Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Splintered Harmony (Bloomsbury) sold just under a million copies in the first week following its release, Publishers Lunch writes. Rebecca Yarros, whose novel Threshing Day (Red Tower Books) sold over 857,000 copies this fall, still holds record for the fastest-selling adult book in the history of Circana Bookscan for Onyx Storm (Red Tower Books), which sold well over a million copies following its release in early 2025. “But Maas now looks to hold second place in the Bookscan record books,” according to Michael Cader.

Salon, one of the internet’s first and longest-running publications, is halting operations after thirty-one years, Deadline reports. The site was founded in the wake of a strike at the San Francisco Examiner in 1995, and became known through the Clinton and Bush years as a place for left-of-center news and criticism. “The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years,” the publication’s final post reads. “After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable. We know this news will be deeply disappointing to many of you, and we share that sadness.”

In the third quarter of 2026, HarperCollins’s revenue increased by 9 percent compared to the year prior, according to Publishers Weekly. Its parent company attributes these gains to strong sales of new releases including Whistler (HarperCollins) by Ann Patchett and R.F. Kuang’s Taipei Story (William Morrow). Digital sales increased 6 percent, and audiobook sales specifically rose 13 percent, thanks at least in part to the company’s partnership with Spotify. Robert Thomson, the chief executive and director of HarperCollins’s parent company News Corp, adds that experiments with AI will likely trigger further evolution in the audiobook space. “AI is going to really provide a role in helping to bring books to life through these vivid voices and the ability to generate a compelling audio experience that makes the book even more valuable,” he is quoted saying. “There’s so many more choices in reading voices, sound effects and other techniques and tools and creativity that will bring words to life. And don’t forget as well how AI will enable much more cost-effective translations into multiple languages, both in text and audio and thus reach new audiences and generate new revenue.”

The largest public library systems in the country are seeing upticks in cardholder membership, circulation, and event attendance, NPR reports. Part of the reason for this shift is likely the rising cost of living, but many institutions have also gotten better at marketing themselves and making people aware of their wide array of offerings extending far beyond physical books. “People start off with Audible and then a friend tells them, ‘Why are you paying for that? You can get that at the library if you're a smidgen bit patient,’” Jeremy Reeder, director of the Maricopa County Library District in Arizona, is quoted saying.

Alexander: God, King, Man (St. Martin’s Press), a new biography of Alexander the Great by Edmund Richardson, has won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize, according to the Associated Press. The £50,000 (approximately $67,000) prize is given each year to a nonfiction book and has been “credited with bringing an eclectic slate of fact-based books to a wider audience.” Richardson is a professor of classics at Durham University in England and spent a decade researching the life of Alexander. The prize judges praised his book for being “a love letter to the humanities and the work of historians and archaeologists.”

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller lists for the week ending November 1, 2026. The lists, in fiction and nonfiction, are compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identify “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” This week on the fiction list, The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett (Spiegel & Grau) once more retains the top spot. New to the fiction list are The Once and Future Queen: Deluxe Limited Edition (The Lives of Guinevere #1) (Erewhon Books) by Paula Lafferty, at no. 10; Of Karma and Corridors: A Dark Romance (Deluxe Limited Edition) (Podium Publishing) by Sloane St James, at no. 19; A Crimson Ridge Christmas: Deluxe Limited Edition (Kensington) by Elliott Rose, at no. 23; and The Summer Hikaru Died, Vol. 8 (Yen Press) by Mokumokuren, at no. 31.

Just a day after receiving France’s prestigious Prox Goncourt for his novel L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel) (Flammarion), Philippe Jaenada admitted on a French radio broadcast that he used AI three times while writing his book, Euronews reports. He said that he slipped a sentence written by ChatGPT into the text as a sort of inside joke and that he also used the technology for technical research. “I think we cannot push AI away, we cannot act as if it did not exist. We have to use it, we have to acknowledge it, we have to tame it and not let ourselves be replaced. It has to be useful,” Euronews quotes the author saying. This year’s Prix Goncourt already made headlines when one of the longlisted titles was withdrawn over allegations that its author, Thélyson Orélien, used AI to write his book.

