Philippe Jaenada, the winner of the Prix Goncourt for his novel The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel, admitted that he used AI three times in his book to “play with the reader.” One of the instances is a single AI-generated sentence. Another is a section of AI-generated text that The Guardian reports serves to “poke fun at ChatGPT” with “completely absurd answers about a technical detail.” In the months before a winner was named, the Academie Goncourt removed Thélyson Orélien’s novel It Was Either That Or Die from the prize longlist following accusations of AI use. Jaenada said, […]
Imprints: Magic Cat Publishing at Candlewick Press
UK-based children’s publisher Magic Cat has partnered with Candlewick Press on an imprint called Magic Cat Publishing at Candlewick Press. The imprint will launch in 2027, with new titles from Annie Atkins, Robert Macfarlane, and Jamie Oliver. Candlewick will also sell and distribute Magic Cat across North America. “There has never been a more important time for children to have access to beautiful, analog books, and we are absolutely delighted to be working with the Candlewick team,” said Rachel Williams, cofounder and managing director of Magic Cat. Andrew Smith, SVP and publisher, Candlewick Press said, “I’m thrilled to be working once again […]
People 11/6
Maas Book Sells Almost One Million Tracked Hardcovers In Opening Week
Sarah J. Maas’s A COURT OF SPLINTERED HARMONY sold 958,195 hardcovers in its first week on sale, as tracked by Circana Bookscan. That puts it ahead of the other big release this fall, Rebecca Yarros’s THRESHING DAY (Wing and Claw Collection), which sold 857,802 hardcovers in its opening as tracked by Bookscan. Yarros still holds Bookscan’s all-time record for the fastest-selling adult title in the history of Bookscan with ONYX STORM from early 2025, which moved 1,288,300 hardcovers across both deluxe and standard editions in its opening week. But Maas now looks to hold second place in the Bookscan record […]
PM25: Features and Figures
One longstanding PM anniversary tradition is to announce or review new features — which is both easy and fun, since we have worked on expanding and refining the site constantly ever since launch, and that work continues to this day. A year ago we had our biggest wave of new feature launches ever, including major innovations such as separating out Dealmakers lists by publisher size, and solving the industry-wide comps and benchmarking dilemma with our Top Deals tab. This year’s work has mostly been hidden, not glamorous and/or not announced — starting with vigilant security efforts to keep the site […]
The AO3 Outage and the Fanfiction Industrial Complex
Amid the challenges of book bans, weak nonfiction sales, growing AI slop, and the bumpy Anthropic settlement disbursement, last week a new catastrophe emerged for many in publishing: Fan fiction website Archive of Our Own went offline, and will stay that way for up to four weeks. The nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works, which runs AO3, noted that there was a security breach, unrelated to the PHP programming language flaws that recently shut down many other sites, and that AO3 would be down for a minimum of two weeks, and possibly up to four. “No AO3 data has been deleted,” […]