)
• Additionally, reading scores have plummeted, reflecting a broader educational challenge: “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.” (57:16)

d. Digital Formats: Ebooks and Audiobooks

The digital segment of the market is experiencing robust growth, with audiobooks leading at a 25% increase year-over-year.

• Brenna Connor notes, “digital audio has been on the rise compared to ebooks” and emphasizes the dominance of BookTok in driving digital sales across genres (65:24).
• Jeff O'Neill expresses awe at the sustained growth, remarking, “a lot of this feels like it's an astonishing run.” (65:02)

e. Holiday Trends and Notable Releases

The holiday season saw strategic releases that capitalized on cultural phenomena:

• Taylor Swift’s "Eras Tour" book, released exclusively at Target on Black Friday, became a bestseller: “The book itself sold very well. It was one of the fastest selling books in the adult non fiction market over the last few years.” (67:25)
• Brenna Connor highlights the success of niche products like family journals, which encourage sharing personal stories, as well as a resurgence in dystopian fiction, driven by societal and political climates: “dystopian fiction is back on the bestseller list... younger consumers are coming into the store and asking for these titles.” (78:06)

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5. Looking Ahead to 2025

a. Continued Growth in Escape-Driven Genres

Both hosts and Brenna Connor anticipate that genres offering escapism—fantasy, romance, thrillers, science fiction, and horror—will continue to thrive as readers seek refuge from daily stresses.

• Brenna Connor states, “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” (70:12).

b. Resilience of BookTok and Reader Engagement

Even with uncertainties surrounding TikTok's future, the BookTok community is expected to adapt and find new platforms for discovery, ensuring sustained interest in literature.

• Brenna Connor emphasizes the adaptability of engaged readers: “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” (75:11).

c. Optimism for Kids Market Recovery

Despite the decline in middle grade sales, there is optimism for a rebound in 2025, supported by late-year growth and increased parental emphasis on reading: “I'm really rooting for the kids market and really hoping that more parents are prioritizing reading time at home over other activities” (72:47).

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Conclusion

This episode of Book Riot - The Podcast offers a multifaceted exploration of the literary landscape, intertwining legal challenges, industry practices, and market dynamics. Through thoughtful analysis and expert insights from Brenna Connor, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of the forces shaping book sales and publishing trends. The discussions on the role of blurbs, the impact of social media platforms like BookTok, and the resilience of digital formats provide valuable perspectives for authors, publishers, and avid readers alike. As the industry navigates these complexities, the hosts and their guest illuminate the path forward, underscoring the enduring significance of books in our lives.

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Notable Quotes:

• Jeff O'Neill at [09:35]: “the burden of proof in a civil suit is preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt.”

• Rebecca Schinsky at [10:33]: “Scarlet Pavlovich has had some canny legal advice here, and I like her chances in court as well.”

• Jeff O'Neill at [17:44]: “authors really hate blurbs because they've got to go get them, they've got to solicit them.”

• Rebecca Schinsky at [18:20]: “asking people to, you read my book and then, God, I hope that you have nice things to say about it is terrifying and vulnerable.”

• Rebecca Schinsky at [21:10]: “every now and then there will be a blurb that is the thing that I'm like that, that tips me over into, like, okay, now I have more time for this title”.

• Brenna Connor at [48:31]: “As you mentioned, print book unit sales grew 1% in 2024 compared to the prior year. This is the first year of growth that we've marked since 2021 in our data set, which is great.”

• Brenna Connor at [50:55]: “Adult fiction led the growth for the print book market in 2024. The categories that drove the highest gains are all coming from Booktok.”

• Rebecca Schinsky at [57:16]: “There’s a drop in kids reading for fun and there's a drop in parents prioritizing reading time at home.”

• Brenna Connor at [65:24]: “Audiobooks have been on the rise compared to ebooks.”

• Brenna Connor at [75:11]: “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.”

Transcript

[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

Blinds.com is the goat shop blinds.com right.

