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Nonfiction Is Struggling. Publishers Are Making It Worse

The industry faults readers for declining sales, but its own decisions are to blame

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

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........

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