Non-Fiction Woes

 Earlier this year, Ceci Browning wrote a piece for the Times of London headlined, 

There’s a crisis in non-fiction book sales. What’s to blame?

Facts were facts, including this: "according to Nielsen, sales of non-fiction books in 2025 were down 6 per cent compared with 2024. It was the lowest yearly total since 2017, the sorry end point of years of painfully consistent decline." 

The article gets into some reasons for this, explaining that commercial presses are unwilling to take risks on authors without big platforms. Fine, and this is something indie presses may be more willing to work around, and actually help establish a platform.

But a conversation I'm having and hearing more is that no one wants to read depressing political books when our everyday politics is infuriating. It's not even infuriating for those of us on the left now; it's depressing, in that everything awful is a fait accompli. We have a fascist president who continues to enjoy widespread appeal amongst a certain segment - and not unpowerful segment - of our population, even as he shows who he is over and over, in so many terrible ways. I won't list them.

But suddenly, I recalled seeing the Z Magazine piece on the history of the South End Press (the press who kicked off this blog), and Cynthia Peters discussing the "middle years," with her start at the Press in 1983, firmly in President Reagan's first term, before he sailed easily into a second. She says:

We had to have the confidence to pick up the phone and solicit
titles from authors—with those books often representing years of work—even
though we couldn’t promise them royalties and, in all honesty, couldn’t promise
we’d exist the following year. We had to forge ahead knowing that the surest way
not to exist the next year would be to not make the phone call. And not existing
was more costly in political terms—in books not published, ideas not generated,
analysis not made available—than the cost of rejection or of appearing foolish
or of having to once again argue the Press’ case, which so many ridiculed as a
pipe dream.

 

Unless/until I find the archives of the South End Press, with financial records, I can't know what sales looked like from 1982-1988, let's say. I know co-founder Lydia Sargent says earlier in the same piece that the Press almost went bankrupt during this time, but to be fair, she actually says, "We

almost went bankrupt in 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984. 1985, etc." But I imagine as Reagan rode a wave of popularity, with cost-cutting measures and anti-union talk *and* actions (lest we forget air traffic controllers), and so many other missteps, as preppy became such a huge culture in the US and Thatcher cracked down happily on all manner of progress in the UK, the South End Press and its allied indie left presses must have hit some sales lows.

But maybe not? I recall seeing a friend at a left-leaning indie in 2018 and she said happily, "We are definitely enjoying the Trump Bump," though in her case, she meant angry progressives reading up on how best to oppose Trump policies. His second term is different. It's more chaotic and more all encompassing, and many of us are feeling overwhelmed, tired, and at worst, powerless. Many readers turn to romantasy over history or politics. And I do worry for Haymarket and Verso and Feminist Press and many others, whose bread and butter is fueling a left that, at least amongst the quarters not actively engaged in the - or rather a - fight on the daily, is taking a mental health break. 

I'm inspiring myself - best to go to those sites and buy some books. Join me?