Tag Archives: book publishing

A simple way to refute any allegation of AI use? Paper trail, baby

Not so long ago, as publishing companies were feeding manuscripts into AI programs to determine if AI was used to write the manuscripts – not surprisingly, in some cases, the AI came up with a “positive for AI” diagnosis, strangely enough often in the case of first-time POC authors – the discourse among writers was how to prepare to defend yourself in case of AI allegations.

“Save your drafts,” the simple response came. Each of the four or five or 10 times you wrote a new draft, each one was proof that it was your hand that crafted the writing.

But what if you don’t draft?

Maybe it’s because of my “this must be written now” practice of writing for newspapers, I don’t draft, at least in the sense of rewriting a stem to stern version of a work several times.

NOTE ADDED AFTER POSTING: I do go over and over everything I write, usually by rereading what I’ve written previously to put myself in the frame of mind to write anew. Does this count as drafting? Dunno.

I do have my outline for my first (and most recently published) novel SEVEN ANGELS, as seen above, dated from June 2019, saved in the SEVEN ANGELS folder on my MacBook Pro.

But is there a more certain, beyond subterfuge, way of proving that a book was written in increments, day by day, for months?

I didn’t realize at the time that I was building proof that I’d written SEVEN ANGELS – really, all my books and even many short stories and nonfiction articles – as I wrote it.

It’s long been my practice to email to myself the latest version of any book as I write another chapter or, on a less productive day, another set of paragraphs. Hell, even new sentences.

In my email, I’ve got the latest version of whatever I’m writing, every day, as I’ve written it.

There’s some added assuredness that could provide a time frame for my writing: social media.

Again, coming from the newspaper business, I’ve always been pretty transparent with my writing. So on Twitter, going as far back as 2009, and more recently Bluesky, I’ll often note on social media what I’ve working on. It’s an incremental timeline, not quite as explicit as the daily email to myself, but pretty close.

Not to mention notes to myself in physical notebooks, which I’ve been using since even before I began writing novels in 2019.

So if the thought of creating a “paper trail” of drafts is intimidating to any writer, I’d suggest emailing yourself your latest version. It’s a good indication that you’ve been working on a project.

It has the added bonus of backing up your work in case your computer decides to jump off a cliff.

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.

‘Nobody knows anything’ – and for writers, that’s both good and bad, as short stories are king and money talks

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That chart there? That’s the definitions that the writing and industry newsletter Publishers Marketplace uses to gauge its reporting on the latest sales of manuscripts to publishing houses. PM reminds us once a week the guidelines for when it refers to a “nice deal” or a significant or major one.

So to disprove writer William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” I quote in the headline – a simplification of Goldman’s sentiments in his 1983 memoir ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE – we know two things: Publishers Marketplace means it when they say a major deal is a major deal and if you ever see my name reported next to the phrase “major deal,” I can tell you that’s the last time you will hear from me other than occasional dispatches from my fortified writing tower.

The talk of the day in writing circles is a New York Times story titled, “Writers are making millions selling short stories to Hollywood,” and the story is, in effect, a trend story about how a few writers have had short stories optioned by producers for movies and TV adaptation – and in some cases, the stories haven’t even been published yet.

(I’m not going to link to the story, because my disgust with how the Times has sold its soul to the worst elements of our political life continues, but you can find a gift link to it, I’m sure, on social media. That’s what I did. Be aware that if you want to read the story, you’ll have to jump through a bunch of hoops, including giving the NYT your email address.)

This is the subhead of the NYT story and it really tells you everything you need to know: Publishers generally don’t race to acquire story collections these days, but studios appear eager to shell out for unpublished short works. They give a few examples.

It reminds me of this story I did a few weeks ago for CrimeReads: 7 crime writers talk about novels and short stories and what they love writing most

I’ll link to my CrimeReads piece at the end of this post.

The other piece that writers are talking about today is a GQ article, Will Books Survive? 34 Insiders, Experts, and Icons on the State of Literature in an Age of Uncertainty.

The article is strong from the start:

Something in the literary world isn’t adding up. On the surface, the numbers aren’t looking good. If you’re an American, there’s a roughly 38% chance you’ll read a novel or short story this year. If you’re an American man, that number slips to 28%. By most metrics, it’s a hard time for literature.

And yet.