[Brenna Connor]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

This is the Book Riot podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And I'm Rebecca Schinsky.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And today is Thursday, February 6th, 2025. We are recording a new show so we're gonna have the first segment of this episode. It's gonna be us talking about news and headlines as normal. Then we'll take a quick sponsor break and you're gonna hear me talk to Brenna Connor of Circana, formerly known as Bookscan. For those of you who used to know things about how books operate, I'm still learning, still amazing. 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 back. Programming Notes we're going to get to this in front list 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 Ste next together was a real journey. But we'll save that for frontless foyer. But go check out that 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh boy.

[Jeff O'Neill]

To talk about interesting deals. If this is your first time, you've never listened to Deals, deals, deals episode. I look at a bunch of deals announcements till my eyes go cross. I threw on some Bonnie Rate, had a whiskey, spent two hours going through my notes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

What a good book for you.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 there. Anything else, Rebecca, on the program that we should talk about?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Who does want to read along with us? Since we did both just read Life in 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And I guess we put on the Patreon too. We can put it here. If you happen to find yourselves in the Portland, Oregon area or thereabouts on March 13, 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 in 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 the eel 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Put a little red circle around that date on your calendar and come hang out with us. Excited to meet some of y'all in person.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, already thinking of the logistics there about how we're gonna how to get to do that live. Okay, let's take a sponsor break and get into the news of the week.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. Six months later, he's brought her to Idlewood, his family's isolated winter retreat. Theo tried to ignore the threatening messages on her phone, but she can't ignore the footprints outside her cabin window or the strange sense of familiarity she has. Then, in a disused cabin, Theo finds something impossible a photo of herself as a child taken at Idyllwood. Someone here has a shocking secret that they will do anything to keep hidden, and discovering what happened at Idyllwood 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 Foreign.

[Narrator]

