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Publishing works on such a long timeline that it can be hard to spot trends. The books coming out this week were likely acquired by publishers years ago — and may have been written years before that. If we rely on new releases to chart publishing trends, we’re always going to be lagging behind. So, how do we track the trends within publishing today — the ones that are driving acquisitions and that will inspire the books of 2025, 2026, and beyond? Book deal announcements, of course.
Analyzing book deal announcements can give us a glimpse into what publishers are prioritizing right now. As a quick-and-dirty visualization of trends, I inputted the deals announcements from January to June into a word cloud generator and then filtered out words like book, deal, author, etc. I also had to filter out some misleading words, like robot: disappointingly, it does not reflect a trend of robot books and is, in fact, just referencing Angry Robot, the publisher.
This is by no means a scientific survey (especially because some words are included just from repeating the title four times in the book deal announcement), but it’s an interesting jumping-off point, so let’s dive into some of the trends in book deals from the first half of 2024.
First off, let’s set aside some of the most common words that don’t say much: debut, series, collection, memoir, love — none of these are likely specific to 2024. Words like woman/women, sisters, girl, mother, and daughter are also timeless. (Though it’s interesting that brothers, father, boy, are not as common.) Now, let’s pick out some of the other words and what they have to do with this moment in publishing.
Fantasy: Fantasy is, of course, a broad genre, but the specific ways fantasy is discussed in recent book deal announcements reveal more about what’s trending now. Several titles are described as romantasy: Last Night Before the War Was Won by Emily Skrutskie (summer 2025), the Hell Bent series by Aurora Ascher (January 2025), and A Forbidden Alchemy by “BookTok sensation” Stacey McEwan (summer 2025). Then there are a couple “cozy fantasy” titles: The Keeper of Lonely Spirits by E.M. Anderson (spring 2025) and An Ancient Witch’s Guide to Modern Dating by Cecelia Edward (summer 2025).
A.I.: Unsurprisingly, A.I. is also showing up in book deal announcements, and in a variety of ways. There’s The Jessica Simulation: Love and Grief in the Age of Emotional Machines to Stuart Roberts (2025), about using AI to speak to a dead loved one; Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari (September 2024), about information communication throughout history; and an unnamed book about Open AI and its CEO by Ashlee Vance (no publication date).
Human: Related to A.I., there are several books grappling with what it means to be human using different lenses, including The Jessica Simulation and the history of Open AI, but also The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire by Henry Gee (March 2025), Little Things That Run the World by Yang Wang (October 2026), and People Like Us: The Origin and Evolution of the Human Family by Heidi Colleran (spring 2027). There are also several novels that put humans at odds with aliens or demons, like an unnamed sci-fi series by Seth Ring (late 2024) and the republication of My Funny Demon Valentine by Aurora Ascher (January 2025).
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I could keep picking apart this word cloud, but let’s call it there. Which trends have you noticed in publishing recently? Let’s chat in the comments!
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