When good books don’t sell, it could be because ‘quite sellable’ isn’t good enough anymore
‘I think this manuscript might have found a publisher ten years ago, but I’m not convinced it stands out enough in today’s market.’
I know as I write this sentence in a manuscript assessment report that it’s going to be an incredibly frustrating thing for the author to read.
In this kind of manuscript, the writing isn’t poor – actually it’s pretty good. The characters aren’t flattened archetypes, they’re well-rounded and believable. The story makes complete sense. In another era, it might even have been considered a strong submission.
So why isn’t that enough?
Because publishing has changed.
The problem may not be the writing or the manuscript
One misconception aspiring authors can have is that agents spend their days reading and rejecting terrible books and ignoring the good ones.
They don’t. The terrible books are dispensed with very quickly. The time they take is spent on the rest – the books that deserve more consideration because they might have a chance of selling.
Many manuscripts on submission are certainly not terrible. Many are perfectly competent. They contain good writing, appealing characters and stories that work well enough.
The problem is that ‘works well enough’ is no longer enough.
Agents are looking for books they can’t stop thinking about.
Every week they’re reading dozens, sometimes hundreds, of submissions while knowing they’ll only sign a handful of new clients each year. They don’t need another competent novel. They need the manuscript that makes them clear their evening because they have to know how it ends.
That’s a completely different standard.
Every book has to be sold several times
Many writers think publication depends on convincing one person: a literary agent.
In reality, any book has to survive a whole chain of decisions.
An agent has to believe they can sell it.
An editor has to persuade their colleagues in the marketing and sales departments that they should acquire it.
The sales team has to convince booksellers to stock it.
Booksellers have to decide to give it shelf space, and may have to take customers to that shelf.
Finally, readers have to choose it over thousands of alternatives.
At every stage someone has to be enthusiastic enough to champion it.
And ‘good enough’ doesn’t create champions.
Why marketing can’t solve a demand problem
Recently, dating coach Amy Chan published a refreshingly honest account of spending $44,000 promoting her latest book. Her article explores which marketing techniques she believes worked and which didn’t.
Reading it, I wondered whether the real issue was about marketing books at all. What if the problem isn’t that this or that avenue of promotion failed, but that the market itself is saturated?
Dating advice is one of the most crowded areas of non-fiction publishing. Readers already have shelves full of books about attachment styles, green flags and red flags, finding the right partner, recovering from heartbreak, modern dating and healthy relationships. Add to that thousands of podcasts, YouTube channels, TikTok creators, newsletters, therapists and now AI.
That’s an extraordinarily difficult market in which to launch yet another book.
The purpose of marketing is to help people discover a book. It can reveal, channel and amplify demand for a book if the need or desire for that book was previously unsatisfied.
What marketing does not do is make people urgently want a book on a subject if they feel they’ve already fully explored that subject.
People often try to solve a demand problem with marketing. But if the demand isn’t there, all the marketing in the world won’t help.
Books that succeed capture the zeitgeist
When a non-fiction book truly takes off, it’s often because it becomes part of the wider culture.
Sticking with the topic of dating, think of books such as The Rules, or Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, or He’s Just Not That Into You.
When they came out, these weren’t simply successful books. They were fresh enough to capture the imagination, and they expressed ideas people were perhaps feeling or had previously heard, but were not quite able to articulate. Thus, they became shorthand in conversations people were already having. People quoted them. Friends recommended them. They entered everyday language. They achieved the holy grail of book marketing: genuine word-of-mouth success.
The same thing happens with fiction: a novel doesn’t usually become a massive bestseller simply because it’s beautifully written, there’s usually something extra, something distinctive. Sometimes it’s because it is capturing exactly the cultural moment that’s emerging at the time that book is published (which makes the fact that it will have been sold to its publisher about two years earlier, and written even earlier than that, even more impressive – the lead time on books is looong).
The current example in fiction is Yesteryear. Whether it anticipated growing scepticism about the highly curated ‘tradwife’ lifestyle or simply happened to arrive just as public attitudes seem to be beginning to shift, it is becoming part of a much bigger conversation than the novel itself.
Marketing didn’t create that conversation, the conversation was already there. A successful book just gives people a way to participate in it, and when that happens that book will sell above and beyond its expectations.
