This year’s US Book Show highlighted key practical topics such as career development and networking, book-to-screen, audience development and marketing, backlist promotion, audio, and all things AI.

By Erin L. Cox and Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Earlier this week, Publishers Weekly hosted the annual US Book Show in New York City.

This year’s show had a little something for everyone, with panels hosted by #BookTok creators on how best to take advantage of that audience, a focus on publishers building relationships directly with readers, and even changing the way we think of book discovery through a practical panel on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help publishers get their books cited by AI agents. The overarching theme of the program was to focus on practical ways to help publishers with their day-to-day business.

Two topics that continue to engage audiences worldwide which were also featured at the US Book Show were AI and audio.

The topic of AI was sprinkled in panel discussions throughout the day, starting with “CEOs in Conversation” at the top of the show where Madeline McIntosh, Cofounder, CEO, and Publisher, Authors Equity; Dominique Raccah, CEO and Publisher, Sourcebooks; and David Shelley, CEO, Hachette Book Group each highlighted that AI is here to stay and the ways they were each implementing it into their businesses.

They also discussed how they are focusing on the authenticity of published works after a book was recently pulled from Hachette’s catalog for questions around the extent of AI usage. While many AI detection products exist, Raccah noted that she didn’t find them to be reliable.

Where AI does play a simpler role in the industry is helping with time-consuming manual tasks such as updating websites, processing submissions, an initial edit of a book, as well as book marketing and discovery as the “AI Lunch Summit: Superabundance and Superdiscoverability” noted.

Despite the benefits the panelists described, the industry may continue to be hesitant to implement these tools as the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) AI Survey, which Publishing Perspectives reported on in April, seemed to indicate. Many users still show “significant concerns” in using the technology

Scaling Audio Globally

On the “Beyond Borders: Scaling Audio Stories for a Global Audience,” Publishers Weekly’s senior news and international editor Ed Nawotka spoke to Amanda D’Acierno, President, Penguin Random House Audio Global; Lee Jarit, Global Head of Publisher and Partner Relations, Audible; and Madeline Shue, Head of Publisher Partnerships, ElevenLabs to show how each company is helping to expand into new countries and languages

In March at the London Book Fair, Audible CEO Bob Carrigan announced the company’s plans to expand their service to 11 new international markets. This week, Jarit seemed to indicate that was just the beginning of Audible’s growth. D’Acierno seconded PRH’s drive to expand the offerings of their audiobooks into new countries but also new languages and new styles of recording (multicast) citing the significant gap between print and audio content in many markets and growing audience demand.

Notably, D’Acierno said that even though multicast recordings are becoming popular, there is still demand for the single voice recording, noting that both types of recording the Harry Potter series are currently on the New York Times bestseller list. 

As Publishing Perspectives previously reported, ElevenLabs “is positioning itself not as a media company, but as a foundational voice-technology layer for global enterprise,” which Shue illustrated on the panel. Shue highlighted many of the ways ElevenLabs is already working with publishers using their text-to-speech models to help them scale their business, expand to new markets, or even build a market where there wasn’t one before. While Shue noted that there is still some room to improve, they can support 80 languages.

Data-driven vs. Data-informed

One key panel which Guy attended was standing room only, signifying the importance of how publishers use the sales and audience data to inform important acquisition, marketing, and sales plans. His report is below.

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“With social media and online retail, publishers have more opportunities than ever to collect data about who’s purchasing, and why they’re purchasing.”

Moderating “The Data-Driven Publisher: Turning Insights into Hits” panel discussion, The Bottom Line’s Jane Friedman set the stage with a provocative question that consumer marketers in other industries have been wrestling with for nearly two decades: “At what point do we have too much information, and we have to separate the signal from the noise?”

The expert panel representing trade publishers of all sizes and different editorial approaches ultimately agreed on two things: it’s better to be data-informed than data-driven, and human insight remains a competitive advantage for all publishers.

Reflecting on his 17-year career with Bookscan, “encourag[ing] publishers to start using data as part of their process of decision-making,” David Walter had some good news and bad news for the standing-room-only audience in attendance.

The good news: “Everyone’s on board. Everyone wants to use data.” The bad news: “If everyone has the same data… potentially putting AI into that process, you may end up with a vanilla output.”

Grand Central Publishing’s Ben Sevier explained that “understanding consumers is a core part of Hachette’s mission” and they leverage Circana data and internal sales data, “looking for signals that identify an over-published category, or a hole in the market.”

Sourcebooks’ Molly Waxman expanded further, noting “certain data informs what’s in the book. Certain data informs what’s outside of the book. And other data informs where we place the book, and who we put it in front of.” She also clarified that being “data-centric” means being “reader-centric.”

The Stable Book Group’s Keith Riegert, a second-generation publisher, went the deepest, explaining how Bookscan data initially helped evolve his father’s “Moneyball” approach at Ulysses Press, where they built a longitudinal database that let them “look at thousands and thousands of titles every week, across time… What subjects are moving, what subjects are rising and decaying.”

Since Bookscan data has always been a lagging (and limited) indicator, they added other sources, including search and audience data, allowing them to “cast a wide net, looking at multiple variables over time so you can actually see the trends.”

Their data-driven, qualitative research approach helped them identify niche categories with reader demand that weren’t on most other publishers’ radars for nearly 15 years, “but it was always an arbitrage opportunity” that faded as data became a lot more accessible. “Everyone is trying to optimize for the same signals, chasing the same trends.”

Riegert concluded on a somber but optimistic note, explaining “We are not a data-driven publishing company anymore; we are data-informed, but we consider that data to be somewhat dangerous if you’re going to act on it blindly… Data is not going to completely solve everything for you; there has to be a human creative touch to it. The Oakland A’s have still not won the World Series, because everybody optimized to the same data and it all canceled out.”

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the former chief content & marketing officer for LibraryPass; project lead for Panorama Project; publisher & marketing director for Writer’s Digest; director, content strategy & audience development for Library Journal, School Library Journal, and The Horn Book; and founding director of programming & business development for the original Digital Book World. He’s also a former poet, occasional journalist, and active blogger.