Jeremy and Sarah represented JM Agency at Publishing Ireland’s recent Annual Conference, held in Dublin Castle, a venue that also played host to the annual Dublin Book Festival. The Annual Conference was an opportunity for us to promote the select few authors represented under own new and growing Literary Agency programme, as well as introducing our extensive suite of publishing services, including editing, design, typesetting and consultancy services to the Irish publishers who attended.
In addition to an invaluable opportunity to network with follow publishing professionals and companies, the Conference hosted numerous talks, with speakers imparting their knowledge and wisdom on all things publishing. These included Ruth Hegarty, editor at the Royal Irish Academy, who delivered a talk on how ‘open access’ was revolutionising academic publishing; Dr Andreas Guadamuz, lecturer in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex, who delivered a fascinating talk on the topic of AI in publishing, and the challenges new AI technologies pose to copyright protection; and a presentation of book data from 2022, courtesy of Neilsen BookData’s Sarah Mulryan.
Mulryan’s presentation included fascinating and important data on book sales, including the changing tastes of Irish readers, and the overall health of the industry. While the Irish book industry is in a good state overall, with Ireland’s appetite for books as a pastime enduring in this increasingly digital age, the data does point to the increasing dominance of publishing conglomerates. We have written previously on the dominance of the large publishing conglomerates, the traditional ‘big four’, and Neilsen’s Irish data underscores this. The percentage of books sold in Ireland published by a domestic publisher is down to 13%. This is down from an average of 20% across numerous years. It points to an increasingly concentrated international publishing landscape.
For JM Agency, the conference was very positive, with publishers and other allied companies showing a strong interest in what we have to offer, and were eager to collaborate further on delivering exceptional publishing services to authors and readers.
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