Hello, dear readers!
Right before the holidays, the Romance Writers of America experienced another organizational upheaval as multiple board members resigned. In today’s issue, contributor Emily Wenstrom offers insight from people with knowledge of the organization and its history.
Also in this issue:
- I offer up a watchlist of trends and topics I expect to report on in 2022.
- Learn what’s happening with dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction—a category that has seen depressed sales in recent years.
Feel free to hit reply to this message with feedback or suggestions for Hot Sheet coverage in 2022. Or hop over to the Discord server for a chat.
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Hot Shots
Recently in the headlines
Spotify takes down comedians’ albums over royalty dispute
Given that Spotify is moving more into spoken-word content, including podcasts and audiobooks, the following case is worth watching. In December, Spotify removed hundreds of comedians’ work from its service due to a royalties dispute with Spoken Giants, a rights administration company trying to change standards around how spoken-word content gets paid. When Spotify plays comedian’s content, the comedians usually get paid by their label or distributor as well as by digital performance rights organizations. The dispute: Comedians are not compensated for writing that content or for their literary rights. (This is how payments work in the music industry: there are performance royalties and songwriting royalties.) Essentially, Spoken Giants wishes to develop a writing credit royalty system for podcasts. It strikes us as unlikely.
Norman Mailer collection gets passed over by Random House
Well-known journalist Michael Wolff has written snarkily about Random House passing on a new Norman Mailer book, a collection to mark the 2023 centennial of the author’s birth. Wolff claims that the concerns of a junior staffer about Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” are the underlying cause—a claim disputed by other media outlets.
Random House, who is Mailer’s longtime publisher, says a contract was never signed and Mailer was not canceled. Skyhorse, an independent publisher that is becoming well known for picking up controversial authors, will publish the collection. The New York Times has one of Mailer’s sons on the record saying he was disappointed by the decision but doesn’t blame the publisher for passing on a single work.
The AP reports that, according to NPD BookScan, print sales for four of Mailer’s best-known books didn’t even reach 4,000 copies in 2021.
Book sales update
In the final two weeks of the year, adult fiction print sales in the US surged, led by new releases from John Grisham, Mitch Albom, and Nicholas Sparks. Overall, 2021 print unit sales were a very impressive 8.9 percent ahead of 2020 sales. Through November 2021, consumer book sales are 13.1 percent ahead of the same period a year ago, the Association of American Publishers reports.
Meanwhile, the Waterstones bookstore chain in the UK has proclaimed 2021 a “bumper year,” particularly for children’s books. They anticipate a healthy 2022.
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RWA Board Members Resign
Can the organization stay on track with plans for change?
By Emily Wenstrom
After a heated public reckoning in August due to issues with winners of its new Vivian Award, the Romance Writers of America (RWA) concluded the year with the loss of half its board members in an abrupt wave of resignations.
Former RWA president LaQuette resigned on December 13. She commented about her decision in a Twitter thread:
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In a statement, LaQuette elaborated further: “My resignation had nothing to do with RWA and everything to do with my real life. I resigned my office because my child received a life-changing diagnosis in November. Focusing on getting his care underway had to become my central focus. As much as I support the organization, my child must come first. RWA still has a board in place, and when I resigned on December 13th, the directors still had future plans for the organization. I’m excited about those plans. That’s why I am still a member of RWA and will continue to maintain my membership. And when my life has become a bit more routine again, I am looking forward to coming back to volunteer in another capacity.”
Additional board members resigned at an informal board meeting on December 16, according to a statement on the RWA website. These board members included Gail Chianese, president-elect; C. Chilove, secretary to the board; Elizabeth Schechter, director at large; and Laura Alford, treasurer. They have not commented about their resignations. The remaining RWA board also declined to comment, citing a responsibility to address its membership first. Virtual town hall meetings are set for Jan. 12 and 19.
