You want it darker, or: what you should know about the international publishing market and your place in it right now

Kent and I just got back from the London Book Fair, where we met with co-agents, scouts, and editors from all over the world...and boy, did they clue us in to some interesting trends.

“Knock, knock!”

The morning after I arrived in England for this year’s London Book Fair, Kent came in bearing two mugs of something that looked like coffee and smelled like burning human hair.

“The French press in this AirBNB is broken,” he said. “All there is is Nescafé. I’m sorry.”

I replied in Marge Simpson’s voice: “All we have is Nescafé. I’m very, very sorry.”

Since we’re both classic Simpsons fans, I knew he’d get the reference:

In the days that followed, “all we have is Nescafé” became something of a running joke between us, our own little spin on the sad trombone. Every time we finished a meeting in which yet another person told us depressing news about their local market—more on what they said in a moment—one of us would turn to the other and rasp a la Marge: “I’m very, very sorry.”

I walked away from this year’s LBF officially convinced that the international publishing market is in a weird, dark place. So is the domestic one, TBH. Kent and I sell so much weird, dark stuff in our ordinary course of business that I didn’t immediately notice the wider derangement coalescing in the zeitgeist, but it’s definitely there now. And not gonna lie: it’s going to be hard for some authors to navigate.

If you’re an author, editor, agent, or anyone else trying to find success in the adult trade market—particularly if you haven’t yet submitted your book project to publishers—here’s what you need to know.

When life gives you Nescafé—I’m very, very sorry—rest assured that there are some ways to make it all taste a little less diarrheal.