Publishing
The publishing industry is thriving with more people reading books than ever before! There’s so much that goes into releasing a book that we often don’t think of.
In simple terms, the publishing industry deals with commissioning, creating and releasing books or audiobooks. Roles vary hugely within publishing, with departments in sales, rights, publicity, production, editorial, design and so on. So this is a great industry if you’re looking for variety and for somewhere where you might be able to pick up a few new skills!
You don’t need to love reading to be part of publishing, you just need to have a passion for connecting with the people who create the content, and the audience who want to know what happens in the next book…
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👭Over half of executive leadership and senior management roles are held by women (52% and 55% respectively).
💪This compares to 49% and 41% in 2017. Females accounted for 64% of respondents.
📖The publishing industry directly employs 29,000 people in the UK and supports more than 70,000 jobs.
💰 The UK publishing industry income was £6 billion as recorded in 2018, with growth in technology and digital ofsetting print decreases in others.
📈 Overall, there was a 3% increase in digital sales income (to £2.6bn) and a 5% drop in physical sales (to £3.4bn).
⚡️ Global exports are very important to the industry, with total publishing exports at £3.5bn and accounting for 59% of total sales income.
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As with many other industries, the rise of technology and social media has influenced the growth of publishing.
A few trends we could see in 2022 feature;
📲 Booktok is slowly becoming a marketing must-have: The rise of Tiktok has both aided and broken certain industries, but the rise of #BookTok has become very popular within the app. So far, #booktok has garnered 34.7 billion views.
💻 AI will expand it's influence into publishing: AI is already being used to write fiction, and while it's a long way off replacing human creativity, AI supports content creators to find inspiration, as well as doing plagiarism checks, editing, translating and marketing.
📈Book prices will increase: Mostly due to inflation. Pretty simple in this case, with production being more expensive, hence the books being more expensive.
👏🏻 D Gilson, a writer and university professor of writing with Expert Insurance Reviews, observes that “as more and more folks engage literature on multiple platforms, we are seeing more cross-genre or cross-platform promotion.”
📚 Print on demand will “lead to a renaissance in terms of distribution and independent bookstores, where inventory is no longer the great divide between big publishers and small press or self-publishing.”
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Like the sound of Publishing?
Learn more on the ERIC app through our industry guides. When you’re ready to explore further, you can start browsing the Publishing section for opportunities, events, courses and more!