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The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing?
This is not one of those periodic “End of Reading” Atlantic click bait essays. Americans—well, the kind who read books or newsletters about books—are well-versed in the challenges with literacy and education that have stretched on for decades. Rather, today we’re tackling the multi-year, fairly rapid—at least relative to book industry speed—radical change that book publishing has experienced over the past decade.
First, the entire industry boomed in Covid—writing is a hobby and reading for pleasure is, too—and has trudged along as it usually does, staying flat, growing a little over the years since 2020. But for the past decade the market for nonfiction has slowly collapsed. What has happened in the last ten years1 is that the overall industry has grown modestly, but fiction and nonfiction have basically flipped positions. In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago.
The nonfiction collapse has profound implications for the industry. Nonfiction, historically, has always been seen as the more stable part of the business for logical reasons. The demand for nonfiction has always felt more predictable than fiction. Novels are complete imaginations often written by relatively obscure strangers. Nonfiction has experts and clear topics of interest. Want to lose weight? Grab a diet book. Want to learn about World War II? You got options. Presidential memoir? Maybe not these days, but sure. And nonfiction books are written mostly by famous people or experts or popular quacks—also known as people with a built-in “platform.”
Nonfiction being more predictable and stable means that nonfiction book advances have typically had a higher floor than those of fiction and, somewhat counterintuitively, are sold on less material. Celebrities have probably gotten millions for a cocktail napkin-worth of material (if that). Other nonfiction proposals can range anywhere from 30-120 pages but usually end up in the middle of this range. You’re paying the author for their public stature, not necessarily their literary prowess. These books are treated more like a commission, the term “book advance”, although it refers to all books, likely comes out of nonfiction because authors are advanced a stack of money to entice them to set aside some of their time—instead of engaging in speaking, television, teaching, politics—to write a book. Whereas most novelists are advanced money to revise a full manuscript they’ve already written.
The paradigm of nonfiction being the more stable category is no longer the case. Part of this is platform unpredictability— it is less and less certain which platforms will translate directly to book sales. Media also isn’t as concentrated; you can’t depend on coverage on a few national news programs to push out copies but rather a parasocial connection—even with a relatively smaller reach—between author and reader is likely to translate to stronger sales. Bunnie Xo has a large social media following for instance (2 million on Instagram) but isn’t an established household name such that you’d think her book would be the third bestselling nonfiction hardcover this year.
However, the nonfiction decline is far less about the changing nature of “platform” and the fractured media landscape, and more about a precipitous falloff in demand. No amount of platform is going to change that interest across the board in nonfiction from celebrities down to science has been slowly disappearing. Even if nonfiction is stable and more predictable than fiction in the abstract, it’s by far worth taking the risk on an unknown novelist if the return is potentially 4x as much. Let’s bring the nonfiction collapse into current day context. Two weeks ago, the entire hardcover nonfiction bestseller list sold 42,000 copies, whereas just the top