The Great British Nonfiction Panic

Treating podcasts as the enemy

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It started December 17 in The Guardian. Emma Loffhagen wrote that nonfiction books, which had seemed unstoppable in the decade leading up to the pandemic, offering explanations for such phenomena as Brexit, Trump, #MeToo, climate upheaval, and the Obamas, are suddenly unsaleable: “The category is down 8.4% [in units sold] between last summer and the same period this year, nearly double the decline in paperback fiction, and down 4.7% in value.”

Authors and agents told Loffhagen that nonfiction books are getting harder to place with publishers, who are determined to meet the moment’s demand for escapist lit. To hell with social justice; give me romantasy.

What little nonfiction still gets published, she continued, isn’t thoughtful, well-researched, high-quality fare. It’s “pop politics or this really jargon-heavy writing on niche topics—the history of resistance through food, or whatever.” She quoted an author who maintains that “a lot of the nonfiction being commissioned at the moment is essentially people capitalising on those with large followings. It feels very Instagram-coded. Did this need to be a book? Or could it have been a caption?”

The demon behind these trends is identified as podcasts, which have “turned public intellectualism into bite-size chunks of entertainment. Why spend £15 on a book about one issue when a few podcasts can explain it on your commute? It’s certainly a hard sell for nonfiction publishers.” Podcasts are viewed as direct competition for nonfiction, and they’re said to be winning because they’re easier than books. You might not absorb the information as well, but you can listen to them while washing the dishes or walking the dog.

Loffhagen’s article went old-media viral.

The Telegraph followed in a matter of days. As recently as 2023, it argued, “nonfiction was in such rude health that it could spawn popular stereotypes. In 2023, for example, we met ‘Waterstones Dad,’ the metropolitan middle-class man with an impeccably centrist reading-list: Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens; Steven Pinker’s Rationality; anything by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. But two years is a long time in publishing. Nonfiction sales have decreased by 8.4 per cent in the last twelve months…”

The Telegraph, too, blamed technological distractions. It also took a shot at the publishing industry for publishing so much crap in 2025. There was Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto, a vapid recounting of her apparently unconsummated affair with Robert F. Kennedy; Michael Wolff’s All or Nothing, his fourth insider account of the Trump crowd, which leans heavily on the nothing; the Slutty Chef’s Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef, which was received by critics as bland and undercooked; Joan Didion’s Notes to John, a queasy-making posthumous exploitation of the author’s private notebooks; and Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, the 2018 memoir that in 2025 had its authenticity challenged (it’s being litigated).

The Times weighed in earlier this month: “… something has gone seriously wrong with nonfiction. When did the big magisterial titles so common on late 20th century bookshelves disappear? Where did they go? Is there anything left to read for those who aren’t interested in ghostwritten celebrity memoirs or self-help manuals?”

After updating the facts—sales of nonfiction books turned out to be down 6 percent, not 8 percent in 2025—The Times resumed the attack on podcasts. “The boom in podcasts (UK listenership reached an estimated 15.5 million people in 2025) has stolen huge chunks of traditional nonfiction audiences, not just because authors who appear on them give away the best bits of their books, but because listeners can absorb from podcasts the kind of knowledge they would once have only been able to get from thoroughly researched tomes.”

The newspaper quoted Mark Richards, co-founder of Swift Press: “Until very recently,” he says, “if you wanted to hear about a subject in any kind of depth, a book was the place to go. It was a monopoly format. Once the internet started, yes, you could go and research online, discover the history of the Tudors or whatever, but you’d probably spend ages. Whereas now I do think, with podcasts, there’s a format that for the first time ever is a viable competitor to the book.”

Richards went on to declare literary biography dead: “To be honest, biography has been going for the last thirty years. I mean, there was a time when a biography of a writer or an artist might actually top the charts. But the last time I could think about that happening was Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life. That was, like, fifteen years ago.” The Times helpfully added that the top five bestselling literary biographies of the past twenty years were all published over a decade ago, and that sprawling histories by big-name authors are also out of fashion.

Bringing up the rear was The Spectator. Said the great Sam Leith, literary editor of the magazine and author of The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (Sutherland House, 2024, and coming this spring in paperback): “We who care about books as vectors of deep and lasting knowledge, and of personality, are in a tight spot. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a podcaster stamping on a shelf of books—for ever.”

