DECEMBER 2026 / BOOKS
Nonfiction Is Struggling. Publishers Are Making It Worse
The industry faults readers for declining sales, but its own decisions are to blame
BY TAJJA ISEN
ART BY JUSTIN POULSEN
Published 6:30, OCTOBER 9, 2026
THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY is in the business of manufacturing stories. Not just the ones that live between the covers of the books it sells but the narratives crafted around those books in order to sell them.
Take, for instance, the debut novel. In Middlemen, a recently published study of the literary agent, Laura B. McGrath coins the term debut phenomenon: “a carefully orchestrated publicity event, designed to turn an unknown, first-time author into a professional writer.” The engine of this transformation is the debut narrative, in which various details—biographical facts about the author, the heat of the bidding war, the heft of the marketing push—coalesce “into a unified whole, launching book and author as two mutually reinforcing products.” A splashy first novel, in other words, is not a freak weather event. It is a calculated bid that success can be manufactured if decision makers tell the right story.
A number of systems exist to buttress this gambit. Like the early announcement of the deal. The industry website Publishers Marketplace contains an entire category for sales made in the “Fiction: Debut” category, emphasizing an author’s entrée into the genre even if they have already published in others. (Additional labels on the site sort fiction into more familiar piles like “Literary” or “Horror.”) Numerous prizes, which publishers often must pay to submit to, are contingent on the author’s debut status or age: the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the Young Lions Fiction Award, the National Book Award Foundation’s 5 Under 35 list (debut narratives, McGrath notes, “tend to focus on youth”).
Of course, plenty of books are published to little fanfare. But first novels can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The public-facing story may be one of bright young things and risen cream. Behind the scenes, it’s just as much about resource allocation.
Not every genre gets this kind of coordinated effort. Poets are probably laughing. Nonfiction also seems curiously detached from these trappings. One might reasonably assume the phenomenon would transfer across prose forms, but little parallel infrastructure exists. There isn’t, for example, the welcome wagon of a “Memoir: Debut” label on Publishers Marketplace. Nor are there awards for being young.
There are some built-in support beams: prestigious grants, open-genre awards, contests by independent presses offering publication and a small advance (the payments writers receive prior to publication, made against future royalty earnings). But there are fewer major prizes to act as launchpads, and the ones that do exist are diminishing. Publishers tend to buy nonfiction on the basis of an author’s platform—their expertise and built-in audience. This means any “carefully orchestrated publicity event” relies more on people already caring about the author (or topic) rather than positioning the writer as a must-read wunderkind who bursts out of nowhere.
This business decision has certain repercussions for nonfiction. In the same way that no single hype-building factor is sufficient to guarantee a book’s success, none of these absences alone will damn a title to failure. Yet, when considered in light of other headwinds currently facing the nonfiction market, the comparative lack of ways to build strategic early buzz starts to look conspicuous.
Because there’s a story being told about nonfiction too. By this point, you’ve probably heard it: sales are down, and the genre is in crisis. Often, when this story is related, the leading culprit is reader choice—their overwhelm at the state of the world, their desire for distraction, their loyalty to other sources of fact. But what if there were other explanations? What if, like a thumb on the scales tipping debut novels toward more favourable outcomes, nonfiction’s bleaker fate was also a product of accumulated choices—choices about where the money goes and how the story of these books gets told?
I DON’T MEAN TO SOUND like a conspiracy theorist. The obstacles to nonfiction’s flourishing are real, interlocking, and extensive: Decimated books coverage. Editorial layoffs. Artificial intelligence. Spiking book bans. Rising costs. And the most diffuse one: reader fatigue. There are too many competing places — podcasts, Substack, social media — where people get their news, and that news is so horrendous, people don’t even want it anymore.
“Are we falling out of love with nonfiction?” asked a much-circulated Guardian piece published late last year. Data from a NielsenIQ report found the UK’s nonfiction print sales had dipped by 6 percent. “Speaking to publishing insiders and readers,” wrote Emma Loffhagen, “one word that cropped up repeatedly was escapism.” Two weeks later, the New York Times confirmed that “Dragons, Sex, and the Bible” were the top categories that drove US book sales in 2025. The world is on fire; why not sit back and watch some mythical creatures—and also, I guess, cousins—get it on?
The numbers certainly back this theory up. “Like an axe to a tree” is how one editor at a major publisher, who works primarily on adult nonfiction, describes the effect of the 2024 US election on sales: people were so emotionally walloped by the outcome that they flocked to genres that clearly offered pleasure and distraction. But despite the critical hit, some branches of the tree continue to thrive.