Poet Grace Nichols has won the 2026 Royal Society of Literature Pioneer prize. The award of £10,000 (approximately $13,458) is given annually to a British woman writer over the age of sixty who overcame obstacles to having a successful literary career. Nichols was born in Guyana and has written numerous books for adults and children including I is a Long-Memoried Woman (Karnac House, 1983), for which she won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. “The word, pioneer, is an interesting one and my mind immediately flashed to when, as young students at the University of Guyana (our university education was free) we had to do a month’s national service before graduation. Dressed in military uniforms we served as ‘Young Pioneers’ in the forested region of Guyana as part of the government plan to develop a hydro-project scheme in our hinterland. Maybe that’s what we do as poets in the act of writing a poem or book, we’re like pioneers embarking on a new adventure with language in the forest of the imagination, finding a path true to our essential voice and vision, lighting things up from our own perspective,” Nichols said upon receiving the honor.

Cambridge University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, and Princeton University Press are backing a new AI service called Meridian, Publishers Weekly writes. Meridian is being run by Cashmere, a start-up that licenses publishers’ content to AI companies, and will give students and researchers access to books and journals already licensed by libraries. When users ask an AI tool questions, Meridian pulls an answer from licensed peer-reviewed content, cites the source, and sends the reader in the right direction. Material accessed through Meridian won't be resold or used to train AI models. “The terms for how AI uses scholarship are being set right now, and university and other mission-aligned presses have an opportunity to take part in setting them,” Barbara Kline Pope, executive director of Johns Hopkins University Press, is quoted saying.

In a new article, publishing expert Jane Friedman hypothesizes that the frequency of AI allegations and scandals in the literary world will soon subside. She argues that most of the scandals we’ve seen in recent months concern books written, submitted, edited, and published in 2024 or 2025, before the industry had any real understanding of the shifting landscape around AI and its ubiquity even among many writers. Now, however, detection tools are much more widely available and everyone is adapting. “I’ve seen many people suggest that authors accused of AI allegations should sue or will sue—or that lawsuits will somehow bring AI detection to an end. I do expect court cases that seek to prove how much of a work is human versus AI, but I think that’s most likely to happen in relation to the question of copyright,” Friedman postulates. “Right now, a work has to be human authored to receive full copyright protection and the US Copyright Office is starting to ask questions about how authors used or didn’t use AI. There have already been lawsuits brought by authors/creators seeking copyright for works they created with the aid of a machine. That’s the issue I expect we’ll be fighting over, not AI detection.”

For the New York Times, writer Ash Wu examines the recent phenomenon of brands hiring writers to pose for their ad campaigns. As Wu points out, authors have a specific cultural cachet that might appeal to clothing companies and the like. And for writers, modeling and brand deals are a way to make ends meet at a time when other sources of income might be drying up. “There may be more writers today than ever before in human history, but the infrastructure to support them (jobs, word rates, institutions) has not scaled to match,” Krithika Varagur, a writer and editor who has modeled for J. Crew, is quoted saying. “I would love to see brands interested in the image of the writer make more of an effort to support the small magazines and presses that actually sustain literary culture today.”

Philippe Jaenada has won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for his book L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel) (Flammarion), the Guardian reports. The novel probes the murder of 29-year-old Louise Cansot in September 1949, a case that has remained unsolved for the last seventy-seven years. This year’s Prix Goncourt already made headlines when one of the longlisted titles was withdrawn over allegations that its author, Thélyson Orélien, used AI to write his book. Jaenada has been shortlisted for the prize four times prior. “He spares no effort in trying to understand his heroine,” a writer for the newspaper Le Monde said of Jaenada, also applauding the book’s sense of humor and “touch of grumpy tenderness.”

Lakeside Book Company, the U.S.’s biggest book manufacturer, just got even bigger with the acquisition of Bradford & Bigelow (B&B), Publishers Weekly writes. B&B’s facilities and teams will stay as they are, and it will operate as a division of Lakeside. “B&B excels at delivering exceptional printed educational materials and we intend to build upon their nearly eight decades of investment in technology, sustainability, and customer-focused workflows to serve new customers in education and other markets,” Dave McCree, the chief executive of Lakeside, is quoted saying.

Late last week, on its final day of operations, Catapult settled on a termination agreement with its employee union, according to Publishers Lunch. “Every union member will get at least ten weeks severance and COBRA health insurance premiums paid for through the end of the year,” Katy Hershberger writes. “Employees who have worked at the company for more than a year will get a minimum of twelve weeks of severance.” The buyer of Catapult’s assets has not yet been revealed, including to members of the union.

