Nonfiction Is Struggling. Publishers Are Making It Worse

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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

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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 befor