Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
The 100 bestselling books of the past 50 years
Interesting to browse this list of the 100 best-selling books of that last fifty years from The Times so see just how different the UK market has (and hasn’t been) different than here in the States. I don’t want to spoil it because it is worth it for the surprise, but only would I never have guessed the #1 best-seller, but I wouldn’t have gotten any of the top ten.
Fake Literary Agencies Exist: How to Spot Them…and What the Scam Is
There is no riper berry for scammers to pick than someone’s dream. And in the world of books, many would-be authors know that getting an agent is important, though they perhaps don’t know why and how legit agencies work. This knowledge gap is where fake literary agencies thrive, posing as real agencies but then charging for things that a) authors don’t need and b) aren’t paid services from agencies. The short version is this: if an “agency” is asking you, the author, to cough up cash for something, they probably are not legit (agents make their cash by getting a cut of your advance and royalties).
The Best Business Books of 2024
I am going to overlook the confounding decision to release a 2024 longlist in the middle of August here (is there some sort of fiscal year thing at play? who knows) because I always like business book lists, mostly because business books are not seriously covered in most of the places I read about books (including BR, I might say). As business person and book reader I am always on the lookout for something to give a go, and there are several on this list that caught my eye. I must admit I am not ready to read books about AI/LLMs at this point: I think that world is moving too fast and long-form reporting is a better fit. That said, I see a ton of AI-related deals being done in the non-fiction space–and I would guess this will be true for the remainder of my reading lifetime.
The 10 Most Popular Books on Book Riot in July 2024
We have our own little trove of data here at Book Riot, and one of the most interesting bits of it is the book titles that readers click on while reading our stuff. It can be both illuminating and misleading by turn (and sometimes at the same time), but I will use this post’s round-up of the most clicked on books of July to cement a point I made here in Today in Books a few weeks ago: this book is the book of the summer. (Apropos of this: this curiosity gap thing I just did there is one reason the “clicked on” metric can lie. If you just clicked on that link, you did so not because you were curious to learn more about the specific title, because you probably didn’t know what it was going to be. Digital metrics are something else.)