Picturing Books

With the Bologna Children’s Book Fair wrapping up its final day, attendees are envisioning the future of publishing for young readers, as challenges from both within and outside the industry loom large. Sales at Hachette Book Group rose 2% in the first quarter over 2025 thanks in large part to a bevvy of bestsellers. Manga publisher Tokyopop is aiming to raise $1.2 million through a Regulation Crowdfunding stock offering to reach its goal of becoming a $50 million company by the end of the decade. Red Wheel/Weiser’s acquisition of the U.K.-based Watkins Publishing will add around 800 titles to the publisher’s mind-body-spirit list. And The Bookies Bookstore in Denver and Chesapeake & Hudson president Janine Jensen are our last finalists for Bookstore and Sales Rep of the Year—tune in tomorrow for the announcement of our winners. In other news, self-publishing platform Draft2Digital has introduced account fees with the intention of filtering out “low-quality ‘slop.’” More than 100 authors have left the historic French publishing house Grasset in protest of its conservative media mogul owner, per the Guardian. The Atlantic’s Daniel Engber poses questions about the authorship of the latest Read with Jenna book club pick, Woody Brown’s Upward Bound. Zona Motel examines the tension between publishers’ use of AI tools and their stated defense of human-written work, in light of the Shy Girl incident. And Lily King’s Heart the Lover and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass topped the Independent Publishers Caucus’s bestseller lists this week.