Notebook: Nonfiction

Will nonfiction be there for us when we need it?

Publishing infrastructure. Here Caroline Duroselle Melish, Associate Librarian for Collection Care and Development at the newly reopened Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, gives a lesson in printing to Clarence Michael Payne. The Folger’s printing press was constructed by historic printing press builder Alan May. Photo by Lloyd Wolf

The book business continues to watch anxiously for the gains in national reading from the reclusive pandemic era to slip away, but numbers coming in suggest that, as of midyear, 2024 print book sales are keeping pace with 2023, with revenue growing, thanks in large part to the booming market for TikTok-powered “Romantasy” (Emily Gould’s exploration of “monster smut” is a diverting introduction for those new to this area). Bookstore traffic and digital library usage are also up, with analysts making nods there as well to the power of romance and genre. The New York Times had a story recently on the growth of romance bookstores, attributing romance’s ascendence to a return to reading and search for escape during the pandemic.

An unknown factor, though, is how many readers of romance had migrated to self-publishing after drugstore “mass market” distribution withered in the aughts and teens and mainstream publishing moved toward more lucrative hardcovers and trade paperbacks. The black box of Amazon, which amassed by far the largest share of self-published books, made the actual size of the self-publishing market invisible, though publishing observers like Jane Friedman and Bookstat have endeavored to read the tea leaves. As recently as the Penguin Random House trial of 2022 major publishers were discounting self-publishing as a force. Recently the strength of the readership for self-published romance and other genre books once confined to wire racks by the checkout has caught major publishers’ notice, with traditional publishing offering creative deals to capture successful self-published authors who could marshall better returns on their own. 

I wonder if there isn’t also a cultural change here, of younger women, especially, with their own money to spend, declining to be ashamed of their pleasures and buying the books they like as visible consumers rather than furtive errand-runners with an embarrassing habit to indulge during their few leisure hours. (See Christine Larsen’s new book, Love in the Time of Self-Publishing.) The site Book Riot was among the first review outlets to reach out to such readers, looking for enjoyment and impatient with elite judgment, even before YouTube and Instagram and TikTok gave them a platform to advocate for the work they liked on their own terms. Being handed the editorial and promotional reins by self-publishing and social media also enabled historically excluded writers to tap audiences that mainstream publishing refused to believe existed, the most famous example being the industry’s unwillingness to believe the assertions of one of the founders of modern romance publishing and one of the industry’s first powerful Black women editors, Vivian Stephens, that there was an audience for romance novels about Black people (see our consideration, “Isn’t It Romantic?”). Women reading romance (le roman) have after all been the backbone of fiction since Day One. 

Yes, I am going to get to nonfiction. These bullish days for fiction are a bit head-spinning when one remembers how recently “the death of fiction” was being lamented, and perhaps a useful reminder how briskly zeitgeists come and go. During the Trump years the entire publishing industry—like the news business—was buoyed by a hunger for political writing. I remember hearing at a convention that even small academic presses were being lifted by the nonfiction wave. Another factor in the now forgotten nonfiction ascendency was the concurrent encroachment by nonfiction on territory previously reserved for fiction and poetry: first the deliberate ascension of the freewheeling “New Journalism” of the sixties into its own university department, “creative nonfiction,” in writing programs; then the efflorescence of the “personal essay” out of blog culture and the fashion for memoir in the nineties; then the branding, as the internet took hold, of what had formerly been the more ambitious end of nonfiction writing as its own genre, “long-form”; and the literary trend swelling in the teens of so-called “autofiction,” dovetailing with the PR directive to market authors as personalities on social media and the increasingly dominant “features” approach to literary coverage. One also recalls Maria Stepanova’s reflections on the adoption of memoir by literary writers as a response to historic crisis; we have a post coming up from Yasmine el Rashidi about a parallel phenomenon in Arabic writing. Sarah Hepola, who had been Salon’s personal essay editor, told Jia Tolentino in 2017, “I feel like the 2016 election was a reckoning for journalism. We missed the story. Part of why we missed it might have been this over-reliance on ‘how I feel about the day’s news.’” The reality quotient was pressing its advantage. Making stuff up, by 2019, had come to seem old school. I once overheard writing professors fretting that they needed to drum up a memoir to freshen up their CV. 

