The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing?

Many non-fiction books are essentially PR material for the author. They don't write these books, because they have interesting thoughts that are too complicated and long for a blog post, but because their career plan involves being some kind of a public intellectual and writing a book is a part of that. They often have a single idea, that in itself might be an interesting one, but it's simple enough that it could indeed be entirely fleshed out in a blog post or an essay rather than a book.

Otherwise fully agree with your points. The non-fiction market is easier to saturate as there's only so many unique angles on something, and people will look for something that feels authoritative rather than something fresh, while in fiction you're likely to read many similar premises because it's what you like.

If that was the cause, 1) book sales would drop overall, and 2) nonfiction books would perform the same as fiction books. The OP says neither are true:

"What has happened in the last ten years 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."

They suggest some explanation:

fiction/nonfiction reading habits are extremely gendered, with 80% of women making up the fiction market, and nonfiction being a more 50-50 proposition.

and

Proportionally we are gaining many more women as readers and losing our few men.

EDIT: But they add: "The collapse of nonfiction is less a “male reading crisis” than a massive breakdown in the social fabric of trusting education, expertise, or any authority other than follower count and force of personality."

It's not some grand conspiracy, people are going to gravitate to what is more efficient/convenient lol

That means attention can be sated by microdosing on free attention morsels rather than paying for something long-form that requires investment.

People drowning in free attention and dopamine might not have a need to pay for a premium attention sink.

This is happening at an enormous scale. An evening book or prestige movie might be supplemented by doom scrolling sloppy content and memes. Instead of authors being paid for supplying entertainment, ads are being watched.

The companies that empower this are worth trillions.

To be clear: this isn't meant as a rhetorical question. There are AI generated works I'm happy to consume. It's meant as a real bar that you can clear. But it's also non-trivial, and the goalposts are moving as AI becomes better and easier to use.

> The collapse of nonfiction is [...] a massive breakdown in the social fabric of trusting education, expertise, or any authority

People don't want to read non-fiction because they don't trust the people writing it.

I don't buy (new) nonfiction because it now feels like playing Minesweeper.

Edit: to clarify: this is not me accusing authors of non-fiction books to always have some evil agenda to push. One human only has limited capacity and things will always fall through the cracks. Do your own research with the constraints you actually care about, if you can.

I was on Spotify the other day checking out the fantasy audiobook offerings and the only item that wasn't absolutely repulsive was Jim dale reading Harry Potter. Everything else comes off like cheap asset flips on steam or thinly veiled rants that you'd find on obscure subreddits.

It's both an extremely competitive field, and it's incredibly hard to convince people to read your book even for those near the top of their field in terms of quality.

But non-fiction writers have an additional problem, that I think the article glosses over:

If I like, say, romance novels, I'm not looking for new books to be dramatically different to what I read before. A lot of genre readers - the by far largest genres are romance and thrillers - expect books that stick closely to expected conventions. Romance readers will form a mob with pitchforks if there isn't a happily ever after, for example.

Non-fiction, on the other hand, must set itself apart. Why should I read your How to Win Friends and Influence People look-alike when I can read Dale Carnegie's original?

It needs to be very different or clearly better and I have to find it in between the many hundreds of thousands (not an exaggeration; might even under-estimate the number at this point) of new non-fiction titles every year, where fiction titles are not:

You don't need 50 books on meditation, or 50 books on repairing your washing machine, but you might have 50 books in the same narrow sub-genre of fiction because it's what you like to read, and so the opportunity cost of picking up an unknown name feels very different.

A whole lot of the non-fiction market is also being cannibalised by blogs, tiktok, youtube videos and the like - and LLMs -, whereas a video is more likely to tease the fiction book rather than replace the need for it.

Even worse, it’s shallowly regurgitated ideas of other people’s prior works, with music and visuals and all.

Recently, on my formerly favourite new history channel [0], I noticed editing quirks (that would have never passed the bar if a human read it) and overly consistent vocalization… it's jumped the shark :(

[0] Fall of Civilisations https://youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations