Labor of Love

Bridgerton author Julia Quinn is on a mission to give historical romance some love with JQ Editions, a curated subscription box with special editions of both new releases and modern classics from the genre. Sophie Escabasse and Anders Nilsen are among the inaugural winners of the American Library Association’s new prizes for comics, and the ABA is relaunching its Indies Choice Awards program, which has been dormant since 2019. Penguin Random House and Scholastic held onto their top spots as PW’s bestselling children’s publishers, leading 2025 sales for picture books and children’s fiction, respectively. We dug into the Heated Rivalry craze and paid tribute to the ice hockey romance genre’s foremothers, including Elle Kennedy and Hannah Grace. Meanwhile, the New York Times wonders if Don DeLillo was the true inventor of the “racy hockey novel.” In other news, court filings revealed that Anthropic, Meta, and other tech firms have been buying, scanning, and destroying troves of print books in their race for AI training material, the Washington Post reports. Will Eisner’s comics and graphic novel IP is now up for sale, according to the New York Times. Google says it’s “exploring” site controls that would allow publishers to opt out of its Search generative AI features, in response to an inquiry from the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority. In the U.K., Faber has announced the launch of a new Sylvia Plath publishing program. And Lily King and John U. Bacon once again topped the Independent Press Top 40 bestsellers list this week.