Newsmakers, bestsellers, and ominous signs
A quick review of 2024, and a peak into 2025
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It never promised to be anything but a quiet year. The first SHuSH of 2024 noted that there was little on the horizon to compare with the Penguin Random House trial and the Chapters/Indigo travails that gave me so much to write about over the previous two years. News was scant and the nonfiction previews were thin—no blockbusters from the likes of Prince Harry, the Obamas, or Walter Isaacson on the horizon.
And that’s how the year went. What were the big stories? Simon & Schuster bought a mid-sized Dutch publishing company. Indigo, to no fanfare whatsoever, delisted from the TSX and became a private company. AI continued to worm its way into our industry, with various tech-lit companies preparing to clog Amazon with thousands more pseudo-books a year. The culture war over book placement in libraries rumbled along. Costco reduced its commitment to bookselling. Barnes & Noble was hit with a labour action.
Arguably the biggest book story of the year didn’t involve the traditional book industry. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Book, self-published and distributed exclusively through Target stores, sold 814,000 copies in its release week, second only to Barack Obama’s A Promised Land.
Taylor is my pick for 2024 book publishing newsmaker of the year. Not for her book, which by most reports isn’t very good, but for what it represents. Her decision to bypass traditional houses didn’t happen in a vacuum. Celebrities—among the most bankable authors available to the Big Five publishers—are laying down new rules when it comes to books.
Some, including Swift, Jared Leto, B. J. Novak, Viola Davis, and Donald Trump, are self-publishing to capture more of their value for themselves. Others, including Mindy Kaling, Sarah Jessica Parker, John Legend, and Sophia Coppola, are demanding a larger piece of the action via their own imprints. Celebrity romance authors, including Bella Andre and Colleen Hoover, are withholding their lucrative e-book rights from their traditional publishers. Everywhere you look in book publishing, celebrities are side-stepping and out-clouting the big houses.
If I was an agent at CAA or William Morris Endeavor, I’d be doing my best to talk my celebrity clients out of traditional book contracts. They don’t need the imprimatur of a Penguin Random House and they may not even need conventional distribution—their followers will find their book if sold exclusively through fishmongers.
One of the greatest tensions in publishing now is that the big houses pay most for authors with big platforms, people with built-in followings, people who essentially do their own marketing. The likes of Ayesha Curry and Jordan B. Peterson. But to the extent those people succeed, they become less and less dependent on what the publisher has to offer. It makes sense for them to own more of the value chain. And even if they do want to work with a traditional house, they’re in a position to extract an eye-watering price.
This doesn’t portend an immediate collapse of celebrity publishing at the Big Five. More of a downward slide, not unlike what we saw with the great migration of genre fiction. About fifteen years ago, romance and fantasy authors began to find Amazon easier of access and more remunerative, and Penguin Random House’s net sales of genre fiction dropped from $349.2 million in 2011 to $86.9 million by 2019. I think Taylor Swift will look like a watershed five years from now.
A glance back at 2024’s nonfiction bestsellers is a dispiriting exercise. Circana’s ten bestselling books up to the start of December included eight romance novels and just one nonfiction title, and it was published in 2018—James Clear’s Atomic Habits.
Amazon’s up-to-date bestseller list for 2024 had ten nonfiction titles in its top twenty-five, with J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy performing leading the way. It was published the same year as Atomic Habits.
Only three of the ten were published in 2024. One was Melania, written by “a former First Lady of the United States, successful businessperson, and former international fashion model” who “resides in Palm Beach, Florida with her family.” Another was Good Energy by Dr. Casey Means, who owes her success in large part to an endorsement from the presumptive nominee for United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Thank god for the third, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, a genuinely good book.
The top-ten nonfiction bestsellers in Canada, according to the very incomplete data provided by BookNet, are almost entirely self-help (there’s a whole world out there people):
Atomic Habits by James Clear (9780735211292)
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (9780593655030)
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel (9780857197689)
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers (9780140280197)
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk (9780143127741)
The Mountain Is You by Brianna Wiest (9781949759228)
Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (9780316575805)
Outlive by Peter Attia and Bill Gifford (9780593236598)
101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think by Brianna Wiest (9781945796067)
Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari (9780771019661)
It was by no means a lost year—I was quite pleased with the SHuSH list of the best nonfiction of 2024. It’s just that the gap between what’s selling and what’s worth reading seems ever to widen.
I haven’t had a chance to look far into what 2025 will bring. It may be another year without a nonfiction blockbuster, unless you think Pope Francis, Bill Gates, or Beyonce’s mom will bust through. There will nevertheless be much to read. I’m excited about Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain. Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine, a critical look at Spotify, looks great—it was excerpted here in Harper’s. Graydon Carter has a memoir of the magazine business in the 1990s, When the Going Was Good. And Michael Luo has written Strangers In The Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. (I’m especially keen on the last one having this year edited and published Patrice Dutil’s Sir John A. Macdonald & the Apocalyptic Year 1885. It’s chapter on the debates over Chinese immigration to British Columbia is stunning.)
As for publishing news, I expect a lot of action on the Canadian side. All indications in recent weeks have been that Trump is serious about a 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods. Given that major Canadian independents tend to derive half their revenue from US sales, that promises to be unsettling. And now that even Liberals are admitting to reckless profligacy, we’ll almost certainly have a new federal government with an austerity mandate. That threatens the funding programs that underwrite Canadian book publishing.
Much to look forward to!
I’m signing off until early (maybe mid) January. Thank you for reading SHuSH in 2024. Considering taking advantage of the great offer on Sutherland Quarterly below. And have a very happy holiday.
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On a brilliant sunny day at the height of the season, July 2024, residents and visitors to the picturesque tourist community of Jasper, Alberta, learned that fast-moving forest fires were burning both south and north of town. That left only one westward road out of harm’s way. Over three frantic days, 5,000 residents and 20,000 tourists were evacuated from Jasper as firefighters used helicopters to battle flames reaching 100-feet high and leaping from treetop to treetop behind 100-kilometre-per-hour winds. The 25,000-hectare fire was so intense it created its own weather system and lightning. Despite heroic efforts, a third of the town was lost. In this gripping narrative, Calgary Herald reporter Matthew Scace talks to the emergency managers who organized the evacuation, the woman who was about to go into labour when the fire broke, the firefighters who fought through the night to save what they could of the town, and the recovery team leaders now trying to put Jasper back together again. Jasper on Fire also takes a hard look at why the blaze happened and what can be done to prevent future disasters in our increasingly volatile climate.
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Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.
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Thanks for all the brilliant commentary this year, Ken. Merry Christmas!
Ken - this country needs your publishing house. Well done!!