In the decade leading up to the pandemic, nonfiction seemed unstoppable. Readers flocked to books that explained a world upended by Brexit, Trump, #MeToo and climate upheaval. Titles such as Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women, and Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility soared up the charts. It felt as though reading itself was part of the civic response, a way to understand what was happening, and perhaps influence what might happen next.
Fast forward to the present day, and the picture is starting to look different: a recent report from NielsenIQ found that trade nonfiction sales have slipped sharply. In volume terms, the category is down 8.4% between last summer and the same period this year – nearly double the decline in paperback fiction – and down 4.7% in value. Though there have been some exceptions, such Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare and Want by Gillian Anderson, 14 out of 18 nonfiction subcategories have contracted.
Anecdotally, authors are feeling the pinch. After receiving a slew of rejections for a nonfiction proposal, one writer told me the feedback from publishers was that “nonfiction just isn’t selling”. Another has pivoted from nonfiction to fiction on her agent’s advice because “it’s hell out there”. A third told me that he’d heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t “Hollywood friendly” – ie made-for-TV memoirs.
Speaking to publishing insiders and readers, one word that cropped up repeatedly was escapism. The world is exhausting, so readers are seeking refuge rather than clarity. Some are disillusioned; the voracious reading of the past decade didn’t transform the world as many hoped. “I think there is definitely a sense of fatigue,” says Holly Harley, head of nonfiction at publisher Head of Zeus. “The news is terrible. People feel overloaded. That escapism is why we’re seeing such a rise in romantasy.”
Emily Ash Powell, journalist and host of a writing club, agrees. “Things feel so bleak right now in our own lives that people want to escape a little bit and borrow the lives of others,” she says. For Harley, this is also where the legacy of 2020 cuts sharply. “It’s awful, but a lot of the trend-led interest in social justice has fallen away,” she says.
In the months following the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the UK saw a 56% rise in sales of books by writers of colour in the year to 2021, and Reni Eddo-Lodge became the first Black British author to top the UK nonfiction chart. But that momentum stalled – in fact, a later analysis by The Bookseller found the post-BLM boom “failed to result in the promised broadening of publishing’s output”.
“I used to work at the publisher who published How to Argue With a Racist,” Adam Rutherford’s 2020 book, Harley says. “It had this vertiginous rise – and then it dropped off. You wouldn’t expect that for a bestseller.”
According to some authors, though, the problem is not one of demand but supply: are we simply publishing less high-quality nonfiction?
The industry “has become so risk-averse that everything they publish is boring,” one novelist, who wished to remain anonymous, tells me. “I read old nonfiction – narrative-driven, proper essay collections. But almost all new stuff is pop politics or this really jargon-heavy writing on niche topics – the history of resistance through food, or whatever. Like, who’s talking about that in the pub?”
Another author says part of the problem is too many books being commissioned because of follower counts rather than ideas. “A lot of the nonfiction being commissioned at the moment is essentially people capitalising on those with large followings,” she says. “It feels very Instagram-coded. Did this need to be a book? Or could it have been a caption?”
Nonfiction is increasingly competing with a glut of free – and often excellent – information elsewhere. Online video essays dissect politics and psychology in 20 minutes, while The Rest Is … behemoth has turned public intellectualism into bite-size chunks of entertainment. Why spend £15 on a book about one issue when a few podcasts can explain it on your commute? It’s certainly a hard sell for nonfiction publishers.
“Podcasts are in direct competition with nonfiction,” Harley admits. “Publishers have to be more agile.”
Powell agrees. “We’re so overloaded with content that [other media] almost ticks the box of nonfiction learning,” she says. “People feel they can get the same insight without wading through a book.”
The shift to audio, however, doesn’t necessarily mean an abandonment of nonfiction books. Audiobook sales have boomed; the share of nonfiction purchases in audio versus other formats has nearly doubled in five years, with 25- to 44-year-olds driving the trend. “Some authors now do four or five times their physical sales in audio,” says Harley.
Caroline Sanderson, a veteran nonfiction editor, adds a note of nuance. “There has long been an ecosystem going on here where these things support one another,” she says. “So the popularity of The Rest Is History podcast, for example, undoubtedly boosts sales of Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s nonfiction. Ditto Rory Stewart with The Rest Is Politics.”
It’s important to remember, too, what Harley describes as the “feast and famine” nature of publishing. “Since the pandemic, there haven’t been any runaway bestsellers that have led a group or subject class to spring up.” In contrast, past big sellers have included the likes of Bill Bryson with A Short History of Nearly Everything, and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, the blockbuster success of which helped define nonfiction markets in the 00s and 2010s.
And indeed, some subgenres seem to be holding their ground, or even growing. Biography and autobiography remain powerful, as do health, pop psychology and “smart thinking” titles, such as this year’s hit from Mel Robbins, The Let Them Theory.
The surge in self-help and personal development titles suggests a broader cultural shift: as interest in political or social justice books cools, readers increasingly reach for personal betterment instead.
For Sanderson, the biggest mistake is assuming nonfiction is a single organism. “The success of one book can change the whole picture. Nobody talked about the decline of nonfiction the year Prince Harry’s Spare was published.”
Harley concurs. “There are a few years in the last 20 where you get double-digit growth, and every time it’s because of one or two massive books. The drop-off between those blockbusters and what we call the mid-list is more stark now. Books either blow the doors off – or they sell weakly.”
What troubles Sanderson isn’t the sales cycle but the long game – as books increasingly come under fire with bans in the US and rising political pressures on education and libraries worldwide, the importance of defending rigorous, long-form nonfiction as a tool for critical thinking has never been clearer. “Regardless of sales, I hold passionately to the importance of long-form nonfiction in helping us understand the world,” she says. “We need it. Sales fluctuations are the weather; it’s the climate we need to worry about.”