There’s an undeniable energy bubbling up in New York, Los Angeles, London, and elsewhere. Readings are “sexy” now, supposedly, and a medley of exciting new publications have popped up, both online and in print. Ben Lerner and Emma Cline returned this year, and we’ve been graced with the strongest crop of debut novels in recent memory, from Caro Claire Burke’s culture-conquering Yesteryear to the jagged edges of Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs to the vibrant energy of Sufiyaan Salam’s Wimmy Road Boyz. People spent the summer reading The Odyssey and crashing The London Review of Books website to read discourse about The Odyssey. So it can’t be all bad, right?

It’s a lengthy State of Books 2026 and worth reading. Here’s a link.

Remember I said the other day that everybody is picking their best books of the year? Here’s the Publishers Weekly list.

My CrimeReads story talking to seven crime writers about what they prefer, novels or short stories:

7 crime writers talk about novels and short stories and what they love writing most

It’s a Friday free-for-all i.e. emptying out my inbox

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It’s Friday – it is Friday, right? – and let’s escape the ugly realities of the real world by sharing some quick-hit news reports about books and publishing, shall we?

As Carl Kolchak would say …

Item: To paraphrase the old joke, I don’t get Kindle Unlimited here. I see it, but I don’t get it. (Sad trombone sound.) Writer friends are on it and another writer friend explained to me that it works by offering some small amount of renumeration for each page of a book read. So in the oddest move since the then-executives of HBO renamed the streaming arm of HBO as Max before changing it back to HBO Max, Amazon in its very puzzling and unlikely decision has renamed Kindle Unlimited as KindlePlus, or Kindle+. No we don’t know why.

Item: Everybody is naming their best books of the year. Even though it’s still October. And yes, I know that all the major releases between now and December 31 are already in the hands of said tastemakers and arbiters of the best of the year. One reason might be that they want to get people prepared to buy books for the holiday season. Maybe the idea is to find ten books that have as much heat about them as Marlon James’ THE DISAPPEARERS.

Item: Eddie Muller, knowledge-laden host of the indispensable Noir Alley on the indispensable TCM, has scored a three-book deal, Publisher’s Marketplace reports. Muller, who has previously authored books, has a contract with Running Press (working with Turner Classic Movies) to publish three crime novels, THE DISTANCE, SHADOW BOXER and BIG LEFT HOOK. I have no qualms with Muller getting this contract, but it emphasizes that celebrity and a national platform are not drawbacks to getting books published.

Item: Here’s a link to an exhaustive survey about the business of indie writing and publishing by William Duryea and his site Beyond Heat Death. It’s long and I haven’t read it yet but I’ve already bookmarked it and I’m ready for some insights.

Item: Here’s another link, this one to a piece on literary scams and why writers are perfect targets. You might remember that I wrote recently about how I – like most writers online – was targeted by a scammer. Mine was pretending to be author Freida McFadden.

Item: Romantasy. Some writers and readers love it. Others loathe it. Here’s a Goodreads wrapup of the genre right now.

Finally, here’s a new little note that I’m going to include with each of these posts, noting who the hell I am. I’m including it because readership on this page is steadily increasing and I figure it doesn’t hurt to explain who you’re reading.

Too many books published? Maybe, but there’s disagreement on the numbers

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Are too many books published every year? Those of us who love books might be tempted to say no. Those of us who write books might be tempted to say yes, if only because it means more competition for every reader.

And there’s disagreement on how many books are actually being published.

In his always-readable newsletter “Dear Head of Mine,” publishing industry figure Sean Delone asks, “Are too many books published?” and cites some numbers that, while large, take the wind out of much, much higher numbers cited by some sources.

Before I give you Delone’s numbers, consider these from Berrett-Koehler Publishers, which produces professional development books. In a post from April, Steven Piersanti, senior editor of Berrett-Koehler, throws out some alarming numbers in the post “Ten Awful Truths About Book Publishing”:

The number of books being published every year has exploded. According to the latest Bowker data (Publishers Weekly, March 23, 2026), 4.2 million books were published in 2025 in the United States. This is the number of titles that received an ISBN number from Bowker. And here is the truly shocking figure: the number of new titles published each year is 15 times greater than it was 20 years ago. According to Bowker, just 282,500 new titles were published in the U.S. in 2005 (Bowker Report, April 14, 2010). The number of traditionally published titles has more than doubled from 2005 to 2025, to 642,242. But the great growth has been in self-published titles, which account for 3.5 million of the 4.2 million titles published in 2025.

