What these companies seem to have in common are their successful investments in “romantasy” and “new adult” series, sales of which have soared, often powered by BookTok and similar influencers. It can be argued that this phenomenon is doubly good for publishing—more sales now and more readers habituated to buying print books.

Richard Charkin

There may be another side to this good news. While publishers and booksellers focus on these mega-sellers what’s happening elsewhere in the publishing ecosystem?

Using figures approved for this column by NielsenIQ BookData, overall retail romance and fantasy sales in the United Kingdom doubled from 2023 to 2024, while sales of self-published ebooks in the same genres can be assumed to have advanced, while overall book sales dipped slightly despite price increases mirroring inflation. Nonfiction sales continue to struggle, down in value 6 percent and down in volume since the peak in 2007 by a huge 35 percent. 

Long-form reading is in decline as people move to digested newsletters and social media for news—some fake, some legitimate. Factual information—how to fix a printer or a car or a body—has become the province of online searches and videos. Writers are turning to podcasts and Substack in the hope of shoring up their incomes. Some actors are losing out to AI for audiobooks. Some translators are losing out to AI. Library budgets are being squeezed everywhere. Traditional media are giving book reviews less space. High-quality authors are finding it harder to locate a publisher and publishers are finding it harder to make money on anything less than a bestseller. Literacy itself is being challenged—who needs to be able to compose a sentence when AI will do it for you? Library budgets are being squeezed everywhere. As you may know from Publishing Perspectives‘ coverage, the Librarian of Congress and the director of the US Copyright Office have been dismissed by the White House.

On top of these external factors, publishers are incurring significant additional costs, many of which add little or nothing to the key functions of finding the best books and selling them. The cost of employing people has increased alongside, quite understandably, demands for shorter working weeks; more flexibility to support family life; greater care in who and how to employ; increased requirements to limit polluting activities; more intense legal scrutiny and cases; more sensitivity readings; more expenditure on social media advertising; more sophisticated marketing campaigns; more literary prizes to apply for; more regional book fairs to attend; expanding human resources departments; more strategy papers to compile, write, read, forget.

Additionally, every publisher in the Western world has had to contend with inflation, as have the billions of citizens who unsurprisingly prioritize food and a home over reading. It’s interesting to note how few of the published results refer to inflation-adjusted increases.

‘As Readers Turn Away From the Bland’

So what does it all mean? There are many more sophisticated and informed strategy managers than me, but here a few possibilities to consider.

• The “Big Four” (in the United Kingdom) trade publishers will progressively become sophisticated logistics and data analysis centers, however hard they try to maintain the editorial integrity of their individual imprints.
• The “Big 10” authors will begin to wonder what value their publisher adds beyond manufacture and distribution and these functions can be bought very easily by the authors, their agents and teams, resulting in a larger slice of the cake and, importantly, more control over publicity and marketing.
• Smaller publishers will thrive as they build better author-care systems and carve discernible niches and thus valuable brands.
• Nonfiction will continue to slide, in particular cookbooks—once the shelf over the cooker is full of gastro-erotic glossy books and the Internet delivers a far greater range of recipes… Not to mention car repair manuals, self-help, gardening, and all the other staples of nonfiction publishing. Perhaps religion and politics may buck the trend, at least in the short term.
• Print on demand will become the dominant production method allowing for instantaneous global distribution with much reduced waste and CO2 emissions.
• Artificial intelligence will allow publishers to reduce radically their administrative overheads (a euphemism for job losses).
• Authors and publishers will find a way, through collective licensing, to live more easily with the generative AI giants of today and mega-giants of tomorrow.
• Literary creativity will, thank God, survive and even flourish as readers turn away from the bland and migrate to the most rewarding and imaginative authors.

Publishing will survive if it sticks to its principles of support for authors’ rights and freedom of expression while recognizing that we are commercial not philosophical partners and we have to run our businesses efficiently in order to pay our royalties; pay our staff; and reward our investors. Easier said than done.

Join us monthly for Richard Charkin’s latest column. More coverage of his work from Publishing Perspectives is here. Richard Charkin’s opinions are his own, of course, and not necessarily reflective of those of Publishing Perspectives.