by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

A couple of items from the trad side of the business.

Book Sales Down

From Publishers Weekly:

Unit sales of print books had a slow start in 2026, according to data from Circana BookScan. Total unit sales fell 3.1% compared to a year ago for the quarter ending March 28, 2026, dropping to 163.5 million copies sold.

The young adult category had the steepest percentage decline.

This last bit concerns me. Is it phones, tablets, TikTok, or whatever else that keep kids from novel-length fiction? Are parents buying fewere books to give to their kids?

Book Deals Hard to Come By (File this under “New, What Else is?”)

Getting a traditional publishing deal has always been a challenge. Is it harder now? A column in USA TODAY says:

About 81% of Americans feel that they have a book in them, according to an often cited survey reported in The New York Times (from the early 2000s). Many aspire to write and publish a book in their lifetime, but only a small fraction see their work formally acquired and announced each year. A little over 2,000 fiction writers announced deals in 2025 on Publishers Marketplace.

***

[W]hen people ask, “Can anyone get a book deal?” what they’re often asking is something else:

• Is this still possible for people who aren’t famous?
• Do I have to know somebody in the industry?
• And if I do everything “right,” will it still take years?

In short: Yes, no and maybe. A book deal is attainable – to some extent. It’s also not a finish line. 

***

The publishing industry is consolidating, which means fewer imprints (and fewer editors)…When editors are stretched thinner, the time it takes to nurture talent – especially debut authors – shrinks. The industry’s ability to take a slow bet on a writer, to develop them the way record labels develop musicians or sports teams develop rookies, becomes increasingly rare.

***

Even when the book is good, “we have less places to sell things than we have in the past,” Carly Watters, senior literary agent at PS Literary, told USA TODAY. “A lot of things are more predicated on the appetites of a smaller group of people … there might be separate imprints, but they all share an editorial board meeting.”

Quality aside, a novel also has to be “sellable” to stand out in those meetings. “In my experience, (books) that are easily pitchable, meaning we can sum up – hook, line, sinker – in one sentence, that’s something that I can get people’s attention with,” Watters added. There are gorgeous books that are hard to summarize, she said. The kind you want to hand someone and say, “Just read it, then call me.”

Those books can sell. But it’s harder.

The article’s author spoke with a literary agent Eric Smith:

Plenty of his clients come from cold querying (sending an email or form pitch) with no connections in the industry. But also, his inbox – when he’s open to submissions – can reach thousands in a few months. Smith estimated he received around 3,000 submissions over roughly 90 days and signed a handful last year.

That number can seem terrifying until you remember something important: Most of those submissions weren’t “bad writers.” They just weren’t the right fit. Or the timing was wrong. Or the market was saturated. Or an editor had just acquired something similar. Or an imprint closed. Or an editor got laid off. Or the editorial board said, “We already have a slot like this.”

You can do everything right and still lose to the invisible calendar of the industry.

Consolidation makes that sharper. Smith described it plainly: Agents can’t send five projects in a row to the same editor without burning that bridge.

So yes, it can be more challenging now; not because the “gatekeepers” hate writers, but because the gate is servicing fewer lanes.

Comments welcome.