One of the biggest acquisitions of 2024 was a seven-figure, three-book deal for YA author Adalyn Grace’s THE WRETCHED DIVINE by Feiwel and Friends. Grace’s book highlights a growing trend of authors who historically published in the children’s/YA market selling their first books marketed for adults. While many authors, such as Jacqueline Woodson and Victoria/VE Schwab, have long published books for kids and adults, PM deal reports show that there’s a marked uptick in what editors and agents are calling “adult debuts.” So far this year, PM has recorded at least 30 such acquisitions, almost a quarter of which were […]
Deals
Record Fall/Frankfurt Adult Deals Follow Big Third Quarter
Yes, your fall and pre-Frankfurt deal submissions really have been even more overwhelming than usual this year. As we noted yesterday, US publishers were strong buyers in the third quarter of the year and that continued in October, as we saw new records for overall deals during this key five-week-plus selling stretch, lifted by adult books in particular. (As a reminder, we measure the five weeks and a day leading up to the Wednesday opening of FBF. Usually that begins with Labor Day, though last year and this year Frankfurt is a week later than usual.) US deals were up […]
Third Quarter Deals Set More New Records
Tomorrow we’ll provide the full report on deal activity in the fall/pre-Frankfurt sales period — Spoiler Alert: It has been a record season. But first we need to catch up on deal trends for the third quarter, which has also set multiple records. The visualizations below will make it more obvious than usual, but: – Overall deals reached a new high for the period, up 8.7 percent over last year – Nonfiction deals recovered, reaching a new high for the period, up 22.5 percent over last year – Fiction deals continued their growth and accelerated, reaching a new high again, […]
Fall Debuts and Frankfurt Unicorns
The big fall selling (and announcement) season, starting right after Labor Day and running through the Frankfurt Book Fair some time in October, seems to get busier every year. Our US deal reports for September were up 8 percent over September 2023, with fiction deals running 25 percent ahead of a year ago, as debut fiction reports set a record for the month (up 60 percent from last year). Other media and popular imagination stills tries to coalesce in October around a few “books of the fair,” even though we document over 800 “pre-Frankfurt” deals — with over 10 percent […]
Expanded Matcher Includes Editors, Too
Over the weekend we went live with our newest update of Matcher, our AI-powered feature that searches and analyzes deals, dealmakers and related data. using natural language descriptions of your work. The new Editor Matcher will help you find editors that “match” your submissions, just as Agent Matcher helps find agents that “match” your manuscript. Editor Matcher works the same way as Agent Matcher, producing a list of the most likely editors who have acquired similar projects and follows with a second list of possible matches to investigate. But with his update, we have significantly upgraded the matching itself — […]
Second Quarter Deals: Strong Investment In Adult Books, As Picture Books and Middle Grade Sink Children’s Sales
First quarter deal reports were up modestly after a bad start to 2023, helped by an early London Book Fair and marked by record six-figure deals — particularly at the higher end — continuing a trend of increased publisher investment in bigger deals. The second quarter of 2024 failed to keep up with a stronger comp from a year ago in total deals though for a very particular reason: Adult deals were actually up slightly versus last year, but children’s experienced a dramatic drop. They fell 17 percent, to their lowest second-quarter level since 2016 (even with an April Bologna […]