book publishing isn't getting worse, you're just not looking hard enough

on the myth of the midlit apocalypse and why great books are still everywhere if you dig past the algorithm.

the argument around whether or not “is book publishing dead” has been circulating for a few years now, especially in the wake of booktok’s popularity — and to a lesser extent, bookstagram.

while booktok’s rise to fame is more recent — having exploded in 2019 thanks to @kathyellendavis, who made videos on the platform recommending books — bookstagram has been around since at least 2014 or 2015 and saw a 31 per cent increase in book-related content in the early stages of the pandemic in 2020. reading was becoming ‘cool’ again and these spaces reshaped how we find books.

as these platforms grew, so did their influence on what people were reading. publishers took notice, sending advanced review copies (ARCs) to bookish content creators and using these channels as low-cost, high-impact marketing tools. in theory, this was a win-win: readers got early access, and publishers reached new audiences.

but it also flattened the landscape. instead of surfacing a wider range of books, we started seeing the same titles everywhere. not necessarily the ‘best’ books, but the ones most marketable to an algorithm. discovery became less about what you found and more about what you were fed.

this doesn’t mean, however, that the book publishing industry is ‘dead,’ it just means you need to work a little harder at curating your algorithm.