Today's episode is brought to you by Sourcebooks Landmark Publisher of Babylonia By Constanza Casadi from the author of the best selling Clytemnestra 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. Caught up in politics and violence, she trains in war and diplomacy. And with each move she rises in rank, embroiled in a game of power, desire and betrayal until she ascends to the only position that will keep her safe, that of Queen Babylonia brilliantly weaves myth and ancient history together to give a voice to Semiramis, the only female ruler of the Assyrian Empire. This spellbinding story charts her captivating ascent to a throne no one promised her, but that she took. Okay, make sure to check out Babylonia Costanza Casadi. And thanks again to Sourcebooks Landmark for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Flat Iron Books, publisher of Ambition by Natalie Keller Reinert Jules Thornton did not come to Florida horse country to make friends. She is intent on becoming a world class rider 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 Reinert. And thanks again to Flatiron Books for sponsoring this episode.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 widest possible.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Net you can cast.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. So Feedspot, you found this. How did you come across this? I didn't ask.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Somebody from Feedspot emailed me and was like, hey, we put you on our list. And 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 like 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Do you think they emailed the people that were like 97?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I bet they did. Yes. You made it into the top 100. Like, I think.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Do you think everyone was number five? Did it? Some sort of LLM or algorithm, like.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Shuffled that way because like number one.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You wouldn't believe in like number 71, you'd be like, I'm not so excited. But Fize feels just about.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It does it? Feels pretty good. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay. And then all the books at number seven.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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, just, just on general about you and you know, in the big ones, of course, you don't want. 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 just going to say it. Trigger warning, I guess, rape and human trafficking and the continued fallout really from the tortoises reporting and then Scarlet Pavlovich and other women coming forward over many years to Amanda Palmer and. 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 and it's Today in.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 counterminded or not. The jurors, lawyers, not counterminded by the judge. But one way you can think about this is 51% probability of culpability. 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, proven 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 be. You have to like Pavlovich's chances in a court.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I agree.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Scarlett Pavlovich, if you read the New York magazine piece that Ella Shapiro reported, was the. 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, like, engaging with this story via this podcast and other headlines, which, frankly, is a very sane way to do it because the details are horrific.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. I mean, really.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. 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 Scarlet 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 Scarlet 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, you know, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I don't know. Yeah, I, 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Story of the year for sure, and it will continue.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It continue to be a follow on effect is that Netflix's 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 out 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 3 if the interest was good and the story doesn't exist. Take that for what you will. So that story continues to pace. Speaking of stories continuing paste 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 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I don't know either. I know he says in Knife that he's not particularly interested in like 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 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But I'm going to go out on a limb and say a lot of his judgment.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, no, 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. Like, there were hundreds of witnesses. And I believe some of it's even on tape or it was recorded. So an interesting choice. Hope Salman Rushdie, you know, gets his justice.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I. Nothing else to say, but interesting to see is that go. We're going to stay in law and order land. The big five in the Author's 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 law, 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 Liot and Publishers Weekly. At the heart of the challenge is HB 710. That's the law definition of sexual content, which PR, age and release characterized as exceptionally broad, vague 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 harmless, harmful, regardless of the age and maturity level of it. Child.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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, like, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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, they're instrument of the government.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Great. That's what we want. 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 and their. I mean, we can't count them because they don't exist. That's why we can't count them.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 and uneducated educated populace would be to the kinds of folks who want to pass.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Or they get it. Both. They can get rid of the books and have. They can have their cake and eat it too, by taking away all the books. God damn it. Okay.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Take a break.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Let's talk about blurbs. We already did ad break. It's a short news second. We don't have time to take an ad break. We got to keep going.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Wanted you to have a little spiritual reset.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes. And I think there's a little more nuance there. Like they, they hate the process of getting them because asking people to, 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 like 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. Some authors love getting a good blurb.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Of course they giving a good blurb.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 ado about blurbing lately, and.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So I'm sympathetic to that. And Sean Manning, who has taken over the flagship print 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We do more than we do. Maybe men should read more fiction.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. 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. 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 blur, 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?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 will make me more open and interested in a book. Something like, I'm going to write. Write about this in my newsletter is more compelling to me than a blurb. But blurbs don't mean.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But blurbs are what you have. Like, if you have a blurb.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. In my. I guess in my personal, like, book shopping experience, may they don't matter until they do. But.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, that's a. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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, you know, 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, 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 blur asking.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I also hate folding laundry, but in order to have clean codes, I gotta do it. Just because you hate it doesn't mean it's not valid.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's just, it's a big black box. So, like, we might be getting a little ab testing of the universe here. Like, it is not the only variable. Because of course this, this first season that Sean Manning publishes will be titles that have never been out in the world before.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But how do they perform against the, you know, median list that Simon and 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. 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, 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 book.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's not that hard to get Gary Stingart to blurb your title, right?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 on this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I don't know. 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 the last 10 years that had three to seven blurbs. Yeah, let's see. And then we're going to do them against again. Books are so different because each SKU is different. But like here's the I just 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. There's one on the COVID 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 of Elizabeth Gilbert.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. And this book by Rekka Romney is about a book collect. It's a book collecting memoir, you know, for someone browsing at a bookstore. Okay, 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. I love this book and it will live on my own bookshelf forever if social proof matters. Yeah, that matters. Now I can't tell you how much, and I'm not saying you shouldn't get rid of them, but to be, 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, yeah, this Elizabeth Gilbert example is perfect for what we're talking about though, because she is such a big name that she's very recognizable. And so I think it's likely that there is a very like a list group of authors that if they blurb your book, people would perceive that as meaningful. It could swing the sales. If you are a mid list novelist or a debut novelist and your blurbs come from other mid list writers that don't have that big name recognition, then it seems like much more of a question mark to me of if no one recognizes the names of the writers that are on your book jacket, which is totally understandable because Elizabeth Gilbert and Stephen King can't be out there Blurbing everybody?