(I should note that I obtained 10 ISBNs from Bowker a couple of years ago and haven’t yet published 10 books, but that’s the benchmark cited as significant by Publishers Weekly.)

Piersanti goes on to note some fascinating figures but I won’t simply regurgitate them all now. I’ll post the link to his piece at the end of those post.

Delone cites significantly lower numbers. (Again, his newsletter is very worthwhile reading and you should subscribe.)

There’s an oft quoted statistic in the book world that millions of new books are published each year (the link says 4.2 million in 2025). Conservative estimates put the number of new books published in the US in the healthy 10,000s, that’s even if you just count the five major publishers. This, we know from the inside of the industry, is a nonsense number. A number that gets people to shout, “There are too many books!”. The truth is that a book editor, reviewer, or avid consumer intuitively knows the actual number of published books that matter, that are competing for their attention, is much smaller.

This is not to denigrate books whose sales are in the double or triple digits. In the year 2026, it should be obvious that financial success does not equal quality, nor intelligence, nor competency. Nor is money what we should rely upon as a scorekeeper for “success.” Book sales are, similarly, not a scoreboard that tells you which books are good and which are bad. Still, we must be reasonable and place the cut off for what books matter to the majority of readers. Let’s not get bogged down in methodology here, but the real number of books— if you cut off all the ones that have very small, specialized audiences—is about 3,000-6,000 new books a year across adult fiction and nonfiction. That’s still a lot of books! Yet, it is a number that your arms fit around, that’s a bit more fathomable than 1,000,000 or 50,000.

Even with 3,000-6,000 new books, discovery is exceedingly difficult. A lot of focus goes to the big bestsellers and then this creates a self-perpetuating gravity of reader recommendations that’s hard to pierce through, a feast or famine dynamic we’ve talked about before at Dear Head of Mine. We are entering the season when this becomes even more pronounced. Book publishing follows the standard retail seasonality of western civilization, so as we approach the fall season—known by retailers simply as the Christmas season—we expect the new releases, reviews, and shelf space to be focused primarily on big known-quantity bestsellers.

Delone goes on to talk about the publishing industry “midlist,” the neither-bestsellers and neither-ignored books, the latter well above the trees that fall in the forest with no one around.

Both sets of numbers spring from that same Publishers Weekly number, although the two different writers arrive at different “net” numbers.

So who to believe? Which set of numbers are accurate, 4 million-plus or 6,000?

It doesn’t really matter. As Delone notes, 6,000 is still a lot of books. For readers, it can make it difficult to cut through the clutter and find your next favorite read. For writers, that clutter is still there and you’re competing with it for readers, attention, sales and space on shelves.

I’m not going to propose a solution here. Ultimately, I do think publicity helps. My novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS wouldn’t have sold even the modest numbers they have without my efforts to publicize them and the tremendous help of booksellers, libraries, friends, family and fellow authors who help get the the very existence of the books out there. As much or little difference as social media makes, for example, I think word of mouth helps more.

If you’re a reader, the numbers can look daunting or delightful. I know for sure that even if I never buy another book, I’ll never run out of things to read. If you’re a writer, the thought of competing with every other book is intimidating or even disheartening.

For writers, in the midst of all that uncertainty, I can say only this: keep writing. You never know if the story or book you’re writing will connect with a reader, who will find momentary amusement, solid entertainment or even enlightenment from your work. Even if the reader has to find it from among more than four million other books or “only” 6,000.

(Photo at the top of this post from the Librarianologist Facebook page.)

Here’s a link to the “10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing” post:

https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publishing?shem=aimgspe,

Which book genre is stuggling now? Nonfiction books.

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Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman probably wishes he’d monetized his famous phrase, “Nobody knows anything,” because while Goldman (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “All the President’s Men,” “The Princess Bride”) painted a wide swath with that statement, he’s surely as correct as correct can be. If we’ve learned nothing from watching movies, books, politics and, well, every damn thing, in the past decade, it’s that uncertainty is the norm.

I’m enjoying paying more attention to the publishing industry lately as I’m doing some editing for Constellate Publishing and working on three – count ’em – three novels. I get a lot of insights from the several-times-daily email from Publishers Marketplace and I’m enjoying learning which books and genres are going to be populating bookstore shelves in a year’s time.

