Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Reading Rainbow Gets Really the Only New Host That Makes Sense
Levar Burton will always hold a special place in the hearts of book lovers of a certain age. But if you do indeed have to get someone new as the face and soul of a beloved children’s book TV show in the year 2025, Mychal Threets is the guy to get. It’s like if you croseed Bob Ross with Mr. Rogers and a unicorn-sprinkle cupcake. What makes Threets different is how much he connects what the library is with what the library can do for young readers: a place of exploration, acceptance, safety, and possibility. Here’s hoping this new incarnation does for generations of new readers what the last one did.
What Is Track and Why It Shapes The Books You Read (and The Ones You Never Will)
Tajja Isen goes deep on the role “track” plays in who gets published….and for how much. The piece is worth reading at length, but the basic idea is that the perceived potential of a book affects what publishers are willing to pay for it (if anything). So if you have a long history of writing books that sell well, you have a good chance of getting a good advance for your next book. This makes sense. Where things get weird is when you have no track or bad track (ie your last book underperformed expectations). So in cases where you have no track for a debut in a hot segment of the market, you can actually get really high advances because you are all potential baby. This might set you up, though, for a tougher time with your second book because chances are, the sales of your first book will not live up to the lofty deal you signed. It’s a strange Catch-22 where the better you want your chances to get a second book deal, the lower the advance you should take for your first book.
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Culture Trends for Fall 2025
Always like a trend piece (does anyone ever track the record of these things? Are they right even half the time? and how would you even keep score?). My cultural spidey-senses are also picking up the “big book” energy as part of a larger awakening for people paying attention that the internet is bad for you. And what is the opposite of the internet? 1000+ page novels.
I think the IndieNext list is my favorite monthly preview to browse. October doesn’t have a lot of AAA best-selling sorts of things as far as I can tell, but it has an extremely deep bench. Point of order: these picks are from mid-September to mid-October for reasons that I am sure are real, but are clearly absurd.