Nathan Bransford | Writing, Book Editing, Publishing

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Scholastic

The best book covers of 2025 (This week in books)

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This week! Books! A day late! The 173 Best Book Covers of 2025 – Emily Temple, Lit Hub – Always one of my favorite features of the year! The winner is an absolute stunner. Sophie Kinsella, ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’ Author, Dies at 55 – Sopan Deb, New York Times – The tremendously influential Madeleine […]

An inside look at rampant publishing scams (This week in books)

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This week! Books! ‘Our Goal Is to Get Their Money’: Inside a Firm Charged With Scamming Writers for Millions – Brent Crane, Bloomberg (gift link) – A well-reported and wrenching look into rampant scams preying on authors. One reason so many of the scams originate in the Philippines is because some of the scammers cut […]

Has your book been pirated by Meta? (This week in books)

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This week! Books! Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Meta allegedly pirated millions of books to train its A.I. via Library Genesis, or LibGen, a piracy library. The Atlantic created a searchable tool to see if your book(s) are available on LibGen, with the caveat that this means your book could have been used to train A.I. They […]

RIP Mike Shatzkin (This week in books)

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What a week. We lost a really wonderful person this week as my favorite publishing sage Mike Shatzkin passed away yesterday at the age of 77. Mike knew more about the industry and publishing history than just about anyone (along with Robert Riger, he literally wrote the book about it), and he was incredibly generous […]

Was the publishing industry really serious about diversity? (This week in books)

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This week! Books! First up, I don’t mean to paint an entire industry with too broad of a brush and there have certainly been pockets of commitment to reversing a checkered legacy of hiring and publishing patterns within the book business. But one of the looming questions was whether the publishing industry would really sustain […]

Cormac McCarthy is not on Twitter (This week in books)

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This week! Books! After the sudden death of longtime Scholastic CEO Richard Robinson, there’s now a succession drama surrounding his estate that’s worthy of, well, HBO’s Succession. This would be merely the stuff of tabloids, and not fit for the esteemed halls of This Week in Books, except that control of a $1.2 billion publisher […]