Allison Devereux, an agent who leads the nonfiction program at Trellis Literary Management, sees reader appetite clustering around two poles: self-help and books that take you “out of real life for a while,” whether through a deep emotional experience (like Chloe Dalton’s memoir Raising Hare, about rearing a wild leveret) or a tale that feels stranger than fiction (à la Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea, chronicling a young couple’s unlikely survival on a life raft after a shipwreck). What readers have cooled on, she says, is learning about social systems and structures. Such curiosity burned brightly during the unrest of summer 2020 and the first Trump administration. But that innate desire to understand doesn’t exist anymore, she says; the news is too chaotic. “We don’t need to read the first draft of history as we’re living it.”
If the problem is indeed the reader, then booksellers have crucial insight here (with the caveat that those insights are shaped by the particular communities they serve). Drew Broussard, bookstore manager at Rough Draft Bar & Books in Kingston, New York, has generally found nonfiction titles moving less reliably than they used to—even ones that should align with his customers’ tastes. But amidst the overall slowdown, one type maintains a strong showing: books that indulge readers’ hunger for a propulsive, even salacious, story, as opposed to argumentation or fact. “People want something they can really sink into,” he says, like Lena Dunham’s Famesick and Belle Burden’s divorce memoir, Strangers.
Claire Foster, manager, events coordinator, and bookseller at Toronto’s Type Books, cites both those titles as ones her store “couldn’t keep in stock” the week of their release. Buzzy memoir is the category, among Type’s nonfiction sellers, that most aligns with broader trends; another is books by local darlings like Miriam Toews; a third evinces their customers’ sophisticated taste in more niche titles less likely to make it to bestseller lists, like Paying Attention, Lynne Tillman’s collected essays on art and culture.
Type hasn’t felt the nonfiction dip as keenly; literary fiction has always been their top seller by a wide margin. But Foster notes that engagement with the news is not limited to one genre; fiction and poetry can be just as topical. Mosab Abu Toha’s poetry and Ashraf Zaghal’s Seven Heavens Away, a Palestinian coming-of-age novel, are strong sellers. Same with Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics (about the rise of private, personal convictions at the expense of old models of public solidarity), which people pick up at the register and add onto their purchases: “If we have a stack, we’re out of it by the end of the week.”
Fatigue with the news cycle is a big part of the picture, Broussard says, albeit not the whole one. Another thriving subcategory is books on democracy and civic engagement. A number of titles he names—Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid, Rebecca Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End—also appear on the Independent Press Top 40 bestsellers list, hinting at the broader persistence of readers’ desire for self-education. But in choosing what to order for the store, Broussard is currently being conservative with nonfiction. The sales reps—publisher’s representatives who pitch titles to retail accounts—have admitted to him that everyone is being conservative with nonfiction. “I think I hear a little bit of panic in their voices,” he says.
There seems to be a general consensus, or at least a hope, that this trend is cyclical. But, at publishing houses, there can be a tendency to treat declining sales as a foregone conclusion rather than a set of conditions publishers have the capacity to influence. The editor I spoke to—on the condition of anonymity—shared that, lately, when she and her colleagues bring nonfiction projects to acquisition meetings, she feels a chill in the room, with people “leaning back and looking away or not engaging” with what’s being pitched.
A common reason such books get turned down is that they feel “too small,” meaning they might not appeal to a big enough audience. But “we determine how big a project is,” she says. She has seen this attitude manifest in other ways, as when the press pulled publicity support from one of her memoirs right before its release, on the grounds that “memoir is just not selling right now.” (Not with that attitude!) For the industry to see a genre struggling and use that to justify gutting the infrastructure for supporting it does a disservice to countless readers, she says. It also puts the cart before the horse—“and we’re the horse.”
THE CHILL HAS SEEPED beyond the boardroom. In response to the market, Mariah Stovall, also an agent at Trellis, closed her queries for memoirs (querying is the process by which authors seek representation for their book). Memoir was already a tricky proposition. But where editors were once buying it selectively, now they aren’t buying it at all. “It’s not in my interest or a writer’s interests to sign them up and say, ‘I can sell this for you,’” Stovall says, “because I probably can’t.” As a result, more of these projects are landing in the lap of smaller and independent presses. Marisa Siegel, former senior acquisitions editor for trade books at Northwestern University Press, regularly met with writers who’d been rejected by larger presses because their work was considered too unmarketable, or “who’d walked away from offers that involved dramatically reshaping the work to be more commercial.”
