What does 2018 hold for you? WM canvassed the experts’ assessments of the state of the publishing industry and their predictions – personal and professional – for the year ahead

Adam Croft

Indie author and publisher

It’s always a sign of success when others try to bring you down, and that’s where self-publishing now finds itself. 2017 has been full of news stories of ‘declining ebook sales’ (ebook sales are actually considerably up; it’s ereader sales which are slightly down, mainly because everyone already has one).

That said, we can’t rest on our laurels. This half (now nearer three quarters) of the industry is incredibly fast-moving. Everyone wants to know what the next big thing will be, following on from the success of previous breakthrough technologies and marketing strategies.

Will it be the much-lauded Facebook Messenger chatbots? I’m putting my neck on the line by saying no. They’ll quickly be judged to be shallow, invasive and very very annoying. Nor do I think this year will finally be the year of the audiobook. They’ll continue to grow, of course, but I don’t think we’ll ever see the explosion that’s optimistically touted in parrot fashion by industry experts every December.

Digital publishing is levelling out, and that’s a good thing. The market is stabilising with independent publishers now in the majority and the market maturing to a level that suits both the author-publisher and the reader. It also means newcomers to digital publishing are likely to find the field much easier to enter. With traditional publishing continuing to decline, why not become part of the digital publishing movement?

Piers Blofeld

Literary agent

2017 was a rare publishing year in which there was no stand out bestseller – no Girl on a Train or Fifty Shades and that has meant that overall the numbers are slightly down for the year: nothing could better illustrate how important those big bestsellers are for the business – and for grabbing the imagination of the public and bringing in new readers.

In part that is because there has been no new trend: psychological thrillers aren’t going away, but that wave has diminished and nothing has come along to replace it. In film and TV people are talking about ‘grounded sci-fi’ as the next trend – and I think that’ll be an interesting space – I also think that 2018 will be the year in which psychological thrillers move from being just domestic noir and really start taking on the international stage: there is a whole host of octogenarian, male thriller writers waiting to be replaced!

Alexia Casale

YA author and director of the YA Shot festival

Despite booming sales, publishers are buying fewer Young Adult novels from both published authors and debuts. While there’s been an upsurge in Middle Grade acquisitions, it’s already starting to stall.

This is partly due the challenges of ‘discoverability’ in a world with so many channels to publicise books, from traditional ads and reviews to newer forms like social media. Bookshops are closing and so are libraries: those that aren’t are severely under-staffed and under-funded. As professional reviews become ever rarer (especially following the closure of the Guardian Children’s Books site), book-blogs and -vlogs have proliferated, but they too are competing across channels for attention. A few ‘big fish’ seem to be swallowing up most of the attention, starving many others and creating a bookish ‘squeezed middle’.