[Jeff O'Neill]

No.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Then 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, okay, we're gonna print a hundred thousand 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 and sell more of the blurbed ones or not. We'll never get it. But it's a beautiful dream.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And in the cost benefit analysis it could well be. And I'd be, you know, 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 don't. 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? 1 out of 3 people actually read the book. They say yes, even open the email. Gilbert Cruz can't even get people to open their email just to fill out a ballot to be part of a big book game that everyone cares about. I can certainly agree with it, but my meta point here is this feels a little bit like supply side people forgetting about humans on the buy side. And I don't like that. I think that's a publisher, a mistake that publishing makes over and over and over. Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 much more widely advertised and the net to try to capture like there's a bigger consumer base for those things than there are for books. So we've got to work harder to capture consumers. Not to mention that what, like 125 films got wide releases last year and thousands and thousands of books like the Field is so much bigger as well. So you have to. You have fewer consumers for more choices for options. And it's.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And we've talked about this before, the book itself, to a first approximation, is the marketing material. Right?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 and reading frontless literary fiction, this wasn't as common, especially on an established author's 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?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Blurbs?

[Jeff O'Neill]

No, just a picture of Toni Morrison. Just a huge fucking picture of Toni Morrison.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

God level Tony Morrison. Who's gonna blurb? Tony Marcus.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But even then I looked at like Jonathan Franz and. But the one that I saw was Rushdie. Satanic Verses. I have a first edition that I collected a while ago of 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think if you can get an author that somebody adjacent to that book's target demo was 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 is the review economy is so decimated, is there's not as much just sort of standing criticism you can pull from to put on a book.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think that's a great point that if you've got those quotes of praise for previous work are usually pulled from book reviews. And when I've picked up like my old. My 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 who have to then go out and read the book is one of the options.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 right now.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I didn't do anything with my hand.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's reading your nonverbal. 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. Like we're pretty sure this is bad though. I like, on the other hand, I like shaking things up and trying things.

[Brenna Connor]

A little bit different.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, try it. Let's see what happens. And authors, like, I'm glad that we're hearing from authors. That's interesting. Like, I didn't know. Would it take you 12 hours? Like if you're friends with somebody, are you going to read 50 pages and be like, this is good enough. Let me like sign my name to it. It's a lot of pressure and it is kind of on the other side. Like 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I mean it's, it's cave Demtor, as always. But I do think that it's probably, I, I guess I'm at this moment I'd be willing to buy blurb stock if it was made available.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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're. We. We've all gotten got at some point.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Which, as we know from behavioral psychology is like, you then are probably more susceptible because you think you're so insusceptible.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well, Dunning Kruger for you.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, there you go. Let's do front list for you. Rebecca, you're up first.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, I am up first. Okay. I. Well, let's talk about the Loves of My Life by Edmund White is my first one.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Wow.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 has. He's been married for quite a long time. It seems like there is a monogamish situation going on there. It's. I listened to this and let me tell you, is spicy, which I knew it was going to be. And I was thinking, what am I doing listening to this audio?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, that much, huh?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I should read this and print because I could, 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. It's really interesting though, like, as I have, like, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And it's. 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 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. I have a lot of admiration for the work that he did. And like dude must have kept a lot of journals is 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. I mean like we're all adults here. People have had sex. So like what? How did he capture the bookkeeping?

[Jeff O'Neill]

The bookkeeping of the whole situation?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes. Yeah. Like 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 captured 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 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I can almost feel the fanny pack on my waist as I'm listening to this right now.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. 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 and. But he's also encountering really beautiful things. It's great. It's so great. I'm ready. I'm very excited for you to read it. And it intersected with life in Three Dimensions by Shigehiro Oishi, which you've been talking about for a few weeks. And I'm finally on with. 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. I thought there was really fascinating tension between like 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, Oishi in the evenings and thinking, oh my gosh, Rick Steves embodies all of this. And then I hit like page 65 and he refers to Rick Steves of like. And Rick Steves is a great example. Oishi, come sit by me.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I know, it's so weird. I mean, there's Ishiguro, there's Oliver Sacks.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

