PVLF 2025

Sights & Insights from the 2024 US Book Show

Highlights from the 2024 U.S. Book Show occurred on May 22, covering AI's impact, publishing insights, industry challenges, and best practices for success and diversity.
on May 30, 2024

The most successful edition of the U.S. Book Show to date occurred on May 22. In case you missed it—or want to relive it—we've compiled a list of highlights and takeaways from each panel.

The publishing CEOs who spoke with PW at the United States Book Show had a lot to say about artificial intelligence, from a variety of angles. S&S CEO Jonathan Karp had the most colorful response, dismissing the notion that technology is currently the "elephant in the room" in publishing and instead describing it as "more like the cicada in the world."

"A lot of buzzing and screwing." On a more serious note, he stated that "rights are being infringed," despite being a "valuable tool."

Clare O'Rourke, Macmillan's chief financial officer, began the day by doing the Lord's work: demonstrating how to understand profit and loss figures. (The practice is notoriously opaque; at the 2022 antitrust trial that stopped Penguin Random House's effort to acquire Simon & Schuster, the presiding judge asked Viking's president and publisher, Brian Tart, "The P&L is actually false. "Am I wrong?" Tart laughed and simply replied, "No!") "In this example, I'm assuming this is a nonfiction book, normal nine-inch trim, 250 pages long, for a debut author, and we're paying a $300,000 advance." The audience, largely young agents, laughed halfheartedly. "I know," O'Rourke quipped. "Love that, right?"

OverDrive CEO Steve Potash described the platform's vast spectrum of libraries and customers, which include schools, academic institutions, enterprises, and the government. "Our single largest non-public or academic library is the United States Department of Defense," he stated. "Every branch of the military has 1.7 million constituents. It's every active service member. It's their entire family, including their children, whether they're in submarines, at the War College, or at a forward station. They seek fiction, fantasy, educational resources, and graphic books... "This is a massive market.

A conversation between Hachette Vice President and Head of Contracts Janet Saines-Cardozo (r.) and AALA General Counsel Jaime Wolf, whose jobs have become more challenging as AI has spread, adopted a cautious approach to the buzzy new technology. Although much of the discourse about AI in the book industry has focused on copyright infringement and probable job losses among book jacket designers and literary translators, Saines-Cardozo and Wolf hinted at far-reaching repercussions. One example was the issue of image and likeness rights, which have routinely been included in publishing contracts as part of the publicity and marketing materials for the books and could be interpreted as giving a publisher the right to, as Wolf suggested, "create a video of the late Toni Morrison endorsing somebody's book"—something he suggested would be easy using such tools as OpenAI's text-to-video model Sora. Saines-Cardozo, for her part, dismissed such possi

Owen Smith, Spotify's VP of Product and Technology for Audiobooks, discussed how the firm has integrated audiobooks into its platform, increasing the potential audience for publishers' works. "By introducing audiobooks to Spotify, we have been able to bring them to over 650 million users and over 239 million subscribers in 180 markets all over the world—it's just a huge amount of people to reach," he said, adding that the platform's high level of user engagement allows it to target the right reader for a book title. "I believe it's this mix of the human editorial expertise with our personalization products that make our recommendations feel more authentic and more culturally relevant."

Keith Reigert, CEO of Ulysses Press, showcased use cases for several AI technologies, including ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Midjourney, and Photoshop. Whether we like it or not, he stated that AI will have an impact on the publishing industry—and urged the audience to prepare. "If you run a publishing company or you oversee a team, this is a really, really important time to set out an AI roadmap," he stated. "And if you work in the publishing industry, now is the time to start implementing AI as much as possible. Because it is not AI that will take your job, but rather someone who will utilize AI to do it."

"How do you manage the intimacy that this job demands to make the relationships, the work, better, while simultaneously being efficient?" Yahdon Israel, senior editor at Simon & Schuster, reflected during a pre-lunch discussion featuring the newly formed Young Publishers Association. Noting that agents had previously informed him that they'd "rather hear 'not for me'" than nothing, Israel stated that, "while that is an efficient way to navigate the job, I find it not to be a sustainable way to do the job in a way that's meaningful as an editor." To remedy this, he stated, "What I have been doing is purposefully acquiring phone numbers of agents and contacting them up.

