It is always good to be aware of the dynamics of the industry you represent, so I try not to miss the annual emails on main publishing trends that come with my subscriptions to various online resources for authors. In 2018, the major authors’ resource authorspublish.com has been discussing the following tendencies in the publishing industry:

1. The euphoria of self-publishing is wearing off ;

2. Independent publishers are becoming more likely to be closed to unsolicited submissions;

3. There are fewer eBook-only publishers (According to authorspublish.com, “A number of eBook-only publishers have closed this year. Others that have focused on eBooks only are now publishing print versions as well.”);

4. More literary journals are charging reading fees;

5. More prestigious literary journals are charging reading fees;

6. More literary journals are having free submission options;

7. Presses have no time to send rejections;

8. Print journals are becoming rarer and rarer;

9. Publishers are consolidating;

10. More small manuscript presses are using Submittable. 

These trends were kind of anticipated by experts, but now we have an ‘official’ confirmation that the changes are rue, which allows every author to make better conclusions about their personal writing and publishing strategies for 2019.

These facts, however, cannot provide a full and objective picture of the industry dynamics without another piece of information–on  international bestsellers lists for fiction books, published in a few European countries (France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) in English. After studying the lists provided in Nina Sabak’s article at publishingtrends.com and a few other similar resources, outlining current publishing trends in Russia, Poland and Germany, I came up with some interesting conclusions:

1. There is an internationally developing tendency to print and sell mainly the books of certain genres: mainly mysteries, thrillers, then some fantasy books and a bit of speculative prose, while other popular genres (like romance) are not printed in large quantities in Europe;
2. It is possible that the major publishers are taking steps toward printing mainly the bestsellers that can be regarded as ‘universally’ accepted pieces of reading and will more certainly be purchased as gifts (to be placed on a bookshelf and read again and again) rather than as pocket editions. This fact confirms that, due to the  quickly developing attitude to printed books as souvenirs rather than information (knowledge) carriers, the publishers all over the world tend to print a limited variety of the most popular bestsellers (innthe most popular genres), while the rest of the books tend to be distributed as e-books.

I also believe that in the nearest years, a new tendency to write shorter fiction books will continue to develop. This conclusion does not follow from the above mentioned articles, but the general tendencies listed here indirectly confirm such possibility.

Any way, the changes are coming tha they are inevitable. Let us see what changes the coming year is going to bring to the publishing industry. And now, just look at the beautiful picture below — very probably, for the last time, because as of now, more and more people prefer to have a kindle device or a phone in their hands while reading.