But even successful books are no longer competing only with other books. They’re competing with podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, newsletters, online courses and AI. That raises an uncomfortable question for every aspiring non-fiction author…
Is this even really a book?
Partly because of the long lead time associated with books – as well as the proliferation of rival media, and the often lengthier commitment books demand from their audiences – the question of format is relevant here. That long lead time isn’t just remarkable when it works, as with Yesteryear. Sometimes it’s the very reason a book is the wrong vehicle for an idea.
Not every good idea is necessarily best brought to market in book form. Some ideas or cultural moments would simply miss their window if they had to go through the years-long book writing and publication process, and so some are better as a single, brilliant 15k-word magazine feature. Some deserve a series of newspaper articles. Some would flourish as a podcast series, or a limited TV series. Others are perfect for TikTok, YouTube, a Substack newsletter or a Ted talk.
Sometimes an author has enough material for an excellent forty-minute podcast episode but not enough fresh insight to sustain 70-90k words – and that isn’t a criticism, it’s simply recognition that different ideas belong in different formats.
If you are any kind of subject matter expert, the goal shouldn’t necessarily be ‘write a book’, at least not anymore. Having a book published may still feel like the most prestigious expression of your expertise, but publishing a book that doesn’t sell isn’t a big help to you or anyone else.
That’s because prestige isn’t the same thing as impact. If your ideas would reach ten times as many people if you produced them as a newsletter, podcast or video series, why insist on producing them as a book?
Instead, your goal should be to communicate your ideas in the form where they’ll have the greatest impact. If you can find the place where demand for your idea lives, you will find that marketing it will be much easier.
Are podcasts really selling your book?
Amy Chan suggests podcasts were among the more worthwhile promotional activities for her book. They certainly can introduce an author to new audiences, and podcasts are reliably listed as one of the best general avenues for marketing books.
But if a podcast interview explains most of the interesting ideas from a non-fiction book, many listeners will feel they’ve already engaged sufficiently with the topic, and so will feel no need to buy the book as well. (I can’t find it now, but I think here I’m paraphrasing a remark the journalist Helen Lewis made.)
This is not because podcasts are bad for marketing, or are cannibalising demand for the books they cover. It’s just because some books don’t offer substantially more than can be covered in a good conversation with a thoughtful interviewer, or in a Longread article, or in some other shorter format.
The landscape has changed. You used to be able to spin basically the content of a single article into a short book and have it be a big success – I remember conversations with other publishing professionals from the mid-2000s about such books, and it still seemed to be working as recently as about ten years ago. But ten years ago might as well be a lifetime if you’re trying to sell a book and you’ve missed the boat for your idea.
The non-fiction books that continue to sell after podcast appearances are usually those that contain much more than a single central idea. They provide greater depth with stories, evidence, exercises, detailed frameworks or insights that reward spending several hours with the subject, and provide the basis for longer conversations, bigger projects, or different directions for the reader. (That’s why a good manuscript assessment looks beyond the premise and the writing to consider the audience and wider market as well.)
If an interview with the author can completely satisfy a reader’s curiosity and thereby becomes a dead end for sales, it will be worth asking whether the content really needed to become a book.
The uncomfortable truth about publishing today
Publishing has become so competitive that authors can no longer rely on competent writing and energetic marketing. They must first ask whether their idea is distinctive enough, timely enough and substantial enough to justify becoming a book.
That’s why one of the things I ask when I assess a manuscript is ‘Why this book? Why now?’
Simply writing a competent manuscript is no longer enough. Even a beautifully written book without a compelling concept may struggle to find a publisher. An excellent idea aimed at a saturated market may struggle to find readers. And no amount of clever marketing can completely overcome either of those problems.
I know that’s difficult to hear. But it could also be liberating for a writer. It could shift the question from ‘How do I market this book?’ to ‘Is this book the strongest candidate for today’s market?’
Those are very different questions. The first assumes the manuscript is already the answer. The second asks whether there might be an even better book waiting to be written.
Does your manuscript answer the needs of its market? Is it correctly positioned? Is it even definitely a book? These are questions a professional manuscript assessment can answer.
