Two of the biggest books of 2025 were technically published in December 2024—Mel Robbins’ The Let Them Theory (Hay House, 12/24/24) and Callie Hart’s Quicksilver (Forever, 12/3/24). They didn’t make our list of the biggest new books last year, but continued going strong enough this year to deserve mention here. In fact, The Let Them Theory was the top-selling print title of 2025 with 2.8 million units sold. Quicksilver came in at 34 in Circana Bookscan’s top 200. Suzanne Collins’ addition to the Hunger Games universe was the top newly-published 2025 book of the year, selling more than 2 million […]
Year End
2025: The Year In Deals
A strong fourth quarter for domestic deals (+4.4 percent overall), driven by an 18 percent increase in fiction deals, lifted the year’s results to another new record total for PM deal reports. Publisher investment grew even more, setting new records overall and new records for major and significant deals. In particular: – US deals overall were up 1.9 percent, a new record total. – Adult Fiction gained again, for the seventh straight year, up 9.3 percent (on top of 2024’s gain of 10 percent). Nonfiction sales ebbed, down 1.6 percent. – Children’s deals finally broke their three-year decline, finishing flat for the year. […]
2025: The Year In Stories
In separate pieces, our year-end reviews have looked at the year in mergers, legal news, and corporate finance, along with our exclusive tally of The Best List, the consensus best books of the year–and in January we will finish up with the year in deals. Comprehensive as that sounds, it hardly covers everything worth remembering or noting from 2025. Last year we introduced this additional “year in stories,” not necessarily for the year’s biggest stories, but to call out pieces and coverage areas where the small but mighty crew at Lunch + Marketplace has brought an extra dimension to community […]
2025: The Year In Legal News, Part 2
Part two of our year-end legal round-up compiles all the major stories not involving AI. The cases we followed in 2025 concerned book bans; the botched auction of Diamond Comics’ assets; the sexual assault case against Neil Gaiman; a certain “tedious” filing from the president of the United States; and more. Book Bans Book bans were once again a big topic this year. Some of the many legal headlines included: a US District Court ruling that Texas’s “READER Act” is unconstitutional; a Missouri book banning law being struck down; and SCOTUS’s decision not to hear an appeal in the Texas […]
2025: The Year In Legal News, Part 1
Publishing news was dominated by lawsuits this year, particularly those related to AI. The biggest legal stories of 2025 involved tech’s mass copyright infringement of thousands of books to train LLMs. Luckily, for authors and publishers, there were some victories for copyright. Accordingly, we have broken up our roundup of our legal reporting this year into two sections, beginning with lawsuits concerning AI. First US judgement on AI copyright infringement In February, we saw the first judgment in the US on an AI copyright case when Thompson Reuters won its case against tech company Ross Intelligence. Ross Intelligence copied TR’s […]
2025: The Year in Finance
Publisher sales figures were stable this year, with most reporting companies just slightly ahead of or behind where they were in 2024. (Bloomsbury is the exception, falling from their record-breaking year in 2023, which had a new book by blockbuster romantasy author Sarah J. Maas.) Industry print sales monitored by the AAP ebbed while ebooks remained flat and audiobooks inched higher (now past the big boost from Spotify), outselling ebooks for the second year on record. (But also, AAP stats are missing data from growing publishers such as Sourcebooks and Entangled.) Here’s our roundup of results from the publicly trade […]