There'S Tony Morgan, Toni Morrison and Oliver Sacks in the same paragraph.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Wild.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, come on.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, it really resonated with me. I thought a lot about it of late talk. I talked to Oishi about Oliver Sacks and then there's a. There is not only just literary references, but then later in the book, you know, thinking about aesthetics, experiences and avenue towards leading or psychologically rich life. And not all books are created equal. And I think it's. 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. 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 interchangeably psychological richness. I don't know exactly know it's 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. Me think about different kinds of recommendations for different people, different kinds of reading moments. Frankly, our cultural, 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. 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 cards on the table and, you know, 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. Might be more exploratory or curiosity seeking.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm really looking forward to having a longer conversation about it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Are we doing on a Patreon or a regular show? What do we do?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We do that on the Patreon, Just, you know, get into our notes, talk about life in three dimensions. I was joking with a friend that the. The alternate subtitle should be Validation for Sagittarius.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Like, I don't know what that means, but I'm here to support you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Just. I love it when science confirms the choices I've made about my life.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. She will get a little pissed off about it or just sort of just, 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 affronting 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 you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, there's some component of.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Richness or interestingness. Like, I think when we talk about interesting messes, we're talking about this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's right. That's right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 DM'd. You were tilt by Emma Pattie, which is coming out March 18th from Mary Su Ruchi Books, was engineered in a lab to screw me up. Because here's what.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Say more.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's set in Portland, Oregon.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 and street level, like, all that kind of stuff.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Wild. So you can totally picture this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 it too much in ikea. And then the big one, the big, 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. Yeah. I'd say 7% of my CPU time is giving to keeping that at bay.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Just suppress right over there. This is a thing coming for you. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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, because 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, if it's not by my house, it's within a block. Because in this neighborhood, and I got to say, a little close to home, 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. 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 much more interested in what she did. So kind of amazing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I have to say that opening sounds like Station 11. Is that a fair computer?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean sort of this happens. This happens over the course of like one day. So station 11 is. But yeah, there is a moment then Emma said that she was in IKEA and had this thought of what if the big one hit what right where I am right now. So it's very much like let's start from this seed where Station 11.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's just the very beginning of Station.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, it's the very beginning. And you do follow people through and much more in the. In the series. I think the vibes though not the. I'm not even sure it's the Vive. 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 because I want to.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's bonkers to be like. Like I can't imagine that like going on a walk in the neighborhood is not different in some way now.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 Chahaya as a memoir that came out this week. It's available now about her life as a reader and how when has 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 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, you know, 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Thank you.

[Narrator]

Today's episode is brought to you by Bloom Books and Sourcebooks Casablanca. Reading is self care. Books are self care. Romance books in particular are self care. And with the holidays behind us and everything going on in the world, it's more important than ever that we take care of ourselves. You can find your happily ever after now by embracing escapism and entering to win a romance self care prize pack that includes romance titles from lucy score, Scarlet St. Clair, Anna Huang, Katie Robert, Elle Kennedy and more, as well as a self care bundle complete with shower steamers, a weighted eye mask, face rollers, relaxing tea sets, essential oils and diffuser. And I don't know about you, but that sounds like the best relaxation combination. Okay, so to enter to win, all you do is go to bookriot.com romance bundle. That's all one word. Again, that's bookriot.com romancebundle thanks again to Bloombooks and Sourcebooks Casablanca for sponsoring this episode.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Foreign.

[Narrator]

Today's episode is brought to you by the Beast we Bury by D.L. taylor. Daughter and heir to the throne, Mansella Cliff yearns for a life without bloodshed. But as a child, she emerged from the broken citadel with the power to summon animals only after killing them first. So her magic is a constant reminder of the horrors her father, the ruler of the realm, has forced upon her to strengthen their power. Now Silver, on the other hand, is a charming thief struggling to survive in a world torn apart by Mansella's father's reign. When a mysterious benefactor recruits him for the heist of a lifetime, a chance to rob the castle, Silver relishes the opportunity for a real future and for some nice, sweet revenge. So this story is told in dual points of view. It has an electric enemies to lovers romantasy, featuring the beloved one bed trope, the will they won't, they will keep you on the edge of your seat. This is perfect for fans of fantasy authors like Margaret Owens, Mary Pearson and others. Make sure to check it out. And thanks again to the beastly berry by D.L. taylor for sponsoring this episode.

