26 Comments
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Elisa Camahort Page's avatar

What a lot of effort went into making this list, thank you so much.

Traci Thomas's avatar

Glad you liked it! It was the kind of nerdy fun I like.

monica_monica's avatar

This! Is my jam. I'm on the verge of tracking my favorite editors, The Stacks influence is strong...

elisabeth's avatar

Same!

Traci Thomas's avatar

I track editors! It’s fun to see the connections for sure.

Nadia's avatar

What an amazing, comprehensive list! Thank you! One day I hope to properly organise publisher data on StoryGraph, including at the imprint level, so people can follow publishers and imprints, see a "hierarchy" chart, etc..

Traci Thomas's avatar

That would be amazing!!! I would love that.

Emily Henderson's avatar

GAH! I'm obsessed with this! I only started paying attention to imprints a few years ago, and it's deepened my reading life in so many ways. I am all in on a post about editors. It seems like such an opaque process (probably intentionally), then I read ON RANDOM and saw the influence Morrison had on American Literature, and I kept wondering how this is possible today? Do they work that closely with their authors? Do editors have that kind of influence? Was Morrison just a singular talent? All the questions!

Traci Thomas's avatar

Oooh these are good questions. I don’t know that as much. I’d love to hear answers from authors and editors.

Justice's avatar

I love this! Thank you for sharing such extensive notes and giving us a new way to nerd out with nonfiction books!

Traci Thomas's avatar

So happy you like it. Yes, new ways to nerd with nonfiction is very much my kink!

Gwen Krosnick's avatar

Thank you so much for this! So informative and interesting — I’ve never tried tracking imprints I read (even for fiction, which I read more of) and this really makes me want to look more closely.

Traci Thomas's avatar

Yes! I love tracking this kind of stuff so much. Not that I allow imprints to dictate my reading, but more because I love to see the patterns that emerge.

Bo Forbes's avatar

Thank you for this! As a science-y nonfiction writer, it's cool to see people paying attention to nonfiction when the fiction market is popping. Flatiron has dropped a ton of money lately in the health and medicine space, perhaps more than any other imprint I've tracked lately, including a much-discussed 8-figure deal to the author of a well-known book about trauma...

Traci Thomas's avatar

I love nonfiction and talk about it all the time! I think Flatiron is for sure having a change in its nonfiction identity, just based on my reading over the last decade. They really seem to have shifted. Which book are you referring to? I clearly missed the discussion, lol!

Bo Forbes's avatar

I think you'd appreciate the discussion. It's the follow-up to the book The Body Keeps the Score. For the tea, look to Emi Nietfeld for Mother Jones (link below). Most of the discussion I've seen around the new deal (between $10M and $99M) has been on Threads with the lens of how white men who often either appropriate or misquote others' research wind up with outsized market share and accolades for their work when, especially in the trauma space, Black women have been doing the work for eons. Well worth perusing lol.

https://www.motherjones.com/media/2024/12/trauma-body-keeps-the-score-van-der-kolk-psychology-therapy-ptsd/

Traci Thomas's avatar

Oh yes, I have seen this. I just didn't know who you were talking about. I mean it makes sense he would get this deal based on his book's success but his dubious research and also white maleness of it all is upsetting for sure!

Rosamond's avatar

This was so fun and nerdy! I like Penguin Press a lot for fiction & non-fiction :)

Traci Thomas's avatar

Yes! So nerdy. And yes to PP for sure. Though this year one of my least favorite books came from them.

Christina McClintock's avatar

So helpful! Thanks! Always appreciate you helping me broaden my nonfiction reading :)

Traci Thomas's avatar

Yaaay! I love it.

Jennifer DAlessandro's avatar

Thanks for this! Very helpful.

Traci Thomas's avatar

Glad you think so.

Rebekah Joseph's avatar

This post was fascinating! Thank you for putting it all together.

Side note, now I know to blame Harper for letting one of the best books ever (Columbine) be published in quite possibly the worst font/font size of all time!

Kerry York-Myles's avatar

Oooh! This is a guide I never knew how much I wanted and needed. Thank you for making this! It was also helpful in making sure any non-fiction recs that I might have missed have gone on my TBR. Your taste is impeccable!

Traci Thomas's avatar

Hahaha that’s funny to me. Glad it scratched a preemptive itch. Lots of the books me mentioned have been featured on the show in some way.