I’m not about to deny problems in the nonfiction world. This newsletter would be rather empty without them. Throughout the English-speaking world, substantial works of researched nonfiction are becoming relatively scarce and it’s more difficult than ever to build a career as a writer of such books. The big publishers, especially, are drawn to sure things, celebrity memoirs and big-name self-help, and less inclined to back a challenging project with middling upside. It’s also true that in the US book sales across the board have been flat for fifteen years while the economy has grown and inflation has had a nice run, meaning that book publishing is 40 percent less significant to the American economy than it was fifteen years ago. Much to worry about.

But perspective is warranted, and you can find it, here and there, in the aforementioned articles. Several commentators noted that certain categories of nonfiction remain resilient and that it only takes one or two blockbusters to change the entire conversation—6 percent is easily made up.

It’s still possible for relative unknowns to have break-out hits in nonfiction, even if they don’t have a social media platform. Three examples: Chloe Dalton’s nature memoir Raising Hare; archaeologist Neil Price’s comprehensive history of the Vikings, The Children of Ash and Elm; Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain, his 2021 investigation of the US opioid crisis. Says agent Toby Mundy: “If the subject matter is good enough and the book is well executed enough, then it doesn’t matter if you’re famous or not famous.”

I don’t have much to add to this discussion. I do want to defend the podcast. Not wholeheartedly. About two years ago, in SHuSH 243, I expressed annoyance with the hosts of Acquired. They’ve made a habit of blatantly ripping off nonfiction business classics, with minimal attribution. They also have the temerity to boast of the depth of their research, which usually amounts to reading a book and turning in the equivalent of a high-school-level book report.

Ripping off great works of nonfiction with minimal attribution is now a staple of podcasting. It’s not cool. But here’s the thing. Podcasts are hardly the first medium to treat books this way, and they’re nevertheless a boon to the book world.

For most of the century before podcasting, magazines were strip mining book content. There were excerpts. There were long articles or essays that effectively summarized books. There were reviews of books. There were conversations with authors. Newsweeklies, men’s magazines, general interest magazines, fashion and women’s magazines—they all did it.

Magazine exposure was invaluable to the book sector. Magazines helped books find their audiences. They were one of the primary ways people decided what they wanted to read. Publishers competed to get featured in the right magazines and mentioned on covers, and if they were fortunate enough to get good play, they used it to bolster pre-sales to book retailers.

Magazines also trained and surfaced literary talent—Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, among countless others. They often subsidized the development of promising book projects. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood began as a New Yorker assignment, as did Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Magazine work was a great way to subsidize the research and reportage of a substantial nonfiction book. The feature and weekend sections of newspapers played similar roles.

It was annoying, if you were in the book business, to see a magazine present the best parts of your latest release to a much larger audience than it was going to get on its own—periodical readerships of several million were common. And the magazines could use book content to sell expensive advertising, something a book publisher could never do. The economics seemed unfair, and there was great fear in the publishing community that magazine attention could satisfy the public appetite for whatever a particular book was selling, undermining sales. Fights broke out over whether or not the book was appropriately credited by the magazine. Yet, on the whole, magazine attention was a strong net benefit to books.

Most of the monthlies and weeklies have now vanished or been greatly diminished, with the notable exception of The New Yorker, where some weeks a third of the content is directly or indirectly harvested from books, often with minimal attribution. Magazines are a spent cultural force. It is frequently noted that even attention from The New Yorker fails to promote book sales like it once did.

So thank goodness podcasts are stepping into the void. They are a great way for authors to get attention, and for readers to find their next books. Like newsletters, they can help writers keep themselves visible between books. They can subsidize research and reportage and test ideas in front of real audiences. They can help aspiring talent prove itself and earn attention from publishers. (Same goes for Substack newsletters.) The podcast isn’t as neat a fit for the book sector as magazines were—talking is not writing, and not every host can make the leap—but it certainly helps.

It was amusing to read the British complaining about the rise of podcasts this month while the US press was handwringing over the decline of the Washington Post’s book section. Intermediaries change. The appetite for books has survived movies, radio, television, and the internet. It will survive podcasts, too.

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