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?

Fatigue with the news cycle is a big part of the picture, Broussard says, albeit not the whole one. Another thriving subcategory is books on democracy and civic engagement. A number of titles he names—Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid, Rebecca Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End—also appear on the Independent Press Top 40 bestsellers list, hinting at the broader persistence of readers’ desire for self-education. But in choosing what to order for the store, Broussard is currently being conservative with nonfiction. The sales reps—publisher’s representatives who pitch titles to retail accounts—have admitted to him that everyone is being conservative with nonfiction. “I think I hear a little bit of panic in their voices,” he says.

There seems to be a general consensus, or at least a hope, that this trend is cyclical. But, at publishing houses, there can be a tendency to treat declining sales as a foregone conclusion rather than a set of conditions publishers have the capacity to influence. The editor I spoke to—on the condition of anonymity—shared that, lately, when she and her colleagues bring nonfiction projects to acquisition meetings, she feels a chill in the room, with people “leaning back and looking away or not engaging” with what’s being pitched.

A common reason such books get turned down is that they feel “too small,” meaning they might not appeal to a big enough audience. But “we determine how big a project is,” she says. She has seen this attitude manifest in other ways, as when the press pulled publicity support from one of her memoirs right before its release, on the grounds that “memoir is just not selling right now.” (Not with that attitude!) For the industry to see a genre struggling and use that to justify gutting the infrastructure for supporting it does a disservice to countless readers, she says. It also puts the cart before the horse—“and we’re the horse.”