LaQuette addressed the wave of resignations in her Twitter thread:
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RWA board leadership is said to be uniquely demanding. “The demands on volunteer leaders of RWA have always been enormous,” said Dr. Christine Larson, an assistant professor of journalism at University of Colorado Boulder who conducts academic research on the romance genre and industry. “Those demands have been much, much greater in the past three years. It’s a huge sacrifice to be on the front lines of organizational change, especially when every single change occurs under a social media spotlight: you’re not just a leader, you’re an activist. Add to that the stress of COVID and family needs, and that’s a perfect recipe for burn-out. Remember that the vast majority of RWA and the board are women, and COVID has been a lot harder on women, mothers in particular. LaQuette has been a smart, strong, inspiring leader, but there’s serious health issues in her family and they need her. The other four board members who resigned also have heavy personal demands. This board has struggled because there’s so much work to be done and so few people willing to do it.”
At RWA, it’s understood that by serving on the board, a person gives up about a book a year due to the role’s demands. Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) president Jeffe Kennedy was told this same metric. However, she takes it with a grain of salt, especially knowing it’s been bandied about elsewhere. “Some people write 12 books a year. And some people write one book every two years. So it seems right away to be a ridiculous metric,” she said. “When people are running for the board ... we ask them about their time and commitment. We’ll say, figure on an hour a day to a few hours a week. Is this something that you can fit into your schedule? Do you have the energetic and emotional bandwidth to do this? … You are taking on a huge responsibility.”
The abrupt resignations triggered another round of public discussion on Twitter—albeit less so than with previous issues:
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This latest upheaval continues a trend that has done a lot of damage to RWA’s reputation and financial stability in recent years. As reported in our September 2021 item, the organization has lost major revenue streams, including its conference and awards programs, due to both internal issues and external challenges, such as COVID. Meanwhile, it’s been losing members and chapters—a trend that continued into the fall even before the board resignations—including the separation of the Greater Detroit chapter and the Chicago North chapter.
“I know there are individuals who have put their hearts and souls into turning the RWA ship around. There were many points where it felt like progress was being made, but almost as soon as there was forward momentum, the obvious signs of a broken system would show,” said Beccan James, co-president of Chicago North Romance Writers. “I can’t imagine what it must be like for the national board members. It must be like volunteering to take on a part-time job. You have to really believe in an organization to make that kind of commitment. I don’t know how many people will be willing to stand up next.”
At the time of the previous article, both board and chapter leaders cited a number of programs in the works they believed could bring needed change to RWA’s membership, with an emphasis on opportunities for marginalized authors. These included a Pen to Paper program to educate new authors on the craft of writing romance and a Pathways Program focused on equipping authors of color to navigate the publishing industry.
“Before I left, we had laid out a five-year plan focusing on education and advocacy,” said Schechter. “That plan is still in play as far as I know—I spoke to the person taking on my role as education coordinator yesterday [December 21], bringing her up to speed on the plans and making sure that she had all the information that she needed.”
In the wake of this latest upheaval, the question for RWA is, once again, where does the organization go from here? Over so many years of lost members, lost chapters, and board resignations, the organization has lost significant institutional knowledge, and many of the changes fought for in recent years are only starting to come to fruition.
“With these resignations, we get to find out if the members really value the improvements that have happened, however incomplete. Are members willing to do the work to sustain change? Will they step up to take on board roles or change the nature of those roles so they’re less stressful?” said Larson. “This is not the same organization I started studying six years ago: It’s more culturally aware and inclusive. But these resignations pose a test of the culture—can those changes sustain themselves without the extraordinary personal effort and sacrifices of a handful of board members?”
Larson also emphasized the sizable role RWA holds within the romance genre and publishing at large, citing the stigma romance authors have historically endured as “women writing about women for women.”
She said, “At a time when Amazon arbitrarily changes search algorithms and payment schemes, RWA is still one of the only organizations that can call them up, get a person on the phone, and ask for change. That doesn’t just help romance writers, it helps all writers. So my hope is that the changes this board has made will be deep and lasting enough to restore faith in the organization, even after the individuals who led the charge have to pass the baton.”
