At the fifth annual U.S. Book Show on June 3, hosted by Publishers Weekly at the Academy of Medicine in Harlem for the fifth annual U.S. Book Show, experts from nearly every section of the business drilled down on the many ways the book business is changing in an era increasingly characterized by chasing big books with bigger audiences and the encroachment of artificial intelligence technologies.

A morning panel, "Steady Wins the Race: Taking Midlist Authors to the Next Level," brought together publicity and editorial executives to discuss career-building strategies for authors with commercial potential who have not yet achieved breakout success.

"I think midlist can have sort of a pejorative connotation to it sometimes, and I really would like to dispel that," said Sarah Cantin, VP and editorial director at St. Martin's Publishing Group. "An author who can stay in the game and publish book after book is doing a remarkable thing these days."

Vida Engstrand, director of communications at Kensington Publishing, described midlist authors as essential to publishers' long-term strategies. "I would much rather work with an author who sells through 8,000 copies than one who sells 10,000 copies but returns 6,000 copies," Engstrand said. "The author who sells through has their network. They've put in the time and built it."

The approach emphasizes community building over attempting immediate bestseller status. Engstrand described a failed experiment where substantial marketing investment did not produce expected results. "What I learned from that is: don't try to make everything a blockbuster," Engstrand said. "Instead, focus on building the neighborhood. Don't bust the block, build a neighborhood."

Publishers cited authentic author development as crucial for audience retention when authors shift genres or styles. "When it is a natural extension of the author, whatever that shift is, I do think readers will follow," Engstrand said. "Readers are allergic to something that feels very calculated."

Finding Your Readers

Panelists at “The Direct-to-Reader Revolution” dug into changes in book marketing in an era of shifting distribution and retail channels and emerging technologies. One refreshing perspective offered by panelists was a measured read on data and AI: specifically, that they aren’t everything.

“I think more about knowing the consumer than about the data that we have,” said Leigh Marchant, chief marketing officer at Hachette Book Group, noting that often, experiential understanding of readerships provides a clearer look at how to best get the right books into their hands. For instance, she noted, the most active shoppers on HBG’s TikTok shop show markedly different tastes than the BookTok influencers who read HBG books—specifically, they are interested in “a lot of deep backlist.” That was knowledge, Marchant said, the publisher had to discover intuitively, rather than drawing simply on BookTok data.

It's important, said Carly Gorga, CMO and deputy publisher at Authors Equity, to draw lessons from authors and their market intuition rather than relying on industry assumptions—a defining characteristic of the publisher's profit-sharing model. "Our biggest advantage is the relationship we have with our authors," said Gorga. "We're business partners with each of our authors. They're ostensibly the creative directors on each project, which is their book. At the beginning of the publishing conversation, we set the goals together. We set the strategy together."

As for the role of AI in today’s book business, panelists agreed that every game-changer comes with caveats. Matt Kaye, CEO and cofounder of Bindery, began building the book world membership platform "a little over two years ago with one engineer," he said. "Doing the equivalent of this work when I was at Patreon five years ago was 60 engineers." At Authors Equity, where Gorga said she is part of a small team with big ambitions, she “use[s] AI all the time.” But, she argued, “The AI is only as good as the human." Fassler agreed. "I don't know one marketer who closes up her laptop at the end of the day and say, ‘I’m done. AI can replace me.’ ”

Readers, Kaye added, “want nothing to do with AI work. They don't care. They love learning about books from people they trust written by authors they can meet. There's going to be more of a premium put on the value that publishing creates—as the cost goes to zero, the value goes to zero."

Sound About Right?

At “Turn Up the Volume: How to Find (and Grow) Your Audiobook Audience," experts in the continually booming audio sector addressed the growth of the format, how to support human narrators at a time of rising use of AI voiceovers, ways to innovate and make audio titles stand out from the pack, and Spotify’s entry into the market.

With immersive audio techniques, full of sound effects and music and other bells and whistles, all the rage, Dan Zitt, SVP of content production at Penguin Random House Audio, reminded the audience, “There are still single voice narrators that are the bread and butter of this business, and can tell really beautiful stories without using sound design."