The U.K.’s Association of Illustrators (AOI) recently found that nearly half of the 549 illustrators the organization surveyed this year have lost work because a client chose to use generative AI instead, the Bookseller reports. 62 percent also said they had been sent AI-generated images as part of briefs or mood boards from clients including book publishers, and over a third had been asked to copy or refine AI-generated images. “AI is replacing commissions in some areas, reshaping briefs and fees in others, moving illustrators further down the creative process and affecting some groups more heavily than others. This survey gives us a benchmark for tracking those changes, identifying where pressure is greatest, challenging poor practice and testing claims about responsible AI against the experience of working illustrators,” the AOI report concludes. “It also underlines a point that can get lost in discussions about technology: Illustration is not simply an output. The ideas, research, judgement, experience, and individual creative voice behind the work have significant value, too.”

For Literary Hub, Maris Kreizman parses the concept of the “make book,” a book that publishers decide to try to make into a success even if the writer behind the work isn’t yet a household name. Examples that worked might include Viet Than Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015) or Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep (Random House, 2005). “The make book requires a number of conditions in order to work,” Kreizman explains, “a publisher willing to risk the time and effort of their staff on a book that is not a slam dunk, a wider company ethos that values the making of art, the ability of publishing workers to trust their instincts to determine if a book is special, and, most importantly, a trust in the market to elevate worthy literary material.” These days, many of these conditions are hardly a given.

Allison K. Hill, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, has put out a letter stressing the many likely disruptions facing the supply chain as we head into the holiday season. These include the closing of a major U.S. book component printer, new Canadian tariffs, and shipping issues thanks to rising fuel prices caused by the U.S.-Iran war. What’s more, Hill adds, because book distributor Baker & Taylor has gone out of business, Ingram will be further strained. “Ingram actively improves their operations every year and they are coming into this season with a couple of much appreciated improvements. Even so they will be challenged to keep up with the demand—at least one publisher is already actively telling booksellers to order from Ingram instead of direct, more publishers are sending more books to Ingram for print on demand in anticipation of the challenges this season, and there are five hundred more independent bookstores than there were this time last year,” Hill writes. “To mitigate risks for booksellers, publishers have advised them to order early and order more, but cash flow makes this a challenge, as does the unpredictability of how much customers will be able or willing to spend in this challenging economy.”

The Poetry Foundation has awarded over $1.5 million in grant funding to fifty-two nonprofit poetry organizations, presses, magazines, and more. The grantees are based in twenty-three states and U.S. territories and support poets at every stage of their careers. “Support for the literary arts, and especially poetry, remains critical at this time of rising costs and a decrease in funding from traditional sources,” Poetry Foundation president and chief executive Michelle T. Boone is quoted saying. “The Poetry Foundation’s funding to this collective of organizations and publishers helps make it possible for people of all ages to express themselves and engage with poetry and poets.”

The Association of American Publishers, the Independent Book Publishers Association, and several other publishing groups have jointly filed an amicus brief supporting the author and publisher plaintiffs in a suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, Publishers Weekly reports. Last month, the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs asked the court to grant summary judgment in favor of dismissing the claim that the defendants’ use of copyrighted materials qualifies as fair use. “Overly expansive interpretations of fair use displace the market mechanisms Congress established, replacing negotiated exchange with uncompensated use and transferring value from the authors and publishers that invest in them to industries that neither incurred the costs nor assumed the risks of producing the underlying works,” the amicus brief states.

For the Guardian, journalist Snigdha Poonam investigates who exactly is behind all of the scams targeting writers today. Recently, more and more authors have reported that they’ve received invitations to Zoom book clubs that turn out not to exist, offers to help with publishing or marketing books, and more, only to be told that in order to avail themselves of these opportunities they will need to pay. But while these operations may seem bot-driven, in at least some cases there are real people at the helm. An employee for one scam group told Poonam that this work underscored how easily manipulable writers, especially Americans, can be. “People in the U.S. are very nice, they’re very good-hearted people. They trust you. Whatever you’re saying, they trust you. That’s the problem,” the employee is quoted saying. And because these people earned their income in dollars, the scammers had few qualms about preying on them. “Generally, the mentality was: When you’re making income in dollars, you have a stable life, you have sustainability. So that’s what they did. They just ripped people off.”