Bottom line: The efforts to set a more inclusive future for RWA appear to have taken a significant toll on those who took on crucial board positions in already stressful times. But the challenges the organization faces are evolving thanks to these leaders’ significant efforts. One set of strong leaders was never going to be enough for RWA’s changes to last. The organization’s future depends on whether incoming leaders can pick up the baton from the former board and keep running with it in a way that earns back the faith of romance authors.
Emily Wenstrom is a freelance writer and platforming expert and writes award-winning speculative fiction for teens and adults as E. J. Wenstrom.
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What to Watch for in 2022
2021 has laid the perfect groundwork for this year’s predictions
In the last issue, I recapped the most notable stories of 2021. In 2022, I’ll be closely watching these ongoing developments.
The battle over digital lending
The Internet Archive and the Association of American Publishers will continue their high-profile battle in court over the IA’s digital lending library. In a nutshell, it is a copyright and fair use fight, and the outcome could dramatically affect digital library lending. Most recently, a judge agreed to extend the discovery deadline to Jan. 31, 2022, with the possibility of another extension. For more background on the Internet Archive and its lending practices, see this August 2020 item, which I wrote shortly after the lawsuit was filed.
There is also ongoing litigation between the Association of American Publishers and the state of Maryland, which recently passed an ebook licensing law. The law is meant to ensure public libraries have the right, with reasonable terms, to license and lend ebooks that are available to consumers. But the AAP says the law violates the Constitution and federal copyright law. Supporters of the law (mainly librarians) say it does no such thing and merely mandates that if a publisher licenses an ebook (or any digital literary work) to the public in Maryland, it must also make a license available to public libraries as well, and that publishers can still dictate licensing terms. That is not how the AAP interprets it.
Those who are sympathetic to libraries’ mission to promote literacy and education and to preserve and lend materials argue that today’s digital licenses effectively don’t allow libraries to buy books. Digital books may only be licensed, and licensed on publishers’ terms; they can only be preserved with permission, and that permission can be revoked at any time. Brewster Kahle, IA’s founder, said, “This is not a rule of law, this is the rule by license.”
Meanwhile, publishers’ and authors’ advocacy groups seek stronger copyright laws and protections because of the increased pressures brought by the digital age (e.g., subscriptions that pay publishers/authors less than outright purchases, frictionless access to digital materials, and piracy, just to name a few). But there is considerable evidence that, so far, library costs are higher for digital materials on a per-lend basis. If costs remain the same, libraries must change how they operate.
Overall, the legal case for the state ebook laws looks weak. At the end of December, New York state governor Kathy Hochul vetoed the state’s recently passed library ebook legislation that mirrored Maryland’s law. She said in an announcement, “While the goal of this bill is laudable, unfortunately, copyright protection provides the author of the work with the exclusive right to their works. … Because the provisions of this bill are preempted by federal copyright law, I cannot support this bill.”
The Internet Archive’s case rests partly on whether they can defend the concept of “controlled digital lending,” an invention that tests the limits of existing copyright law but would allow libraries to lend ebooks without permission or licenses if they own print copies in their collection. Kevin Guthrie, the founding president of JSTOR (a digital library), wrote on the matter, “Testing copyright law is the Internet Archive’s specific intention. It is reasonable for people to disagree about whether this is the right thing to do or if it fairly accounts for value and costs. And those things should be worked out, whether around a table or in the courts. … We all need to work together to define a new balance between the need for authors and content producers to be compensated for their work while also enabling wide access and sustainable preservation of content for future generations.”
The Copyright Claims Board will soon begin operations
Speaking of copyright: starting this spring, authors in the US will be able to bring copyright infringement claims without having to hire a lawyer. The Copyright Claims Board—a small-claims copyright tribunal created last year under the CASE Act—operates as part of the US Copyright Office. Three experts in copyright and litigation will act as Copyright Claims Officers, with attorneys to support their work. Once the tribunal is operational, any individual will be able to litigate their copyright disputes at a fraction of the cost of federal court. Will it work as intended? No one is entirely sure. I reviewed the concerns in January 2021.