It’s a rough ultimatum: take a project you’ve spent years working on and either alter it beyond recognition or shelve it because of unlucky timing. One nonfiction writer I spoke to is querying agents for her second book after her former agent left the business. (She, like every writer I spoke with, asked to remain anonymous.) The response has not been encouraging. Over and over, she has been told her book—which she describes as environmental reportage with personal elements—won’t sell in the current market. One agent thinks they can sell it but only if the writer turns up its prescriptive takeaways.
The writer has mixed feelings but is game to try, as the result is “still kind of the book I want to write in wolf’s clothing.” But, if pressed to make further changes, she might reassess. “It would be painful to sell a book that’s completely not the book I want to write and then be contractually obligated to write it.”
Another author, whose debut memoir-in-essays outperformed her publisher’s expectations, was surprised to find herself querying again when her former agent declined to represent her next memoir. She has also heard the refrain I can’t see this in the current market. This is a notable departure from what happened with her debut, for which she received multiple offers. The issue might, she concedes, be the book itself, but based on what she’s heard from fellow writers, something has undeniably shifted.
“Are we just cancelling an entire genre?” a third memoirist lamented. “An entire art form?” When her first memoir went on submission in 2015, it sold at auction, went into a second print run before pub day, earned out its advance, and surpassed 20,000 copies in sales. In phone calls, editors told her they loved her new book, but nobody wants to buy it. “God knows most novels are shit, but nobody is out here suggesting we all just stop writing them,” she added.
It may be easier to reduce a nonfiction book to its takeaways than it is for a novel. But to treat the genre in this way diminishes both its literariness and its political efficacy. Nonfiction is not purely a vehicle for delivering information. It is immersive, sustained, and carefully wrought—capable of offering an experience no other format can.
“I’m still trying to follow my tastes and what I personally enjoy,” Devereux, the Trellis agent, says. But she does think the bar for assessing projects, already high, has only been set higher. Before, if a well-written proposal came across her desk that sparked her curiosity, by an author who had a few good connections, that might have been enough for her to sign them. Now, she wants “to be truly mind-blown by a story or a topic that I realize I’ve completely misunderstood or underestimated.” There is more pressure on authors to justify why the idea must exist in the form of a book-length inquiry rather than a magazine piece or podcast. Writers must demonstrate a more impressive platform—not just that they are an expert on the topic but the expert.
Finally, they must have a strong grasp of their audience and “a top-to-bottom plan and demonstrated inroads” for reaching them, like having published in top-tier outlets like the Times and The Atlantic. (This is nonfiction’s closest analogue to the debut-novel pipeline—and it’s borne almost entirely by the individual rather than a team of publicists and marketers and editors. The writer must secure all these accolades themselves before their book is even seen as a viable candidate.)
Many of these pivots, by publishing industry workers, are deliberate and innovative responses to challenging market conditions. But they are also constrained by a context that treats the market as fixed and opaque. A common denominator of publishing logic, Stovall says, is: “‘The reason we don’t do this is because it doesn’t work.’” The truth might be the opposite: “I often think, ‘It doesn’t work because you don’t do it.’”
FOR ALL THIS TALK of the market, the discourse tends to avoid commercial terms. The more common idiom is of feelings. We fall out of love with a genre; we mourn its coming death. The reader is a delicate creature, easily spooked. She is rarely, say, a consumer who has to do something as crass as fill up her car rather than buy up the bookstore.
Rahawa Haile, in the newsletter Scratch, picks up on this hesitation: “This is rarely the first point mentioned with regards to sagging nonfiction sales, [but] hardcover books grew too expensive in an economic environment where people of all stripes are barely getting by.”
Not only that, she continues, but publishers aren’t issuing paperback versions nearly as often as they used to. In a standard royalty structure, the publisher recoups a higher percentage of the hardcover than on paperback; if the former doesn’t hit big, the latter is less attractive. In this, publishers’ and writers’ interests are at odds. Cancelling the paperback ruins a second chance to reach readers through a fresh marketing push, a possible new cover, and—most crucially—a more affordable format.
“It’s not that people don’t want nonfiction,” the editor says. “They cannot afford a hardcover; they wait a year for the paperback they can afford, and then [it] never comes. What are they supposed to do?” The cost of hardcovers, like everything else, is climbing; what used to be a $30 purchase is closer to $40. She is sympathetic to people for whom these margins matter—for whom it might come down to the book or the groceries?
