The books are finally closed on 2025—accounting takes a while, y’all—and the news is pretty solid: publishing sales rose 2.5% last year to $33.4 billion, per the Association of American Publishers.

When you think of the publishing industry, you’re most likely thinking of the trade segment, comprised of adult fiction and nonfiction, children’s and YA fiction and nonfiction, and religious presses. Sales in this segment increased 2.7% last year.

So why are the vibes so weird when the numbers are pretty good? Many factors are at play, including:

Revenue ≠ profit. Publishers brought in more dollars in 2025, but the increase in sales did not keep pace with their costs.

Consumers are feeling the squeeze. The disparity between the industry’s 2.5% increase in sales and 0.4% increase in units sold suggests that revenue gains were driven by higher prices rather than increased demand.

2026 isn’t looking better. Unit sales were down 0.3% in the first half of this year, and the numbers would have been worse without the buoys of Theo of Golden, Project Hail Mary, and Freida McFadden. But there’s still time to turn it around.

For more conversation about the state of publishing, follow the Book Riot Podcast. — RJS

It’s been four years since we were last blessed with an Emily St. John Mandel book, but our wait is almost at an end. Her latest novel Exit Party is out on September 15th, a story set in Los Angeles in 2031 after a violent civil war ends in the collapse of the United States (gulp).

Mandel’s unique stories can’t be placed in a tidy box. They play with space and time, tapping into fractured timelines and parallel realities as they stretch into multiple genres.

With just over a month till Exit Party hits shelves, now is an excellent time to begin reading Emily St. John Mandel and get in on some of that easter egg action. Here’s a reading pathway to help you get started.

📚 Learn more about Mandel’s style and how these reads connect.

Inventing and gripping Western horror

Luke Larkin’s The Unheld combines the moral dramas, iconic landscapes, and untamed wildernesses of Western classics with a startlingly original monster and a creeping sense of dread. 

Perfect for fans of Stephen Graham Jones, T. Kingfisher, Victor LaValle, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the rich and immersive story alternates between the points of view of a scrappy twelve-year-old, an exiled Northern Cheyenne police officer, an Englishman occult society member, and the monster itself—a horrifying creature made out of the severed hands of its victims.

This is not about comedian Anthony Jeselnik. Anthony Jeselnik genuinely loves books and wants people to read more. Terrific, totally on board. Go forth and may your efforts succeed. This is about a phrase of his in this very good profile in The Los Angeles Times: “I’m trying to make reading cool again.” 

This is an idea that crops up now and again, that the cure or safeguarding of reading culture can and must come from making reading “cool.” In the inexorable logic of popular culture, cool is the currency of attention and therefore survival, so if you want something to stick around, it needs to be cool (or sexually transmitted, which is trickier for books). 

Let me offer this instead: poppycock. People who read have never really been cool. People who write certainly haven’t been. There are the odd cool writers, but they are cool people who happen to be writers (Joan Didion) or that got associated with coolness after they were famous already. But reading itself has always been the redoubt of the weird. The loner. The eccentric. The oddball. That readers find each other is powerful because of that intrinsic strangeness of being a reader at all. 

What reading offers is in some ways the opposite of cool. It is the solace of knowing that there are other weirdos out there who care about things that are expressly uncool, who like complexity, ugliness, indeterminacy, and the range of human messiness that cool is always trying to distance itself from. 

If people read more because they think it is cool, I am all for it. But I suspect that if people read more, it will be because they want a respite from trying to be cool, from playing the game of doing things primarily so that others will think you are cool for doing them. Which is where most of us started, whether we liked it or not. — JO

We’re sure you’ve heard about Libby, the app that services more than 22,000+ public libraries, but there’s another app you should know about if there’s a K-12 student in your life. Sora is kind of like Libby’s little sister, but geared towards students (you even log in using school credentials).

The free app also boasts some big numbers:

With Sora..

This back-to-school season, if you’re looking to help foster a life of reading in a young person, Sora is a great place to start. 