But the more information I have, the more I need. I’ve got a William Goldman-level lack of knowing anything about the book industry and I’m trying to remedy it.

So today I was fascinated with a new piece by editor Sean Delone – link at the end of this post – in which he looks at some trends in publishing, specifically about non-fiction book publishing.

Before I get into details, here’s a picture I just took of one of my several shelves of non-fiction books, very specifically in this case books about movies, TV and entertainment, but we’ve accumulated hundreds of non-fiction books in the past few decades. Pictured above, my copy of Denis Gifford’s “A Pictorial History of Horror Movies” was published in the early 1970s. My copy was published around 1974 and it’s not even the oldest non-fiction book in the house.

It’s accurate to say that I love non-fiction books, history or news or photography or films or Saturday morning cartoons or whatever, and while I don’t buy as many as I used to – I think my latest might be “TCM Underground,” the cult films book released right before TCM canceled the Saturday night/Sunday morning program – but while dozens of boxes of fiction going back to the 1960s are still stored in boxes here, our non-fiction books are mostly but not entirely displayed. Yeah, I love ’em.

And there’s no doubt that online sites have decimated the need for nonfiction magazines and books. Why buy an authoritative book when you can look something up on some possibly totally erroneous online site?

Anyway, Delone’s article, “The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing,” carried disheartening news.

The gist of it:

First, the entire industry boomed in Covid—writing is a hobby and reading for pleasure is, too—and has trudged along as it usually does, staying flat, growing a little over the years since 2020. But for the past decade the market for nonfiction has slowly collapsed. What has happened in the last ten years1 is that the overall industry has grown modestly, but fiction and nonfiction have basically flipped positions. In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago.

Delone emphasizes he’s not writing an Atlantic-style “end of reading, end of books” essay. If you remember, that one alarmed at lot of writers, editors, publishers and readers a while back.

Delone notes that media – which used to be a few big newspaper book review sections and late-night talk shows, where even a Midwestern rube like me could see important authors interviewed by Johnny Carson – is much more decentralized than it used to be and there’s some emphasis placed on book influencers and book accounts on social media. (I follow a bunch of them, for enjoyment more than education, but information nonetheless.)

But he also notes a colossal fall-off in demand for the kind of information we formerly turned to non-fiction books for:

No amount of platform is going to change that interest across the board in nonfiction from celebrities down to science has been slowly disappearing. Even if nonfiction is stable and more predictable than fiction in the abstract, it’s by far worth taking the risk on an unknown novelist if the return is potentially 4x as much. Let’s bring the nonfiction collapse into current day context. Two weeks ago, the entire hardcover nonfiction bestseller list sold 42,000 copies, whereas just the top two bestselling fiction hardcovers the same week—The Calamity Club in its 15th week on-sale and Yesteryear in its 19th week on-sale—sold 52,000 copies. It’s not inconceivable that on the right week, one fiction hardcover with first week sales could outsell the entirety of the hardcover nonfiction bestseller list.

Welp, as the young people used to say.

Want another gulp moment?

The tide going out on nonfiction sales and reading is entirely reshaping the power balance in the industry. Not overnight, but slowly, the money is flowing to fiction and away from nonfiction. It is causing quite a scramble. Fiction is unpredictable, it requires taste, it does not favor the solid metrics or predictability which, if you are running a publishing company, are much more preferable (businesses tend to prefer predictable growth and low volatility or at least high growth alongside high volatility). Fiction is also an easier category for the big publishers to capture and corner the market on. For instance, a handful of talent agencies represent nearly all A-list actors, and therefore a significant supply of big nonfiction bestsellers. The capture in supply carries over to publishers—when is the last time a big celebrity has published a huge bestseller with an indie press?

Delone has a lot of interesting thoughts on the industry. You can find some very thought-provoking posts here:

https://dearheadofmine.substack.com/p/the-nonfiction-book-market-is-collapsing?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Together, we can heal the Canada-US divide! Buy each other’s books!

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I always enjoy when friends and readers note on social media they’ve received a copy of one of my books, like the new one, SEVEN ANGELS, but I don’t usually post about it here.

Today, I am, because my friend Karen Grose, a rightfully proud Canadian author of several bestselling novels like ALL JUNE LEFT BEHIND and FLAT OUT LIES as well as WHAT WE KEEP SILENT, which is near the top of my Towering To Be Read Stack, posted on social media last night that she’d finallly received a copy of my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS.

