The Celebrity Gold Rush (And the Lesson for the Rest of Us)
The Freedom to Read, and Why It Is an Author’s Fight The celebrity book deal is a permanent feature of the landscape, and every season brings a fresh crop. A pop icon’s children’s book lands at a major house. An actor’s memoir commands a bidding war. A musician turns novelist, an athlete turns essayist, an […]
The Freedom to Read, and Why It Is an Author’s Fight
The Freedom to Read, and Why It Is an Author’s Fight This is a contentious area, and I want to write about it carefully, because the subject deserves accuracy more than it deserves heat. Across the United States, the question of which books belong on library and school shelves has become the object of intense […]
The BookTok Reckoning and the Case for Owning Your Ground
The BookTok Reckoning and the Case for Owning Your Ground Give BookTok its due first, because it earned it. The phenomenon did something the industry had been failing to do for years: it made reading contagious among young people, revived backlist titles that had been left for dead, and turned word of mouth into a […]
Readers Just Said No to the Robot Voice
Readers Just Said No to the Robot Voice On paper, AI narration should have swept the audiobook market. The economics are overwhelming: a human narrator is expensive and slow, an AI voice is neither, and the number of AI-narrated titles surged accordingly in 2025. Every incentive on the production side pointed toward a rapid, total […]
The Ear Has Become a Bookstore: Inside the Audiobook Boom
The Ear Has Become a Bookstore: Inside the Audiobook Boom Let me start with the number, because it is the kind of number that ends arguments. US audiobook revenue reached 2.43 billion dollars in 2025, a 9 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Audio Publishers Association’s annual sales survey. That figure is […]
Prestige Is a Story: How Literary Reputation Actually Gets Made
Prestige Is a Story: How Literary Reputation Actually Gets Made Let me end this collection with the idea underneath all the others, stated as bluntly as I can manage. Prestige is not inherent. It is not a quality that radiates from a sufficiently good book until the world is forced to acknowledge it. If it […]
Why Do Good Books Fail? An Autopsy of a Book That Vanished
Why Do Good Books Fail? An Autopsy of a Book That Vanished I want to be clinical here, because sentimentality helps no one and the failure I am describing is common enough to be worth understanding precisely. The subject of this autopsy is a composite, assembled from a dozen real cases I have watched up […]
The Reader Who Finds You Late: On Books, Time, and Discovery
The Reader Who Finds You Late: On Books, Time, and Discovery We measure books in their first weeks, as though a book were a fruit that spoils. The launch, the opening sales, the reviews that arrive while the ink is metaphorically wet. And then we speak of a book as having done well or done […]
The One-Page Author Identity: Can You Explain Yourself in a Single Page?
The One-Page Author Identity: Can You Explain Yourself in a Single Page? I am going to keep this one practical, because it is a practical matter and dressing it up would waste your time. Most authors cannot clearly say who they are. Ask them and you get either a plot summary of their latest book […]
Why Genre Snobbery Is Bad Business (And Worse Criticism)
Why Genre Snobbery Is Bad Business (And Worse Criticism) The prejudice is familiar enough to recite. Literary fiction is art; genre is product. The literary novel is read; the genre novel is merely consumed. Romance is a guilty pleasure, thrillers are airport fodder, fantasy is for people who never grew up, and the truly serious […]