Increased AI narration
The quality of AI narration just keeps getting better and better, and while it may not ever fully take the place of human narration, it is already good enough for some types of books and a viable option for self-publishing authors and small presses who need to keep costs low. Big Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook all have a vested interest in perfecting the technology.
Last year, the biggest US book wholesaler and distributor, Ingram, established a marketing partnership with the UK’s DeepZen, which provides publishers with AI-generated text-to-speech audiobooks. DeepZen has licensed voices from actors and narrators to produce realistic speech patterns featuring seven different emotions. The production process combines AI technology with human editing and takes three weeks to produce an audiobook. DeepZen is just one player of many. Thad McIlroy recently covered several players in AI narration and text to speech.
When AI enters any professional space, there is guaranteed pushback and concern for human workers. Expect professional voice talent and audiobook advocacy groups to increasingly argue why human narration is superior and results in better sales than AI.
Books as intellectual property
In recent years, the appetite of streaming services for new and proven material has increased the number of publishing deals and partnerships—to books’ great benefit. The activity will continue to flourish. Michael Cader expressed it best in an interview with the BookSmarts podcast: “Books have always been foundational IP that have driven all kinds of other products. And those products, in turn, have driven back interest in the books and authors that originated the material.” He mentioned HarperCollins’s partnership with Elizabeth Gabler, a producer with a long and successful track record with book IP (past projects: The Devil Wears Prada, Life of Pi, Marley & Me, The Fault in Our Stars). For more on what Hollywood is looking for, see our page-to-screen issue from July 2021.
Cader also noted the crossover happening in the podcast and book publishing realm. For example, author Malcolm Gladwell, now a successful podcaster, is founder of Pushkin Industries, which produces audiobooks and podcasts. It continues to roll out audiobooks on private RSS feeds. Storytel, Europe’s subscription service for digital books, bought Audiobooks.com in late 2021, giving it a foothold in the US. And Spotify bought Findaway, an audiobook distributor and creator. The line between audiobooks and podcasts continues to blur.
The merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster
I think it will happen despite the DOJ’s attempt to block it. We’ll have our answer by fall 2022.
Was Hot Sheet’s 2021 outlook accurate?
Here’s what I discussed a year ago.
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👍 PRH’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster: This was definitely a topic of conversation at every industry event in 2021, and the DOJ’s suit has ensured it will remain so for another year.
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👍 Growing competition between Spotify, Audible, and others: This past year brought important acquisitions, as mentioned above.
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👎 Digital subscription services for audio: None of the biggest publishers have made important moves in this direction as far as sales and distribution, but the services continue to grow, and new ones have been launched. I don’t think 2022 will be the year Penguin Random House changes its mind on making titles available for digital audio subscription, but pressure is likely to increase.
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👍 Copyright law: The issues have only become more vexed, with states trying to pass laws that favor libraries, as described above.
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👎 Barnes & Noble’s new bookselling model: There wasn’t much news in 2021, other than that B&N managing to hold steady and improve its position slightly. The conversation around B&N has been so minimal, it feels as if the chain is becoming less relevant overall to the industry. Or is it the case of no news being good news?
- 👍 Scrutiny of Amazon and other Big Tech firms: Increased pressure likely led Amazon Publishing to offer its digital books for library lending. But so far the tangible benefits of increased government scrutiny have not changed authors’ or publishers’ fortunes.
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What Others Say about 2022
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Written Word Media rounds up the top eight publishing trends based on insights from indie publishing experts.
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Agent Laurie McLean predicts a huge fight over banned books and offers 11 other predictions for the new year.
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Agent Kristin Nelson offers 12 predictions and believes, as I do, that the Big Five are likely to become the Big Four despite the objections of the DOJ.
