What is Happening in Book Publishing?
A First Quarter Review
Recently, I’ve been feeling lost in the endless sea of culture. Spring has felt like a dead zone in the entertainment industry with nothing to grab on to. For our part, “big books” in the first months of the year are defined primarily by the takeover of “new year, new you” categories. Such that if you operate outside of the financial fixes, dieting, and self-care areas of the paper trade it can feel…quiet.
This is obviously not true. In fact, what typically makes the first quarter of book publishing so exciting is that established authors typically release new books in the fall, because of holiday retail traffic, and that leaves spring wide open for new authors to thrive and different kinds of bestselling authors. Inspired by my own sense of bewilderment, I decided to take a moment to sort through the clutter and see what’s been happening these first couple of months in books.
Nonfiction — Politics Are Here to Stay
Trump’s presidency sparked an unprecedented jump in political book sales from both sides of the polarized spectrum. But during Biden’s presidency there’s understandably been a waning of anti-Trump, anti-Fascist fervor on the left, while anti-Biden, anti-left books are still having a plurality of success.
The notable exception to this waning has been books on race in America, a topic progressives are still politically engaged with. Outside of self-help and cookbooks, new releases about race in America saw the largest sales in nonfiction. Books like Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity by Michele Norris (NPR), Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America by Joy-Ann Reid (MSNBC), and The Grift: The Downward Spiral of Black Republicans from the Party of Lincoln to the Cult of Trump by Clay Cane (political commentator), Legacy: a Black Physician Reckons With Racism In Medicine by Uché Blackstock (MSNBC contributor) and Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton (which sounds amazing, NBC journalist). But there’s also the Cancel Cultural Dictionary (Fox) that hit the bestseller list, in case you worried that we were headed toward a moment of reconciliation.
Either way, it’s clear that the malaise I feel personally and the widespread frustration many have of repeating the election four years ago has not completely extinguished the fire of political or political-adjacent books.
Recommended Nonfiction from Q1
We are so back! Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork remains one of my all-time nonfiction recommendations. Cork Dork is a fantastically written, first-person narrative- nonfiction deep dive into the world of wine, a magical rumination on strange obsessives who populate this subculture and an ode to the sense of taste. Seven years in the making, Bosker returns to our lives and the bestseller list with Get the Picture. It is in the exact same vein as Cork Dork but for the world of fine art and visual taste. I’ve never cared much for fine art as a book subject, but Bosker is uniquely gifted at guiding you into exclusive spaces with fascinating people. You probably won’t appreciate the fine art world any more after reading Get the Picture, but you will be filled with awe for artists and learn to reconsider your way of seeing and looking at contemporary art and the people who make it.
Big Fiction — Tik Tok and Self-Publishing
Fiction sales are flat to up a little bit, which is great given the COVID-related growth over the last couple of years. But what’s buoying this plateau is largely the exogenous factor of Tik Tok and the related self-publishing romance and Romantasy boom. Traditional publishers have benefited tremendously from Tik Tok and Romance/Rom-Com genres (see below). But most publishers are still racing to catch up as this trend is accelerating daily and new bestsellers are coming out of nowhere from independent publishers and self-publishing platforms.
The biggest shift with these latest trends is that they aren’t fueled by the reliable readers of old like they were for the trends a decade ago such as psychological suspense and WWII fiction (i.e., Boomers), but an entirely new readership of younger women coming to books for the first time in a big way. The millions-of-dollars question is whether these readers will stick around as readers for the next trend—will these genre binges become lifelong reading habits? My guess would be yes, but want comes after Romantasy no one really knows.
Blockbusters
Some traditional publishers have been on the receiving end of the Tik Tok / Romantasy windfall by chance. Sarah J. Maas’ House of Flame and Shadow is the biggest publication of 2024 so far, selling well over 300,000 hardcovers its first week on sale. A longtime author for Bloomsbury, Maas has suddenly gone from bestseller to black swan mega-bestseller. When Maas’ new book published, she had four of fifteen spots on the combined bestseller list. In the past few months, I’ve seen dozens of women reading her books on the subway and watched a flight attendant pause mid in-flight service to talk with a passenger reading one of Maas’ books. She’s truly broken into the mainstream.
