The next chapter
Alison Flood, who has written about books for more than 15 years and is comment and culture editor at the New Scientist, predicts what the future holds for the publishing industry.
The literary world has a fair claim to being able to predict the future
From Emily St John Mandel’s eerily prescient novel Station Eleven, set during a swine flu pandemic and published in 2014, to Margaret Atwood’s terrifying vision of a misogynistic America in
The Handmaid’s Tale, the literary world has a fair claim to being able to predict the future. But after having changed beyond all recognition over the last 25 years, thanks to the advent of e-books and Amazon, what lies ahead for the book world itself over the next decade?
Green issues first for this paper-heavy industry: publishers are signing up in their dozens to a new industry-wide pledge on sustainability, which will see signatories looking to achieve net zero as soon as possible, and by 2050 at the latest. But there is certainly no rush to predict the demise of print in favour of a forthcoming new device. ‘There is no death knell for the book,’ says Louisa Joyner, associate publisher at Faber & Faber. ‘The printed book is a fantastic technology; it’s really resilient.’ But when it comes to e-books, people are likely to be reading on the same device they’re working or calling from, rather than having a separate e-reader, believes Miranda Jewess, editorial director at Viper Books: ‘People will stop having multiple different sources of media, and the phone will become even more important than it already is.’
What we’ll be reading over the next decade, though, is set for major change, believe industry insiders. Over the past two years, readers desperate for comfort while living through a pandemic have been treated to a steady diet of cosy crime and ‘up lit’ – optimistic stories about human connections. ‘We’re going to move on from that, and want something with slightly darker themes,’ predicts Anna Boatman, a publisher at Little, Brown Book Group. ‘I think there will be more complexity in the stories that people are looking for, rather than reassuring happy endings, because I think we might be looking for ways to process what has happened to us over the last few years, but at a safe distance. So we’ll see high-concept fantasy, magical realism or dystopias that also show the indomitable nature of the human spirit. We won’t want depressing, but we will want journeys that contain a range of emotions, and the potential for the story to end in any way.’
The book world has been taking steps to diversify its mostly white, middle-class workforce, and to ensure, through the use of sensitivity readers (who check books for offensive content) that the diverse titles it publishes are getting it right. Publishers believe this will pay dividends over the coming years – particularly as a new wave of diverse young adult readers, who have been driving book sales through Tiktok, grows up. ‘These readers want books that reflect the world around them, the lives that they live and the people that they are, and I want to make sure we’re publishing them,’ says Anna. She points to an ‘increasing diversity in romance in the submissions that we’re receiving, across ethnicity and sexuality’. Diversity of all kinds is something Miranda is also predicting; The Maid
Nita Prose, with its neurodivergent protagonist, is ‘a sign of things to come’, with more non-neurotypical heroes and heroines set to hit our shelves. For Louisa, the whole industry needs a shake-up. ‘Publishing looks a bit like an oldfashioned Ordnance Survey map, where the agents were the church in every village and the publishers were the pub,’ she says. ‘The map has to change. More agents with different life experiences, ethnicity and class, as well as diversifying the publishing workforce, means that we will see more properly diverse writing.’
And vampires! Almost two decades after Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight hit our shelves, Anna thinks the undead are due a literary revival. ‘Vampires will rise again,’ she promises.