Jessica Care Moore, a poet and the publisher of Moore Black Press, also noted that in some cases, making what is old new again really does work in the market. "We're going to be doing limited edition vinyl with all of our poets," she said. "Vinyl is back. My vinyl has always sold better than my CDs." She added that, in Black and brown communities in particular, "they are really listening to books, listening for voices, more than they are going into bookstores and buying them."

The occasional accusation of cannibalization of print sales has hung around the neck of the audiobook world for years. But as Catherine Bucaria, VP and publisher at the newly launched Sourcebooks Audio, pointed out, "audio has a higher listenership than people reading with their eyes, but it's so dependent on the book. It's very front of mind for acquisitions, and it certainly runs the finance teams through their paces as they try to predict forward. Ultimately, we want people coming to our books, and however they come to them, in that way, we're very format agnostic. If someone's choosing to set their free time on one of your books, you can read, you can listen, you can do everything in between and both. That's kind of the victory in and of itself."

Jason Pinter, VP and editorial director of another newly launched audiobook endeavor, Simon Maverick, pointed out that discoverability in the audio world is often different than it is in the print book world—a distinction he sees as an advantage. "The growth of audio dovetails almost perfectly with the contraction of the way that books are found," he said. "Book review sections have been flooded. The ways that books used to be covered have been smashed to the bone. And a lot of times, it's been up to readers and authors to find these communities, because you can't depend on these traditional outlets anymore. There are a lot of books and genres that are being discovered now that were not getting seen in traditional media and traditional marketing. They're being discovered through audio."

At Audible, said Lee Jarit, global head of publisher and partner relations at Audible, children's audio has also become "an upcoming area." The market leader in audio recently launched kids' profiles on its platform, "and we had 22% growth of kids listening in just that period," he said. "It really is a great way to introduce young readers and listeners to a whole entire new world and format, and I think the expansion of offerings is really playing a role in that."

On AI narration, Zitt exemplified some of the hesitancy around unreservedly embracing the tools. "Over the last six or seven years, AI companies have come to talk to us about AI voices," he said. "Where were you guys 25 years ago, when we were struggling to produce thousands of audiobooks in our backlist, and now there is no backlist? We've produced everything with a human voice. I wouldn't want to replace that in the future."

Audible's Jarit, on the other hand, noted that AI can be helpful as part of the discoverability process. "We have an AI search that allows people to use natural language to say, 'Oh, I'm going to be in the car for eight hours with my kids, and I need a book with a female protagonist that has a little bit of excitement and action to it,' and the search will generate something that is actually of great interest—that will be useful for being able to find stuff that maybe wasn't as easy to find before."

Translated Voices

At “Publishing in Turbulent Times: Why Translated Voices Matter More Than Ever,” moderated by Open Letter Books publisher Chad Post, a panel of publishers of translated literature discussed the value of translation, the loss of NEA grants for translators, and the future of AI translations.

Rohan Kamicheril, senior editor FSG, said that the “idea that we should publish literature in translation to show that we are all the same” is “pernicious.” Instead, he values “trying to find ways to make the Other make sense to people without changing it, without dumbing it down.”

Kamicheril also expressed concern that the loss of funding for translators, including NEA grants, will make it harder to bring in literature from languages and countries with less-established channels to the U.S. book market. Dan Simon, founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press, said that the press has of late tried to focus on publishing work from “countries that don’t support translation the way other, bigger countries do,” including Eastern European nations such as Romania and Croatia.

As the possibility of AI supplanting translators looms, Tynan Kogane, senior editor at New Directions, questioned the technology’s value. “I think a lot of AI is about finding shortcuts and a lot of shortcuts lead to flattening mediocrity,” Kogane said. While New Directions recently started using AI to generate image descriptions to comply with new EU accessibility requirements, he said that AI couldn’t ever be used to translate a book: “It’s sort of just a blunt tool that can be used for certain things.”

Kamicheril agreed that “a lot of literary publishers are clear on the fact that they don’t want to use AI” because “the quality is just not as good. On a very basic level, it does not work yet.” However, he added, “I do think it’s going to start getting used a lot more” because “there’s so much ravenous appetite for content.”

Like Kogan, Simon said he sees AI translation as a shortcut: “It’s like saying that you can have a baby without pain.” However, he did qualify his rejection, saying more “commercial” books “where it doesn’t matter how it’s written” could be AI translated: “If it’s translated with AI, it’s not literature. If it’s translated the hard way, that shows it’s a literary text.”