Daily News

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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 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.

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller lists for the week ending October 25, 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 Italian Obsession (House of Ferrara) (Arndell) by T L Swan, at no. 21; The Land in Winter (Europa Editions) by Andrew Miller, at no. 22; and Glass, Irony and God (New Directions) by Anne Carson, at no. 40.

The independent publisher Apateon Press has said that it will help authors whose books have gone out of print republish and sell those titles on Amazon, according to Publishers Weekly. The program is free; authors will not receive later chargebacks and will receive 15 percent royalties on gross sales based on Amazon’s retail price. “Authors who have regained rights to their titles, previously self-published a book and wish to bring it back to market, or have a backlist of titles they would like to make available again are eligible to take part in the service,” Jim Milliot writes.

For the Wall Street Journal, Ellen Gamerman talks to the voice actors tasked with bringing the characters of Sarah J. Maas’s wildly popular A Court of Thorns and Roses books to life via audiobook. The latest book in the series, A Court of Splintered Harmony was published today by Bloomsbury. A traditional audiobook is available now, but fans who are willing to hold out will also be able to enjoy a full-cast version of the audiobook made by the production company Graphic Audio in December. Making this kind of recording is not without its challenges. “Bringing the sounds of this world to life isn’t easy,” Gamerman explains. “The metallic clang of sharp claws should evoke mythic combat, not knife prep at a roast beef station. Performers aim to match the emotion of the books. For intimate scenes, actors make some embellishments, including kissing a hand into the microphone.”

Chris Haughton and Nicola Davies, the children’s literature laureates for Ireland and Wales, respectively, have both said that they will donate royalties from their works to Sally Rooney in solidarity, the Guardian reports. These decisions come on the heels of the news that Rooney’s works will no longer be sold in the U.K. because of her pledge to support the group Palestine Action, which has been banned by the British government. “As authors, we need to be focused on freedom of expression, this is everything we’re about, and this is just showing solidarity with an author who has bravely spoken out,” Haughton is quoted saying. “The entire situation is just a farce. Sending Sally Rooney the money adds another level of absurdity to this absurd situation, it’s making a mockery of the law.”

The Authors Guild has joined a slew of other organizations in calling on the Australian government to change its copyright law to allow AI companies to train their models on authors’ works without permission. “The legislation would make it legal for your work to be exploited by AI companies, if they conducted that exploitation on Australian soil,” the Guild wrote in a statement. “It would effectively preempt the lawsuits authors have brought against AI companies and our lobbying for protections since the AI companies would simply move their training operations to Australia while continuing to deploy the models in the U.S.” Those interested in signing on to this statement can do so on the Guild’s website.

Trends come and go at the pace of the internet, which means that publishers must figure out how to balance meeting the market with taking the time required to produce a physical book, USA Today writes. Between all the additional tasks on their plates and the many hurdles of the production process, rushing a book out can be a challenge. But while it may seem like audiences’ appetites are ever-changing, some in the industry point out that they’re actually more likely to get sick of a trend before readers do. “[Jessica] Faust[, the chief executive and founder of BookEnds Literary Agency,] offered an example where a hypothetical reader might discover a mermaid novel, while agents have already seen fifty manuscripts about mermaids.” Josh Rivera explains. “Publishers may have bought several before readers see the first.”

The Canadian publisher Les Éditions du Boréal has said that it is cutting ties with Thélyson Orélien after it came to light that the author used AI to write his debut novel C'était ça ou Mourir (It Was Either That Or Die), which was published earlier this year, Reuters reports. After the book won several major literary awards, allegations began to swirl online that it was written largely by AI. Orélien previously denied that he had used AI, but an investigation by his publisher found otherwise. “We still cannot know what capacity AI was used in the creation of It Was Either That Or Die, and undoubtedly we will never have a definitive answer,” the publisher said in a statement. “After the allegations, we continue[d] to trust [Thélyson] Orélien, who assured us he had never used such tools. This assertion has now been proven false.”

On October 19, nearly three hundred authors filed individual copyright infringement claims against Meta across five complaints rather than join a class action lawsuit in which a few named plaintiffs sue on behalf of many more people, Publishers Weekly reports. The plaintiffs are alleging that Meta trained its AI models on pirated copies of their books and on physical books the company bought and scanned without permission to do so, and include authors Jacqueline Winspear, Reyna Grande, and Mark Spragg. But some have reservations about this approach. “The Authors Guild stands with the authors who filed suit against Meta and supports their efforts to hold the company accountable for copyright infringement. We are especially glad to see the complaint take on Meta’s mass scanning operation to train AI as an independent act of infringement,” Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the Authors Guild, said. “At the same time, we believe that authors must stick together to ensure that the law protects all authors against the blatant theft of their work by AI companies through well-conceived class action lawsuits.”

Catapult is being sold and operations will wind down at the end of this month, Publishers Lunch reports. The Catapult union, which formed in June, said plans for a sale came to light while the NLRB vote was happening and that “continued employment with the prospective buyer is not an option.” A termination deal for affected employees is still being finalized.

The Society of Authors (SoA) has withdrawn from the ethical AI charter it announced last week, according to the Bookseller. The charter calls on members and industry organizations to “pledge to only use generative AI in a transparent, responsible, and ethical way, balancing the technological benefits with the potentially devastating impact on people and planet.” But after it was publicized, SoA members voiced criticism both about the contents of the charter and about the fact that members weren’t consulted before it was published. SoA has withdrawn in order to hear from its members, but none of the other participant organizations have followed in their footsteps, and the charter is still live.

Penguin Random House will be bringing back its annual two-day holiday transit program to help independent bookstores avoid suffering from shipping delays, Publishers Weekly writes. Booksellers are permitted to submit orders of any size and PRH guarantees that it will expedite shipping orders to independent shops so that they arrive within two days throughout the holiday season. “The program includes all frontlist and backlist physical-format titles from the imprints of the Crown, Knopf Doubleday, Penguin, and Random House publishing groups; Random House Children’s Books; Penguin Young Readers; PRH Audio; and DK Publishing, as well as titles from all PRH Publisher Services clients,” Claire Kirch explains. The initiative began in 2011.

A new profile in the New Yorker calls James Daunt, the CEO of both Barnes & Noble and Waterstones—the largest bookstore chains in the U.S. and U.K., respectively—the “most important man in bookselling.” Since taking charge of the former in 2019, he has encouraged each location to operate more like an independent bookstore, giving booksellers the opportunity to take ownership of their work while also catering to customers who differ widely from city to city. And he’s pushing back on the idea that reading is falling out of fashion. “Such nonsense,” he is quoted saying on the subject. “It’s ‘Policemen always get younger’—we just go through an arc of life. Every single year of my bookselling life, somebody has popped up and said, ‘Literary fiction is dead!’” But in reality, that hardly seems to be the case. Case in point: Sales of print books have increased nearly 25 percent in the last decade.

Isabel Allende has won the €1 millon (approximately $1,122,000) Premio Planeta literary prize under a pseudonym, the Guardian reports. The Spanish prize is one of the most lucrative literary awards in the world, and Allende won with La Hora Antes Del Alba, a sequel to her debut novel, The House of the Spirits (Knopf, 1985). Though Allende submitted the unpublished manuscript under the name Luz Ventura, some have speculated that the prize judges may have picked up on her style. “I had never entered a competition because I wanted to avoid the embarrassment of coming last,” Allende, who is 84, is quoted saying. “At my age, there is very little to lose.”