We’ve made it official: You can now use the Fiction: Romantasy sub-category when reporting — or searching — deals at PublishersMarketplace.com.
Deals
Follett Moves to Hachette
Ken Follett is changing English-language publishers, moving to Hachette Book Group and Hachette UK — after publishing with Penguin for 45 years, and with Pan Macmillan for 35 years. Follett’s next novel, due out on an unspecified date in 2025, will be published by Grand Central in the US and Quercus in the UK. The Follett Office sold rights to Ben Sevier at Grand Central (NA) and Jon Butler at Quercus (UK/Commonwealth), in a one-book deal. Follett said in the announcement, “This is the beginning of an exciting new phase for me: new publisher, new editors, new sales force. I’m […]
Deals Rebounded In the First Quarter, Led By Strong Six-Figure Reports
Deal reports rebounded in the first quarter of 2024, likely helped by an early convening of the London Book Fair and driven by strong investment in adult books. The gains come in comparison to a lower bar from a year ago, when Harper Collins was dealing with a strike and cutbacks. This quarter’s deal volumes were nearly back to the record total from 2022, and six-figure sales hit a new high. Adult fiction sales set a new record, up 20 percent over last year. Adult nonfiction recovered meaningfully from last year’s lull, gaining 10 percent, though still well off its […]
Using AI to Search Deals and Dealmakers
We have launched an experimental use of an AI-powered search approach at PublishersMarketplace, called Matcher. Up until now, our corpus of over 200,000 deal reports has only been searchable through basic word matching and Boolean search strings—and our Dealmakers lists, while quite extensive, only cover the 100 or so sub-categories that we tag and track. Matcher is designed to help you find agents and editors that “match” your manuscript, using natural language descriptions of your work. In this initial phase, it comes in two versions: Deal Matcher lets you search through the deals database, and highlights the editors and agents involved […]
Fourth Quarter Deals: Fiction Rises, Nonfiction and Children’s Declines
Today we report on dealmaking statistics for both the fourth quarter of 2023 as well as the full year — which means that most of our focus is on the annual trends. To recap: Q1 deals were weak — due in large part to the strike at Harper Collins and continued conservatism at Penguin Random House — and then sales rebounded in Q2, helped by later dates for the book fairs, with particular strength in the bigger six-figure deals. Q3 deals declined again, even as major deal reports hit record levels. Fourth quarter deals continued to paint multiple pictures. Adult […]
2023: The Year In Deals
Today we report both fourth quarter and full-year 2023 statistics for US deal reports. Dealmaking patterns were somewhat in line with sales in 2022, as most key domestic deal statistics ebbed from record levels in 2021 but still held at high levels relative to previous years. Things did soften after a strong first quarter, and then picked up a bit in the fourth quarter. In particular: – US deals finished down by 2.7 percent — like print sales as measured by Circana Bookscan, the third-best year in recent charting, and well ahead of 2020 and earlier years. – Adult Fiction continued its […]