[Jeff O'Neill]

All right, I'm pleased to welcome Brenna Connor 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 Circana to talk about book sales. Bren has pulled up some data to talk about. I've got some observations. You've heard us Rebecca and I talk in the show about what's going on, I guess, Brenda, let's start with the big picture. So 1% unit sales prices have gone up. I was just reading HarperCollins. Their. 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?

[Brenna Connor]

That's a great question. I would give it a B plus.

[Jeff O'Neill]

B plus. Okay. You want to say some more about that?

[Brenna Connor]

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 note is that at Sarkana, we track many industries outside of books. So I get to see performance, 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. 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 books did outperform other discretionary categories.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, that. That is a good. So there's kind of two curves we're graving on, because if you're looking at GDP growth, I think it's probably underperformed. I guess unit sales is different than gross dollars, but you look at inflation or the things like that underperforms for the top line. But within discretionary sales, that's because everyone's buying eggs. For my grocery store, my eggs were $8 a dozen.

[Brenna Connor]

Bre, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. Those three together, if you Spell them. If you mix them up in jumbo, they actually spell Book Time. I don't know if you know this. If you do Bananagrams, they spell booktok. Is that what you're seeing too?

[Brenna Connor]

Absolutely. Adult fiction led the growth for the print book market in 2024. The categories that drove the highest gains are all coming from book talk. So BookTok authors are really leading that growth. And then the categories that you mentioned are very popular on Book Talks. We're looking at authors like Frida McFadden and Thrillers. Sarah J. Maas in Fantasy. Rebecca Yarros for Romantasy.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Those are the names. Those are the names. And if I recall you all at Circana, you kind of. Is it you guys that break down the list of here are the authors we consider like Book Talk authors is that you do that, right?

[Brenna Connor]

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 identify BookTok authors. And then I also use other industry news outlets, including Book Riot. I mentioned others like PW to kind of fill in the blanks for the things that aren't appearing on that BNN list. So I can, I can mark, you know, an author as a booktok author. And then collectively, collectively I can look at that author grouping to see overall performance compared to the rest of the market.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And how many authors is is that.

[Brenna Connor]

List it was we're up to. I'm up to over 200.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I thought I had 200 in my head. So it's a pret. Pretty robust list. Yeah, that makes sense. And I'm guessing like I know this is your proprietary data so on top 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 in nonfiction. Just so I get my terms right, does kids as you're describing, does that cover ya?

[Brenna Connor]

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, kids fiction, kids nonfiction. And then YA is the separate.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So the kids you want to talk about does not include ya. Okay, gotcha. Just want to make sure about that.

[Brenna Connor]

Yep. And we, we mentioned, I mentioned that adult fiction drove a lot of the growth in 2020. 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. I can go deeper.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So what? Yeah, okay. What, what, what? In that, like we're. So I'm 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, what does that present represent as a percent of the market for kids fiction or year over year?

[Brenna Connor]

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. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So the theory of the case I have, I know you have the data, but the narrative is harder to. To know. Here's my theory of the case and we can talk about.

[Brenna Connor]

You can share it. And I also have a narrative as well.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, yeah, let's see who wins.

[Brenna Connor]

Or people can think quite a bit of overall.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So a couple 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 parents are excited about buying. It's just a chilling effect. We say this about free speech and I think I was saying about book market. That's got to 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. I wonder if Barnes and Noble outperforms its marketplace because you go and you're browsing around and I know that Barnes And 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 and 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. 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 grown out of the. It's hard to find. You don't know. So you're going to Barnes and Noble browser on trying to find something. If they don't have as many titles, you're not going to buy as many things. So those are my things. Covid hangover, censorship, chilling effect stocking at Barnes and Noble. What else would you add to that? Or what do you think of my theory of the case?

[Brenna Connor]

I would, 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, kindergartens 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Brenna Connor]

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. 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. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And not for nothing, the future if we wanted to put dollars behind it, the future book sales of the industry. Right. Because those kids grow up to be adults and they grow up to be the adults that buy these things that are, you know, hire a bigger part of the market. And that's a decades long situation. 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?