Did the shocks of long-2020 substitute what David Shields, in a sign of the times, had called readers’ “Reality Hunger” (2010) with a hunger for wish? Is it possible that “reality hunger” has been decisively sated?

Politico had an article recently quoting various publishing insiders getting optimistic that an invigorated political landscape might yet revive the nonfiction business. It does seem salutary for reading culture to have a healthy market for facts, whether or not it faces existential threats thereto. A question remains whether the industry we have is now hospitable to them though. Trends in publishing continue to redouble the advantages enjoyed by bestsellers, drawing resources from books in the middle that might reach a large but not-blockbuster audience. Examples: the chain Barnes & Noble taking chances on fewer unproven authors; the Big Five publishers laying off executives from editorial and replacing them with executives from marketing; innovative publishing models outsourcing marketing and publicity to (implicitly) already successful authors. Success in the far-off conglomerate corporate boardroom is measured by individual blockbusters, not modestly sustainable whole lists. In his recent book Big Fiction, Dan Sinykin noted that the publisher W. W. Norton, which has historically specialized in nonfiction, can credit in part its employee ownership, which spreads the gains and losses around and is not incentivized toward corporate consolidation, for its durable attention to medium-sized books.

In an environment oriented toward mega-sellers, the old model for producing researched nonfiction seems sidelined: a publisher gives an author an advance allowing them to devote a few years of study and preparation toward a work of enduring, carefully documented analysis. How many historians, economists, political scientists, science writers, are likely to command the outsized audience toward which advances gravitate these days? The nonfiction we see on bestseller lists comes mostly from public figures and celebrities everyone knows from TV.

The failsafe used to be the academy: a professorial salary or a sabbatical might support sustained work toward an enduring book, but the incentives of technology are drawing resources in the humanities even from their academic strongholds. What is the model for creating an eclectic and dynamic pool of enduring works to address our lived reality, when the road to success in publishing is to ride the self-reinforcing algorithmic emotional wave that produces a dozen outrageously successful books but has little attention to spare for modestly successful, sustainably financed books that require quite a bit of work reliably to reflect the world?

If one looks to the example of journalism, the contemporary information environment seems to accommodate just one or two successful corporations, which come to have an outsized influence on public opinion, while everyone else struggles virtually alone, or with philanthropic support, for the adventurous slice of an audience no one quite knows how to find. I genuinely applaud a reading environment that is welcoming and celebratory of all kinds of readers, and hope that it augures a future ecosystem in which popular genres give some ballast to other kinds of work. Nevertheless, I find it worrying for book publishing to be too dependent on the freshet of earnings from the TikTok well. 

In case were on the beach: You won’t want to miss Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s consideration last Wednesday of “Hacks” and women’s solitude, for Book Post subscribers.

---

Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. You can find her series of Notebook posts about publishing, writing, and the life of ideas here.

---

Join Book Post’s April Bernard for Summer Reading! Thinking about three poems by Elizabeth Bishop each Sunday in August. This Sunday, three poems of Key West: “Little Exercise,” “The Fish,” and “Roosters.” We’d love to see you in the comments! Buy Bishop’s Poems from our bookselling partner Northshire Bookstore. And join April and me (editor Ann Kjellberg) in a virtual conversation on August 29 at 6 pm. If you’re not receiving Summer Reading by email, toggle on in your settings.

We are also in the midst of our August Summer Special, offering a big discount on annual subscriptions and a Book Post mug for the first ten people who order a gift!

Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Thank you for your subscription! Your payment supports our writers and our effort to build a common reading culture across a fractured media landscape. Coming soon: Ian Frazier on Trotsky in the Bronx; Yasmine El Rashidi on the memoir trouvé in Arabic writing; Kathryn Davis on a lingering childhood fascination.

Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, and Saratoga Springs, New York, is Book Post’s Summer 2024 partner bookstore! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. Read our portrait of Northshire here. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.

Follow us: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Notes, Bluesky, Threads @bookpostusa

If you liked this piece, please share and tell us with a “like.”