While Tik Tok may be driving industry growth, successes like Kristin Hannah continue to be a shining light of how to build a writer’s career over time. Hannah has gone from being part of the WWII trend with The Nightingale in 2015 almost a decade ago to becoming one of the biggest living authors. Hannah’s new book The Women was the first book to knock off the Romantasy domination of Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J. Maas, who collectively have held the #1 spot on the fiction bestseller list for three straight months.
Alex Michaelidias continues to go strong and capitalize on his multi-year, bestselling thriller The Silent Patient, racking up tens of thousands of copies sold in the first few weeks with his latest novel The Fury.
And, finally, the controversial author of the million copy bestseller The Woman in the Window A.J. Finn returns. In an abnormal review The Washington Post goes into a long commentary on the author’s situation before reviewing his new novel. The common wisdom I’ve always followed has been that negative press doesn’t really affect blockbuster authors—the infamous American Dirt did just fine in the end sales wise. Once a book reaches a certain level, most of the readership is no longer inside the insular world of literature, publishing, and media. But maybe this is wrong, Finn’s follow-up didn’t hit the bestseller list. It’s still selling decently, but perhaps the combination of unfavorable sentiment in the media/publishing world and a six-year gap between books is playing a role.
Sally Rooney’s Returns
The millennial generation’s Hemmingway (one of my favorite comparisons, sorry to whomever I’m stealing this from without citation), Rooney’s fourth novel was announced to publish this September. It’s called Intermezzo. I have no legitimate inside info to share, but judging from the title alone (the book cover is just a placeholder) I can imagine that this will be a further departure from Rooney’s first two books that were spare, intimate stories of relationships. For her third and fourth novels Rooney has switched publishers to Farrar, Straus & Giroux (“FSG”) in the US. FSG is one of the most notoriously literary imprints in the business, and with this switch Rooney has waded deeper into the waters of philosophically-inclined Literature. Actually, you can kind of trace her literary shift using her titles alone: Conversations with Friends to Normal People to Beautiful World, Where Are You? We went from “friends” and “people” to a literary reference, a comma, and a question mark. With a one-word title that references classical music and no human element, it is more likely than not that Rooney is going to venture ever further from her earlier work into the realm of abstraction.
Literary Darlings
We got a new book from Dolly Alderton (when you’re a favorite literary author your books are mentioned by name “the new Dolly Alderton” rather than title), whose essay collection Everything I Know about Love quietly took the reading world by storm. Now Good Material is a Read with Jenna Pick. It’s great to see Alderton rise, her last novel Ghosts was a book that fit into the old definition of rom-com in a way that I loved (adult, serious, funny in a certain way).
Inventive short story writer Kelly Link who has meme’d for years about writing her novel, has finally published her novel. Because her jokes are often about how hard it is to write a novel, I was surprised to learn that The Book of Love is 640 pages, turns out it didn’t take a long time because she was struggling!
Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age was a huge book in publishing when it came out, something with literary bonafides that crossed over and hit with lots of regular readers (the elusive goal for many publishers and editors). I find the pig on the cover of Come and Get It slightly unsettling, but also with that color, undeniably cool. Can’t wait to read and see what she’s done next.
There’s also Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Orange, and nonfiction stalwarts Sloane Crosley and Leslie Jamison whose books all hit the bestseller list and that have been, unsurprisingly, everywhere.
Breakout Debuts
Of the eight non-celebrity debut novels that hit the New York Times bestseller list last year only one of the eight was not a major book club or Book of the Month pick. That makes Knopf’s Martyr! By Kavneh Akbar an amazing achievement to kick off the start of 2024. With no major pick, they made Martyr! a bestseller on a brutally competitive list with good old-fashioned, full-press institutional literary support. Advance praise includes the above authors mentioned Leslie Jameson and Tommy Orange, as well as Mary Karr, Clint Smith, and John Green to name a few. The author has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, etc. While connections like these are impressive, make no mistake that plenty of authors with the same kind of resumes don’t hit the list. My bet is that the book is also good!