[Brenna Connor]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That was my theory. This is anecdote Brenna, but. 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?

[Brenna Connor]

So I'll mention that we don't do the categorization that comes from publishers and publisher. That publisher does categorize fourth wing as adult.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I would think that would make sense having read 4th Wing in a couple of the scene 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 in there and romanticy writ 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 adults, 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 there's 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 romantasy romance and then McFadden to space 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, if fiction is doing well, why are the kids nonfiction growing again marginally but still not having the same decline?

[Brenna Connor]

Yep. So kids nonfiction grew. I think it was just like a quarter of a point in 2024. 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 learning to read in first grade and second grade, the growth in readers is skewing younger. So it is these younger children who are, you know, use or parents of younger children buying readers. And then when I look at subjects like math and science, it's skewing older.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, 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, 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 outside of the classroom? And that's when you'd 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 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. Jump down to digital formats.

[Brenna Connor]

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. And 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 break out 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, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right.

[Brenna Connor]

So I think this is a theory that some have. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. So they're. So publishers are publishing about the same number of books. I'm just wondering, is B M carrying them? Right. I guess as example, maybe they're Amazon only or, or digital only. Maybe you can get on the BNN website. But at your. I mean a lot of these. There's been one that's open in Portland, I think actually two smaller format BNNs and they just have as much cell space. So I don't. I'd be curious to know. Maybe there's one. Maybe they have one copy or. I don't know. That's a, that's a good point though, Brent. I hadn't thought about. Okay, are the aggregate number of available titles decline? 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 audiobook and ebook. So you're seeing double digit sales growth in digital formats. 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, what's the mix there that you're seeing?

[Brenna Connor]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Unbelievable. One of these years it's not going to be 15 plus books percent. I don't know what year it's going to be. Maybe I'm going to be 95 years old, but an astonishing, 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, I don't remember which one is.

[Brenna Connor]

In, in units, in, in our data. When I combine kind of all of the formats into one view, I'm looking at 40% percent of the market for digital and about 60% for print.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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?

[Brenna Connor]

Definitely. And a lot of it's coming from book talk. So BookTok is extending, you know, beyond just print and is impacting sales for ebooks for sure 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 data set. Biography has been on the decline, but growing in digital audio, which, well, when.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You'Re growing 25%, you're gonna have pockets of growth in a lot of different places. Like 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 anecdote 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. 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 eras 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.

[Brenna Connor]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No pre orders, no digital, just the printing day and date. What a weird. Were you surprised by that strategy when they released that?

[Brenna Connor]

I wasn't surprised because it's a, a, it's a way to bring foot traffic in store. Black Friday specifically. And then it was available online the following day on, on Super Saturday. So that made sense to me. I went to my Target that morning to assess the situation. My, 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 that was not the case. That there were some targets that did have lines that you know, were sold out very quickly. But the, the book itself sold very well. It was one of the fastest selling books in the adult non fiction 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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.

[Brenna Connor]

Yep. So this is, these are journals that you gift to someone in your family to encourage them to share their story.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So Grandma, tell us about the old days, that kind of stuff.

[Brenna Connor]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

They're so smart. Source books always over there, they're like, they're like vultures with a huge brain. That sounds bad, but they, they're really looking around and seeing what's out there to pick up.

[Brenna Connor]

Sourcebooks is incredibly nimble and data driven and it's paying off for their business 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. They are, they are doing incredibly well.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's like them in Red Tower probably are entangled or it's something like that, I would imagine. Let's look ahead to 2025.

[Brenna Connor]

Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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?

[Brenna Connor]

So some of this is related to the categories that are doing very well in BookTube. 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 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Rebecca and I just recorded is for Patreon a deals, deals, deals episode. And I was telling she hadn't heard of Myrtle. The. You saw this? I see you have brain teasers on here. Yeah, I was a little surprised by that. But it's sort of, 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 or something. Is that a Myrtle story or what the hell's going on with that? Why is this.

