2024 Predictions for the Publishing Industry

I started working on this post over the Christmas break, but then things got so busy that I never got around to writing anything more than the section headings. The year is still young, though, so I figured it was worth posting it anyway, even if only as a list of bullet points.

  • The courts will side against authors and publishers, in favor of OpenAI and generative artificial intelligence.
  • Amazon will use self-published content to create an LLM or other generative artificial intelligence.
  • We will not see an AI-assisted novel break out and become a bestseller this year…
  • …but we will see generative AI used to power a new book recommendation engine that will outperform everything currently out there.
  • Censorship and book banning will accelerate and become more flagrant.
  • The gap between bestsellers and midlisters will grow.
  • Book sales overall will decline, unless a new pandemic is declared.
  • A surprising number of authors will find success with their online stores, though we probably won’t hear about that.
  • The long, slow decline of Amazon’s prominence in the book industry will become a talking point.
  • By the end of the year, AI-assisted stories will garner public interest as more than just a novelty.

By Joe Vasicek

Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.

2 comments

    1. Book sales got a huge shot in the arm from the lockdowns, since a lot of people were bored at home and decided to get into reading. But that’s been wearing off, and as it does, I think it will revert to the previous trend, which is a long, slow decline in reading (at least by the tradpub metrics).

      I have a theory that as genres grow, the gap between the bestsellers and the midlisters within that genre narrows, while as the genre shrinks or calcifies, the gap between the bestsellers widens until there are only one or two household names that are synonymous with it. A good example of this is westerns and Louis L’Amour. I wonder if the same thing is playing out with Brandon Sanderson and epic fantasy. In general, I think the gap between bestsellers and midlisters will widen, but some younger genres like litRPG and progression fantasy will probably buck this trend.

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