Every year at around this
time I come out with my predictions of where book trends will take the book
publishing world into the future. I would not go out on a limb about anything
for 2024. It could be a wild year.
Likely, it will be a successful year for the
book world. Olympics, elections, wars, and major court case decisions will
leave people scrambling for books to either escape these things or to educate
themselves on them. Will AI cause more commotion? Probably. But remember the
bitcoin-NFT-blockchain craze of a year or two ago? That shit is dead.
I have never checked back to see if predictions
became reality — and no one has ever contacted me to either applaud or disprove
these annual prognostications. For the upcoming year, I will admit that I don’t
really know what will happen.
Past performance is not always indicative of
future performance. In fact, it seems like if anything is a truism, it is that
what worked for you today, likely will not tomorrow. Everything is in
fluctuation, being tinkered with, and in invention mode. We are on not just
dealing with evolutionary cycles, but revolutionary moments.
Did we expect Covid-19 to devastate the United
States, in 2020? Or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in 2022? Or Hamas executing
the biggest and most brutal one day attack on Jews since the Holocaust, in
2023? Of course not.
So, what will happen that we never saw coming in
2024?
The book industry has had many game-changing and
defining moments in the last 15 years. E-book devices launched. Borders
closing. Audiobook streaming invented. The rise of Penguin Random House.
Amazon’s self-publishing and online book retail growth spurt to dominance. The
list goes on. Lawsuits over copyrights, free speech debates, book bans,
publishing mergers, and all kinds of stuff keeps popping up, helping to reform,
if not revolutionize the writing-publishing-retailing landscape of America.
I remember when desktop publishing got launched
in the 1980s, which led to an explosion of newsletters being created, more
books getting written, and more efficient ways to design book layout and
covers.
Then came the Internet in the 1990s, from email
to websites, how we communicated, created, and conducted business was
revolutionized.
In the 2000s, we got cell phones and then smart
phones, walking around with computers in our pockets. Social media and blogging
were born. And cost-effective small press runs saw self-publishing burst onto
the scene.
The 2010s saw accelerated growth in all of these
areas and the advent of new tools that went from novelty to optional to
mandatory almost overnight. Economists were declaring the book industry to be
dead. But it is as lively as ever.
The book industry is way different now from the
end of the last millennia. There is an explosion in the number of books
published, the formats they are produced in, how they are researched and
written, the speed in which they go back to press and get delivered, the way
they are sold, the methods used to market them, and the economics of the book
world.
What will 2024 bring? More changes. More book
sales. More predictions.
Need Book Marketing Help?
Brian Feinblum, the founder of this award-winning
blog, can be reached at brianfeinblum@gmail.com He is
available to help authors promote their story, sell their book, and grow their
brand. He has over 30 years of experience in successfully helping thousands of
authors in all genres. Let him be your advocate, teacher, and motivator!
About Brian Feinblum
Brian Feinblum should be followed on LinkedIn. This is
copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2023. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now
resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue
dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog. His writings are often featured in The
Writer and IBPA’s The Independent. This
award-winning blog has generated over 3.4 million pageviews. With 4,600+ posts
over the past dozen years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by
BookBaby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018
as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by
www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” For the past three decades,
including 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book
publicity firm, and two jobs at two independent presses, Brian has worked with
many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with
best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen,
Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard,
Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C.
Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler. He recently hosted a
panel on book publicity for Book Expo America, and has spoken at ASJA,
Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction
Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland)
Writers Association, APEX, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association.
His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal,
USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News
(Westchester) and The Washington Post. He has been featured in The
Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald. For more information, please consult:
www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.