[Brenna Connor]

Apparently it's, it's Myrtle and Myrtle is a tick. Is coming out of Book Talk.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Brenna Connor]

So I think that this, this is the first thing that I've seen come out of 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, I can tell you by deals coming out and deals have been signed. There's, there's. I think, I can't remember the woman's name who wrote Myrtle, but there's been a second volume. Then there's going to be look alikes and coattail kinds of things happening. There's a fantasy one coming out. And 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 purchase with 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.

[Brenna Connor]

That's a good point. And that's something that our toy industry analyst has called out in her. 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 everywhere. Yes. So that might be a part of this bigger desire from adults to kind of lean into interesting things to occupy their minds that are fun.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. So you're thinking maybe. So you're like, you're not giving up on kids market for 2020.

[Brenna Connor]

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 underperform 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 the kids market and really hoping that more parents are prioritizing reading time at home over other activities.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I don't think anyone really knows what's going to happen with TikTok. TikTok in their ownership situation. We're in this weird limbo period where technically, maybe, maybe they're supposed to not be available in the U.S. 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?

[Brenna Connor]

That's a good question. So I think Booktalk has been obviously really good for book sales, but it's also been this tool that has grown 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. So in terms of what that looks like for sales, maybe if these platforms are more varied, then the TikTok or the. The group of authors that it's outperforming in adult fiction becomes less top heavy and more varied.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Like for example, I think the genres of romantasy 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. 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 there. One effect 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. It 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 bestselling authors of the year. Brenna, hit me with it. So I don't get out of here, you know, being very sad for sure.

[Brenna Connor]

So I looked at the Author performance in 2024 vs 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 booktok authors. We also have authors like Taylor Swift.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, right.

[Brenna Connor]

But the number 13 highest growing adult author in our data is Percival Everett.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Brenna Connor]

So in 2023 he had less than 50,000 in unit sales and in 2023 that number is over a half a.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Million 10x 10x and still selling quite well, I'm seeing, you know, even into the new year. I guess probably it'd be interesting once award season is finally over. We still have the Pulitzers in April and BCC 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.

[Brenna Connor]

I would like to see it have a long tail.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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? 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?

[Brenna Connor]

Yeah, so I think a lot of our discussion has been focused on 2024 so far, but there were a couple major things that happened in our data so so far in 2025 in January that I just reported on. So one, I 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?

[Jeff O'Neill]

We didn't talk about on the show, but I linked to it in Today in books. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Brenna Connor]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Amazing.

[Brenna Connor]

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 this the the power of of NFL NFL. It's amazing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And that's why we the the Taylor Swift Travis Kelce story is so huge. Right? Like you 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?

[Brenna Connor]

Oh yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Follow that.

[Brenna Connor]

Yeah, I did. That was the 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, 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, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So that's when it kicked off. It wasn't after November. It was like the inauguration. Really like, oh, it's real now. Okay.

[Brenna Connor]

Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Deal with this at some point and it's usual suspects. Right. Handmaid's Tale, 1984, Brave New World, that kind of stuff.

[Brenna Connor]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You know, I hadn't thought about that because the first time I, I got a little salty about this in today in book, saying, really, we're doing this again eight years later, you know, we, this didn't help the last. You know, again, my politics are on the table, so whatever. Brenna, you don't have to, you don't, you don't 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, their prime sort of early reading years. And I hadn't considered that. Okay, you guys, it's all right if you, you can go read this now. That's, that's fine. If you're 47 like I am and you've already read the 1984, you don't need to go read it again. Let's 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. Yeah, I will be sure to remember the things I got right and then forget the things that you got wrong. So we'll be, we'll come out ahead.

[Brenna Connor]

I do keep a tally for the things I get right and I tend to promote those things.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay, good. Well, email is forever. I'm looking at it right now. You can't unsend at this point. Brenna Connor for Circana thank you so much for joining me today.

[Brenna Connor]

Thank you, Jeff.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Brenna Connor]

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 far 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. Deterra, 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 wadded 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. Hard, 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 fiance'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 treeline. Conner 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 10 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.