Earlier this week, I posted here about my Canadian writer friend, who I’d been talking to for months about why Amazon Canada kept delaying delivery of my book that she’d ordered. I was stumped. Karen was stumped.

Maybe all it took was for me to post about it here, because Karen received the book something like the day after I posted about the delay. I’m certain the two are related, right?

Anyway, I told Karen that I hope she enjoys the book – now that she finally received it – and I’m looking forward to reading hers.

Karen’s site:

Karen Grose

To that Texas politician: You can have my books when you pry them … well, you know the rest

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If I were to turn this space into a full reporting of every assault on books and literacy and writing and publishing and privacy and freedom of choice, I’d never get anything done. The folks at Book Riot – that’s their image above – are doing a good job of keeping track of every petty tyrant’s ambitions to tell you what you can and can’t read.

But I will note this: In a month of frustration and anger at the attack on books and our freedom – and you bet your ass those two are connected – by everything from greedy AI companies (who need to go broke and out of business sooner rather than later, please and thank you) and petty tinpot wannabe dictators over their own little fiefdoms, there’s little that has presented as so ignorant and intolerant as “We’re coming for the books,” uttered recently by repugnant Republican Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Here’s how the Texas Tribune reported it on August 19:

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Wednesday vowed to pass legislation punishing public schools that do not remove graphic books from their shelves by knocking them down a notch in the state’s annual school performance ratings, which the state uses to seize control of underperforming districts.

Flanked by easels displaying printed covers of books he found obscene, the lieutenant governor said school boards and administrators have not been following a 2025 law aimed at weeding out lewd books from the shelves in Texas’ more than 9,000 campuses attended by some 5.5 million schoolchildren.

“It’s the law and we expect you to follow the law. So we’re coming for the books,” Patrick said during a news conference at the Texas Capitol. “We ask that you do it on your own and remove these books.”

The law from last year, Senate Bill 13, granted school boards the authority to approve and remove books based on complaints they receive, such as those from parents and activist groups. Before, those powers largely belonged to school librarians. But Patrick said an overwhelming majority of school boards have not taken any action, as the law nears one year in effect.

Patrick is no stranger to controversy over his ignorant, intolerant and politically questionable acts. I’ll leave it to more comprehensive online sources to tell you about that.

Book Riot notes that this is “manufactured panic over the content of books in school libraries,” and there’s certainly some head-shaking in noting that Patrick was conducting a publicity stunt for his podcast. The far-right activist/busybody who stood on stage with him was his next podcast guest and she’s put together a list of 2,200 “dirty books” that Patrick is touting as the state’s unofficial list of books that will get school libraries in trouble.

All of you know this space has become increasingly noisy lately regarding authoritarian-wannabe and oligarchs’ attacks on books and writing and publishing and privacy and freedom, because please have no doubt that anytime a politician and would-be authoritarian wants to ban books in school libraries, what they really want to do is control every aspect of your life, from your reading material to who you marry and how and when you reproduce.

Huge sweeping generalization there? I’m not gonna go the easy route and compare these wannabe dictator moves to the best-known authoritarian movement of the 20th century, But that’s what’s at work here.

So to cop a phrase from the old gun lobby bumperstickers, “You can have my books when you pry them out of my cold, dead fingers.”

As Kelly Jensen so ably put it in that Book Riot piece:

If laws like SB 13 are about local control, then why does one partisan activist brag about having been engaged in censorship attempts at 163 schools where she doesn’t have a student or pay taxes toward? Why does one partisan activist get to decide which 2,200 books are illegal in Texas?

This isn’t about local control. It’s about Republican control of anything and everything, down to local availability of books.

Academic publishers have set some guidelines about AI use and, well, it’s a start

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I like writing about the scourge of generative AI in the arts – obviously – and it seems like there’s new news almost every day.

I’ll make this quick:

In the new Publishers Lunch is a report on how some publishers have developed guidelines and methods of screening papers and books for AI use. (You’ll recall that the suspicion of AI has roiled the mainstream publishing industry lately, causing book deals to be canceled and, possibly, author careers to be stymied.)

Academic publishers cited in today’s Publishers Lunch have tried to come up with a constructive method of screening works submitted to them for use of AI. That’s because like a lot of publishing, academic publishers are being swamped with submissions of AI or AI-assisted slop.