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On the Six Figure Authors Podcast, three self-publishing authors discuss how they will focus their marketing efforts in the new year. A common thread: reducing reliance on Amazon.
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HubSpot has put together a report on social media trends. Unsurprisingly, the very first prediction is that TikTok will “take over” social media. That may be overstating things, but certainly publishers—especially of YA—are paying attention.
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CNBC features 10 very specific predictions involving sales, acquisitions, and mergers from anonymous media executives.
- Ashley Carman at Hot Pod newsletter believes there will be fewer exclusive show deals and more windowing in the podcast realm. She writes, “If ad revenue is the primary goal for most of the big platforms, minimizing shows’ audiences by housing them in one place doesn’t make much sense. Instead, I expect to see more deals like the one between Amazon Music and SmartLess with one week of exclusivity.” I expect a similar windowing approach for digital books could help big publishers warm to the idea of distributing through subscription services such as Storytel or Scribd.
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Amazon Trend Report: Post-Apocalyptic & Dystopian Fiction
While editors and agents have discouraged writers from submitting COVID-inspired fiction, pandemic- and disease-related tropes remain popular on Kindle
Almost since the pandemic started, agents and publishers have been generally discouraging of dystopian fiction submissions. The most cited cause: Many today feel that we’re living in a dystopia, and few want to read about a fictional one.
However, both pre-pandemic and today, Alex Newton at K-lytics reports that Amazon sales ranks show that stories about diseases and plagues remain among the most sought after. But before we get into further detail, let’s talk about category definitions.
The terms post-apocalyptic and dystopian often get used interchangeably on Amazon for marketing, even though they refer to different types of literature. Newton has created comparison charts to delineate the features of each. For example, in dystopian fiction, the setting is often a place that appears perfect on the surface but is bad and undesirable underneath. Typical themes focus on oppression, class systems, and injustice. In post-apocalyptic fiction, the setting is related to the aftermath of a cataclysmic event. Typical themes involve starting over, survival, and rebuilding civilization. As with all fiction, definitions can get blurry, and one book can contain elements of both categories.
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As an identifiable category, dystopian lit goes back to at least the 1960s, according to the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Interest remained at a low level until reaching a growth phase in 1990, then it gained dramatic momentum in 2010, which roughly coincides with Amazon and the Kindle platform for self-publishing. Both dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction (PAD) are subgenres within SFF and also mix with romance and mystery-thriller-suspense. Generally speaking, interest in dystopias is higher than in post-apocalyptic books.
Dystopian fiction peaked in terms of Kindle sales rank in 2017 and has declined ever since. By that measure, it’s not just the pandemic affecting demand, and traditional publishers and agents have reason to be lukewarm on the category. The good news for self-publishing authors: Amazon ebook sales for post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction stabilized in 2021. “Authors who hung in there now reap the rewards,” Newton says. (Also, note that fading interest in zombies and The Walking Dead likely played a role in declining post-apocalyptic category sales.)
The overall PAD category is closely related to other categories, such as YA dystopia and YA dystopian romance. Notably, YA dystopia and YA post-apocalyptic fiction have performed even worse than other PAD areas in terms of Kindle sales rank. Also, the horror category often used by post-apocalyptic and dystopian novels has declined in performance. A new area that is doing well, however, is disaster fiction, a new category recently created by Amazon. A current bestseller in this niche is the Edge of Collapse series by Kyla Stone.
Successful indie authors to watch: A.G. Riddle, Mike Kraus, and Franklin Horton. Traditionally published authors in this category include Suzanne Collins, Stephen King, and Kiera Cass (YA dystopian romance), as well as Margaret Atwood.
Bottom line: Post-apocalyptic tropes currently performing well are informed by current events and include stories about experiments/laboratories as well as ecological and environmental disasters. Trending down: snow, ice, and winds. Dystopian tropes that are trending up: caste/class and slavery. Trending down: wealth and money. Pandemics and plagues still represent the highest share of books and estimated royalties for post-apocalyptic fiction on Kindle. For a much deeper dive into PAD fiction, you can buy the full report at K-lytics.