This point has been difficult to make in house, where she has heard, “‘If a dollar is what makes a difference to someone, they obviously didn’t want to buy the book in the first place.’” She disagrees: “If people can’t afford basic necessities, they are not going to invest in something they do not need.” At this point, on a publishing salary, she can’t even afford hardcovers—she has to ask industry friends to send her copies.
“There’s no way we can continue like this,” Broussard says, of how quickly prices are rising. Forty-dollar hardcovers are a turnoff to customers. He posits flipping the model and “going to paperback originals with limited-edition hardcovers” later. Many of the political books he sees doing well—and that are on the indie bestseller list—are pocket-sized paperbacks that are more attractively priced: “They feel like something you can just pick up and carry with you.” Same with Hyperpolitics. Still, it’s not like tossing in a pack of gum—in Canada, the book retails at nearly $26. That’s more than the standard entry-level gift card amount at a major book retailer.
In the widely cited NielsenIQ study, one underreported fact was that women under forty-five—the biggest group of buyers in the market—actually increased their nonfiction consumption, just in the more affordable audio format rather than in print. Maybe it’s connected to another point that people rarely mention alongside sagging nonfiction sales: hardcover nonfiction costs more than fiction does. School Library Journal used to run a survey that tracked the average sale prices of adult, young adult, and children’s books for schools and public libraries. (The prices libraries pay for print copies vary; sometimes it’s the sticker price; at others, they get discounts—which suggests the cost to individuals is even higher.)
For 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, SLJ found that the average cost of a hardcover adult nonfiction book was $30.97 (US). That’s almost two full dollars higher than for fiction: $29.04. Ten years earlier, those numbers were $27.59 and $26.63. Not only is hardcover nonfiction more expensive—its price is also increasing at a faster rate.
These conditions aren’t merely ones that publishers can influence but ones they helped create in the first place. There are many reasons why nonfiction might be more expensive: the page count, the writer’s contract, the perception that fact is worth more than fiction. But there’s a certain self-defeating logic in perpetually driving up the price and then wondering why the product isn’t moving like it used to. Without nonfiction being made available in formats within people’s means—with those formats, in fact, getting kneecapped left and right—the idea that the reading public has been zapped of its political energy begins to look, at a minimum, over-indexed. Maybe people aren’t tired of facts. Maybe they simply can’t afford them.
ANY ACCURATE, good-faith reckoning with the effect of the political climate on the market must treat publishers, not just readers, as barometers. Glossing the halcyon pre-pandemic decade, the Guardian suggests that people picked up titles like On Tyranny (a practical guide to resisting authoritarianism) and White Fragility (an examination of white people’s defensive emotional reactions when talking about racism) because the act of reading “felt as though [it] were part of the civic response.” This notion is worth taking seriously: that people are keener to learn about the world’s evils when they live under conditions that grant them the freedom to imagine otherwise—namely, that they constitute a public with the agency to change those conditions.
But to conclude that that readership, for example, fell in love with antiracist books in 2020 and then gave a collective shrug treats that public as conveniently fickle. (What if all that reading was never about learning at all but just a distraction from the pandemic?) It may be a part of why. But to treat it as the whole story casts publishers as passive entities rather than corporations that met the moment with a concerted push to hire racialized editors, publish racialized writers, and profess their social justice bona fides.
I’m not picking on 2020. It surfaced repeatedly in my interviews, and I was never the one to bring it up. Publishers met that moment and they’re meeting this one too, with a well-documented backlash that coincided with a change of administration, in which they disinvested in marginalized writers and fired the editors hired to nurture them. Readers are paying more attention to this sort of thing, the editor says. They look at publishers’ decisions—how they treat their workers, if they publish politicians who ban books—and choose on that basis where their dollar goes. “If you are fucking around,” she says, “you are going to find out.”
The energy readers once marshalled toward a civic response may have gone underground, but it hasn’t disappeared. Sources like the IndieBound bestseller list, or—as Haile notes—the New York Times paperback charts, tell a different story. The persistence of titles like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss (an exploration of the plant’s biology and culture) or Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (a history of Palestinian resistance to Zionism) silhouette a reader who is alert, curious, empathic. Engaged. Who maybe can’t drop $40 on a hardback but is still eager to learn; who, no matter how burnt out, does not turn away from the imperative to engage with other lives. Their presence, quiet and uncontemplated, implies there might yet be a public determined to imagine otherwise.
