If your social media algorithms think you care about books, you could be forgiven for believing it’s a buoyant time in American fiction. Seemingly every week there’s news of a first-time author scoring a big advance. In just the past few months, the over-$500,000-advance club has welcomed journalist Charlotte Runcie’s Bring the House Down (in which a theater critic files a career-ending review of an actress he’s slept with), Stegner Fellow Jemima James Wei’s The Original Daughter (about two competitive sisters), and climate reporter Emma Pattee’s Animal Sounds (set in Portland, Oregon, after a catastrophic earthquake), among others.
In the $250,000-to-$500,000 range, there’s Amy Rossi’s The Making of Birdie Rhodes, Lauren Wilson’s The Goldens, and Grace Flahive’s Palm Meridian. That’s not to mention the many $100,000-to-$250,000 deals this fall for debut novelists, or deals that went to a private auction, such as the one for prominent culture critic Rayne Fisher-Quann’s Complex Female Character.
As one debut author who landed a deal between $250,000 and $500,000 at auction this year tells me, the money is something they “really could not have in my wildest dreams imagined.” It “changed everything about my life in ways that are difficult even to describe.” (For one, they were able to quit their day job.)
New York City’s literary scene is also buzzier than ever. Independent publishers such as Wonder Publishing and Dream Baby Press routinely host packed readings around town, while parties thrown by literary magazines such as The Drift and Forever Magazine have become staples of the social calendar. It’s a far cry from the “total dead zone” that was the city’s literary scene five years ago, 31-year-old novelist Jordan Castro says, when there was “nothing exciting happening, and it was hard to look out at the culture and feel like there was any sort of vitality.”
While all of this is wonderful for young authors and their readers, inside the major publishing houses, editors are struggling to ignore a troubling trend. More than ever, people are only buying the same few titles, if they’re buying books at all. At a recent wedding full of “English majors and minors,” one editor at a major publishing house found that when conversation turned to reading, every guest would “without fail name four books. It would either be Lessons in Chemistry; Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow; some esoteric NYRB Classics book; and maybe Sapiens. That happened to me, I would say, 12 times,” says the editor. “This is the demographic we rely on, but these were the only books they’d read all year.” (A common reason given: “This year’s actually been crazy.”)
Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove Atlantic and the go-to editor for 1980s New York’s literary Brat Pack, admits that it’s one of the most frustrating periods of his 46 years in the industry. “The conventional wisdom in this business has always been that 20 percent of your list carries the other 80,” he says. Today, fellow executives lament that it’s become closer to 5 percent carrying the remaining 95. (Last year, Penguin Random House revealed that just 4 percent of its titles earn 60 percent of its profits.)
Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove Atlantic, admits that it’s one of the most frustrating periods of his 46 years in the publishing industry.
For those in the industry, the gulf between hype (those giant advances and claustrophobic readings) and actual sales is frustrating. This October, when the culture magazine Nylon published a feature on the “new class of literary It Girls,” book editors rolled their eyes. Many of the mentioned authors had notable online profiles and media connections, but editors had access to their numbers, and very few of the books had any sort of life beyond their buzzy launch parties. “Without looking I can tell you that some of the books mentioned probably have sales in the three figures,” tweeted Erin Somers, a reporter for book-trade newsletter Publishers Lunch. “Legit spit out my coffee,” replied Lisa Lucas, senior vice president at Knopf Doubleday.
“Colleen Hoover is the It Girl of publishing,” one editor at a major house tells me, citing the 43-year-old Texas romance novelist, whose most recent book shifted 800,000 copies on publication day alone, adding to her over 20 million copies sold thus far.
Publishers continue to spend on big advances because, given that everyone now buys the same few books, if you win, you win big. And yet, one editor at a legacy publishing house says it feels “like an unsustainable bubble that is going to pop when I see these deals for mid-to-high six figures, or even low seven figures. I know that book is not going to earn out or make money. Any company—it doesn’t matter how big they are—can only take so many of those hits before something goes wrong.”
“Without looking I can tell you that some of the books mentioned probably have sales in the three figures.”
It doesn’t help that today’s editors can no longer rely on their relationships with the press to boost an author’s sales. Just a few years ago, there were at least a dozen stand-alone book sections in newspapers across the U.S. Now, The New York Times Book Review is one of the few left, and even a great review there “doesn’t really bring readers to the book in the way that it has for the last several decades,” says Entrekin. Another editor at a legacy publishing house put it more bluntly: “Reviews have nothing to do with sales anymore.”
“Before, you’d get your book on NPR, and that was 30,000 sales,” says another editor. “‘Now, your author goes on NPR, you sell nothing. I watch the numbers—it’s like five copies, maybe.” Even debuts that seemed to capture the media’s attention, from Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi (published in 2022) to Julia Fox’s Down the Drain (published in October), didn’t do a huge amount for their publishers’ bottom lines.
Given the intense competition for a hit, and publishers’ seeming inability to predict one, auction prices can easily balloon. “The size of deals is often not representative of the quality of the book,” says one editor. Rather, they’re “more a sort of game-theory manipulation between the agent and different editors who are competing and trying to speculate about what everyone else is going to do.”
“Before, you’d get your book on NPR, and that was 30,000 sales. Now, your author goes on NPR, you sell nothing.”
Following the 2021 death of beloved independent publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano—known for finding and mentoring many promising young writers, including Tao Lin and Sam Lipsyte—all of the legacy publishers quickly started “throwing large sums of money at anybody who was associated with him,” recalls Castro, who worked at DiTrapano’s New York Tyrant Magazine for five years. One such author, Gabriel Smith, tells me the money he and his peers have received has been “life-changing.” (Smith’s first novel, Brat, will be published by Penguin next June, followed by The Complete, which Penguin also purchased.)
The hope is that a new literary Brat Pack might emerge from DiTrapano’s scene and sell as well as Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Tama Janowitz did four decades ago. So far, publishers have largely encountered pale imitations instead. “I’ve seen an increase in completely illegible submissions this fall,” one editor tells me. “Agents are coming with what seem to me half-cooked projects just because the writer wrote for [shuttered downtown newspaper] The Drunken Canal one time.... Those books come out, and they flop.”
The most optimistic moments of my conversations with editors came when discussing literary life beyond New York City’s debutants. Entrekin has been cheered by the newfound success of 55-year-old Irish writer Claire Keegan, whose recent hardcover novellas, such as Small Things Like These and So Late in the Day, are selling handily. He mentions London’s upstart publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions, whose authors have received four of the past eight Nobel Prizes in Literature. And in the U.S., he says, Nashville, Seattle, and Chicago have newly joined the likes of Los Angeles and the Bay Area as market-making hubs of literary life.
Another editor is soothed by the fact that entry-level salaries in the industry have risen by more than 20 percent since 2020, something that, when combined with an increased tolerance for remote work, is allowing a broader swathe of people to consider a career in the industry. “It’s allowed for more flexible and crucially more diverse staffing across racial and socio-economic lines. And I think that ultimately, that’s going to be the thing that actually saves the industry.”
Louis Cheslaw is a writer and former editor at New York magazine. He lives in London