IP Picksđ: Taylor Swift's 'Errors Tour' Book
â A 'Bonfire of the Vanities' for the 2020s and the return of a YA star
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Before we jump into this weekâs picks, I wanted to share two interesting stories about the state of the book business . . .
â˘Taylor Swiftâs Flex Doesnât Break the Biz: Publishers and booksellers have been shut out of one of the biggest book launches of the decade thanks to Taylor Swiftâs decision to self-publish her book about the blockbuster Eras Tour and sell it exclusively at Target. The coffee-table tome dropped on Black Friday, and after just a few days it had already sold 814,000 copies! For comparison, thatâs 5K more books than Colleen Hoover sold in the first week with It Starts With Us in 2022. And itâs just 2K less than the debut-week record held by Barack Obamaâs 2020 memoir, A Promised Land.
There was a lot of anxiety within the industry about Swift disrupting the publishing business by creating a new sales model. But I donât think the results bear that out. Yes, some publisher lost out on a big seller this holiday season. And yes, indie bookstores (as well as giants like Barnes & Noble) probably didnât love seeing a massive number of direct sales slip through their fingers. Still, Swift is a unicorn. With the possible exception of BeyoncĂŠ, itâs not likely that others will be able to match whatâs sheâs done. Plus, who knows how many copies Swift didnât sell by going exclusively with Target, a retailer thatâs struggling?
Beyond that, Swiftâs decision to bypass the traditional route actually underscored some of the positives of going with a traditional publisher. Many fans have been complaining about mistakes in the book â some wags are calling it âThe Errors Tour Bookâ â ranging from typos to grammatical mistakes to blurry photos. A traditional publisher would have caught these problems. Putting out a book is a is a heavy lift that requires proofreaders, copy editors, layout artists and a whole host of others. As Swift is quickly discovering, amping up that infrastructure for one book isnât cost-effective, even if you have the resources. What is the takeaway from all of this? Well, the publishing biz may have lost this one battle, but the war is far from decided.
â˘BookTok Giveth, BookTok Taketh Away: One of the big publishing stories of 2024 was the growing influence of BookTok. Itâs helped push certain authors and titles up the rungs of the sales charts â Exhibit A: Colleen Hoover â and itâs also been a big factor in the romantasy boom. But that power can be a double-edged sword as U.K.-based bookseller Waterstones discovered this week when it crowned Asako Yuzukiâs Japanese mystery novel Butter as its book of the year. BookTok did not care for that choice (to put it mildly) and the backlash was loud and, ahem, swift.
On to this week's picks, which feature everything from an academic history that could be the basis for an epic biopic of an overlooked figure to the first new novel in a decade from a beloved YA star.
The full lineup:
A procedural about an infamous robbery as told by the FBIâs lead investigator on the case
An epic biopic about a controversial hero who liberated his country from foreign rule
A murder mystery set on a cruise ship
A magical-realist coming-of-age story about three siblings who were abandoned by their father and the mysterious girl who drops into their life and helps them heal
A class-warfare drama in the vein of The Bonfire of the Vanities