Here are some of the most popular titles students checked out on the app this time last year:

For more diverse titles, this list of picture books for Disability Pride Month has some great selections. —EE

Lit Mag News is your guide to all things lit mag. News, inside information, publishing advice, and more.

Come join the huge and growing community of writers and editors! Authored by Becky Tuch, a fiction and nonfiction writer, instructor, editor and mom, based in Philadelphia, PA.

Spotify Premium users can enjoy 15 hours of audiobook listening every month with their subscription. Put that perk to use with these three new audiobooks, each under 15 hours. 

🎧 The Good Parts by Evann Normandin – A love story about a woman who takes a memory-erasing pill after a terrible tragedy, and the man she used to love who comes back into her life as a stranger, hoping to woo her again. 

🎧 A Tender Age by Chang-Rae Lee – A contemporary coming-of-age novel about masculinity, identity, and the American Dream, inspired in part by the author’s own experiences.

🎧 Take What You Can by Naima Coster – Friends who first bonded as the only Black students on a study-abroad trip in France are now both married with baby girls on the way. When they decide to move to New York to raise their daughters together, they discover a lot has changed in the decade they spent apart. —VD

Melissa Pace is the author of The Once and Future Me, out this week from Holt Paperback. Below, she recommends three sci-fi historical fiction books.

My psychological thriller, The Once and Future Me, tells the story of a woman teetering between two realities, two possible selves: one a delusional schizophrenic housewife in 1954 and the other a time-traveling soldier from 2035. Her desperate quest for truth against the backdrop of 1950s America, with its smothering social conformity and constrictive gender roles, lets me explore how memory shapes identity and the consequences of one’s choices when love, history, and destiny collide.

Here are three books that powerfully combine historical fiction and science fiction: 

Time and Again by Jack Finney (1970): This cult classic was my first time travel novel and, nearly fifty years later, inspired me to attempt one myself. A blend of sci-fi, historical fiction, romance, and mystery, it tells the story of Simon, sent back to 1882 New York City in a government experiment, who soon falls in love and must make some hard choices. Finney’s book has had a huge influence on other writers like Stephen King, who, in the afterword of his novel, 11/22/63, called  Time and Again, “THE great time-travel story.” 

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (2014): Harry August relives his life over and over from his birth in 1919, retaining memories from each previous life, but powerless to influence the world, until a message from the future about a coming apocalypse changes everything. The book explores everything from the nature of our existence and free will to the threat of technology, to the power of memory, purpose, and love, as it cycles repeatedly through the twentieth century. 

Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979): Dana is a Black woman from 1976 who finds herself being pulled repeatedly back in time to antebellum Maryland to save the life of her abusive white ancestor, Rufus, so she and the rest of his descendants don’t flicker out of existence. Butler “set out to make people feel history,” and she most surely does, using time travel to show us the brutalities of slavery through Dana’s 20th-century eyes and sensibility as she’s forced to make increasingly painful compromises in order to both preserve her bloodline and stay alive. 

ThriftBooks is keeping summer reading going with Endless Summer, Endless Points, giving readers the chance to build their perfect summer reading stack while earning up to 200+ bonus ReadingRewards points on a single order.

The more books readers add to their cart, the more bonus points they can earn, making it the perfect time to squeeze in one more great summer read or stock up for the season ahead. Plus, readers can enjoy free domestic shipping on orders over $20, making it even easier to keep the pages turning.

Did you know? Perrotta’s Election was only published after Alexander Payne read the manuscript and was interested in turning it into a movie.

✏️ Missing syllabus season? Pick up these back-to-school romance novels.

🍿 Torrey Peters‘s genre-defying novella Stag Dance has been optioned for film.

🤣 Barnes & Noble names 50 of the funniest books ever written.

👫 Dating app Hinge is making audiobooks now.

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Vanessa Diaz, Jeff O’Neal, Erica Ezeifedi, and Danika Ellis. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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