The guidelines, which build on the use of AI-detection tools, set thresholds for when AI use is detected.

Some of the publishers have established four guidelines:

Assisted – AI helped you brainstorm or research but the writing is yours. Meaning, if you asked AI to find the relevant information for you and then you read those source materials and wrote from them, that’s a mechanical assist. It’s just AI working as a search engine.
Collaborated – AI drafted parts while you rewrote, verified, and made it your own. Meaning, if the facts, ideas, etc. came out of the AI model itself (e.g. you asked it explain something to you) and wrote from its answer instead of the source materials, that is AI collaboration and should be disclosed.
Generated & reviewed – AI produced the artifact, but you read every line, checked the facts, and stand behind it. To be clear, you hold responsibility for its integrity and accuracy.
Generated & unreviewed – AI made it and you didn’t really check. This is not acceptable AI use for PUP staff ever: internal, external or under any circumstance.

Publishers Lunch says that for at least one publisher, if a submitted work meets the last two guidelines, it’s rejected. That’s because that particular publisher correctly argues that the use of that much AI couldn’t be copyright-able because, of course, AI is based on the work of others.

I’m skeptical, but at least somebody is setting some guidelines somewhere.

(Image at the top of this post is from the wonderful, funny AppleTV Plus series MURDERBOT, based on the series of novels by THE MURDERBOT DIARIES by Martha Wells.)

Trend chasing? So many hockey romance novels … most of them straight, though. How long will this trend continue?

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Sooo many horny hockey players. And fans.

Barely a day goes by that I don’t open Publishers Lunch and see yet another book deal for a hockey romance.

This is, of course, in the wake of the success of “Heated Rivalry,” the Canadian sports romance series about two hockey players who have an ongoing romantic and sexual relationship while playing on opposing teams. The series got a ton of views and a ton of publicity when it aired on streaming a few months ago.

It’s been interesting to see the book industry’s response to the popularity of the series, which is itself based on one book in a series called GAME CHANGERS written by Rachel Reid.

Oddly – or probably not oddly – of the half-a-dozen hockey romance books I’ve seen announced in the two or three months I’ve been subscribing to Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace, most of the new novels are straight romance as opposed to gay romance like the popular streaming series.

The latest book to win a contract, the one I saw today, is, as Publishers Lunch reported:

Sunday Times-bestselling author Freya Marske’s THE OFFSEASON, the author’s first contemporary queer sports romance, pitched as for fans of HEATED RIVALRY and YURI ON ICE, in which a former figure skater who walked away from the sport returns home, where reconnecting with his infuriatingly gorgeous childhood rival, now the current national champion, reignites his passion for the ice—and more, to Ruoxi Chen at Putnam, in a two-book deal, for publication in summer 2027.

For all I know, each of the novels I’ve seen announced were in the works for years and are getting publishing contracts only now, after HEATED RIVALRY has made the subject popular for mass audiences.

It’s like another genre of books that I’m seeing announced regularly, the Western.

Who’ll get published first? Who will best meet the demands of readers? Will a half-dozen hockey romance books all be successful or will some corner the market? Or will each one inspire readers to seek out more?

After all, romantasy books – the trend, that is, not just the genre – kicked off somewhere and they’re still going strong.

No time to sleep! Constellate Publishing has a plan for months and months ahead

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My friend Jill Blocker and I had our first Constellate Publishing meeting in a few weeks this morning. We’ve been busy with Indiana book talks and signings in support of our new novels HAPPILY AFTER EVER and SEVEN ANGELS, and then Jill went on to book events in her longtime town of Seattle as well as New York City and her home base in Zurich.

Today we had our usual Monday morning meeting and talked about what we’ve got on our Constellate agenda for the next few months.

I won’t get into specifics as to titles and authors, but we’ll be:

Editing a manuscript that’s in our 2027 release schedule.

Choosing at least one more MS to edit, publish and market from among submissions to us.

Planning e-book editions of our books and others.

And working toward publication of my novel GHOST SHOW, which I’ve written about here recently.

Jill’s next project is one that absolutely tickles me because it’s so perfect for her. I can’t wait until she tells you about it.

And I’ve got two novels to write, including what I hope will be a surprising spin on SEVEN ANGELS.

Sleep? Never heard of it.

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