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Trailblazes
Opportunities, launches, and startups
New agency: Next Level Lit
J.L. Stermer, previously of New Leaf Literary, started Next Level Lit in late 2021. She is seeking a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, YA, and adult. Learn more.
New agent at UK’s Blair Partnership
Rachel Petty has joined Blair Partnership as an agent heading up the children’s and young adult list. (The agency’s most well-known client: J.K. Rowling.) For the past 14 years, Petty was editorial director at Macmillan UK Children’s. Learn more about the agency.
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Links of Interest
Copyright
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Authors and publishers win $7.8 million in a global piracy lawsuit. But it’s unlikely they will ever see a dime of that money. Read Andrew Albanese in Publishers Weekly.
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Here are some of the works that entered the public domain this year. Once a work enters the public domain, it can be republished and repurposed by anyone and used to create derivative works without permission. Learn more.
Trends
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Webtoon is enjoying growth in the US market. According to CEO Junkoo Kim, mobile reading app Webtoon has 14+ million monthly active users, which represents 20 percent of their total userbase. Read Rob Salkowitz at ICv2.
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China is changing how the world reads. The web novel has been flourishing in China since 2002 and represents one of the country’s most successful cultural exports. Read Zeyi Yang at Protocol.
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The most popular library books of 2021. They include Barack Obama’s memoir and bestsellers such as Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens and Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. Read Clarisa Diaz at Quartz.
Audio
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Fiction podcast “movies” are now a thing. Until recently, most podcasts featuring fiction were anthologies or serials. But a podcast production company is now focusing on standalone 90-minute stories. Whether people are willing to pay remains an open question. Read Reggie Ugwu at The New York Times.
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Amazon’s Alexa fails to grow and sees high abandonment rates. Amazon’s own analysis has determined that the smart speaker market has “passed its growth phase.” Read Priya Anand at Bloomberg Businessweek. For even more considered analysis, read Benedict Evans.
Creator Economy
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Twitter and Clubhouse fight for talent and users. Twitter Spaces (its Clubhouse clone) has reached 2 million users and is stealing away some of Clubhouse’s market share. Read Kate Conger at The New York Times.
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Discord will soon allow for paid memberships. If you’re a premium member, you can charge for access to your Discord server. Read Tom Warren at The Verge.
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After starting a Substack to fund her novel, Elle Griffin is now experimenting with NFTs. If you’re curious about crowdfunding a book based on crypto and NFTs, this is the post you’re looking for. Read at The Novelleist.
Culture & Politics
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Is the writing life built on nothing but shallow notions of fame, success, and ambition? Apoorva Tadepalli explores careerism and the challenge of retaining one’s dignity while publicizing one’s work with “self-effacing yet smarmy tweets.” Read at The Point Magazine.
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How creative nonfiction overcame English Dept. resistance. Creative nonfiction is seen as a serious genre today, but that hasn’t always been the case. Read Lee Gutkind at Lit Hub.
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Some writers prefer distraction-free devices for writing. A New Yorker article looks at tools such as iA Writer and Freewrite Smart Typewriter, among others. Read Julian Lucas.
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Looking for a picture book you loved as a kid? There’s now an Instagram account for that. Read Rachel Treisman at NPR.
Accessibility
- How publishers (and authors) can get alt text right. In too many cases, the alt text for images is either missing or wrong in ebooks. This article includes helpful examples for improvement. Read Bill Kasdorf at Publishers Weekly.
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Closing image: According to Marketplace Pulse, the Amazon marketplace (third-party sellers) doubled in the last two years. Amazon’s own retail sales were up 14 percent from 2019 to 2021, while the marketplace grew by 30 percent. Consumers tend to blame these third-party sellers for the frustration involved in identifying and ordering quality products (including books) on the site. Learn more.
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Contributor: Emily Wenstrom
Copy editor: Nicole R. Klungle
Production coordinator: Mark F. Griffin
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