I've just seen that making the phone call results in a five-minute conversation vs an email thread that can last two or three days"—and it's more personal.
Unsurprisingly, former Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur dropped out of the U.S. Book Show after leaving her job unexpectedly on Monday, causing vibrations across the book industry, which was described as "a business of musical chairs" during the panel's introduction. The audience welcomed the suggestion that they were "looking forward to seeing where she lands next."

The remaining panelists, including 37 Ink publisher Dawn Davis (center) and Little, Brown publisher Sally Kim (second from right), discussed what qualities they seek for when recruiting young publishing professionals and how they've dealt with job changes. "People who set a high standard for themselves," Davis proposed, are ideal. "You don't have to micromanage them, because they've already set a bar that's high" and they "aren't afraid of the industry that is required to be successful." To the latter topic, Kim said, "I don't think I've ever known when it was time for a change." Publishers: They are exactly like us!

In a panel discussion titled "Kicking Down the Gates," publishers discussed best practices for making publishing more accessible and diverse. Joy Peskin (third from left), executive editorial director of FSG Books for Young Readers, believes that overcoming conflict, which can often stem from misinterpretation, is critical. "I think conflict is a very important and healthy part of people coming together across differences," she stated. "We are going to stumble, but then we're also going to be able repair any relationship." Peskin went on to discuss a needlepoint that was presented to her as a gift and captured her perspective on dispute resolution. It says, "Be curious, not furious."

Other panelists focused on the usage of similarities while presenting books, noting that the majority of parallels were drawn to works by white authors, which frequently resulted in improper comparisons to books by BIPOC authors.

During the afternoon panel "Sales Says," the directors discussed the symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing. Christine Edwards (second from left), SVP of sales at Abrams, emphasized that, while point-of-sale data is a "invaluable tool" for publishers, it is not perfect. "We spend a lot of time working in the rear-view mirror," she explained. "We can look at POS historical data or POS on comps, expecting that that is an indicator for the success of a future publication, but it isn't, necessarily."
How can agents and editors strengthen their relationships? What can they do better for one another? During a session titled "Great Expectations," panelists and audience members alike gave advice on how to improve and simplify everyone's work. Suggestions included copying agents on all correspondence between editor and author, remembering the value of networking over lunch, following up on submissions via phone or video calls in addition to emails, and remembering that a lack of response from editors can have an impact on relationships between authors and their agents. Aliya King (r.), executive editor at Disney Publishing, had the audience in stitches.

"I want to talk about the word ghosting, make sure we're using this the way I see it," King said, implying that editors losing track of emails and forgetting to react to agents was not malicious in the sense that word suggests. "My introduction to ghosting came several years ago, after my divorce."

During a late afternoon session, agents and editors discussed their experiences on opposing sides of an auction, introducing some memorable language. In an effort to persuade the assembled agents why publishers favor round robin auctions over best bids, Stephanie Hitchcock, editorial director of the recently formed Simon Acumen, stated that "if you've been playing it out over time, you can probably generate more enthusiasm" in-house.

"Are you talking about… auction fever?" Moderator Ivan Held, president of Putnam, Berkley, and Dutton, inquired slyly. When asked by CAA agent Anthony Mattero to clarify, Held amused the audience by saying, "Where you went to the finance people..."and said, 'I need $350,000 for this book,' and then an offer comes in at $600,000, and you go back pleading, saying, 'I know I wasn't going to spend a dime more than $350K, but I need $700,000.'" "How are those P&Ls?" inquired another agent on the panel. "Terrible," Zack Wagman, VP and editorial director at Flatiron, deadpanned.

The panel discussion "Greenlighting 2.0" focused on the present situation of book adaptations to movies. Lucy Stille (second from left), head of her eponymous agency, believes it is critical for publishers to recognize the main contrasts between how streamers and filmmakers create content. "One thing you should know about them is that, in television, streamers like Netflix commit to a season—maybe eight to ten episodes—whereas broadcast organizations like ABC commit to a pilot and then possibly a season. Book IP became important to them because they could see how everything will come together."

Another major insight was that books continue to appeal to producers, but they are most enticing in the form of a series, with a strong lead character or set of characters who can return in numerous seasons and become, in essence, a franchise of their own.

To conclude the day, Vivian Tu (l.), author of Rich AF, advised young people in publishing on how to handle their finances and optimize their publishing earnings.