2028 Is When Traditional Publishing Plans to Quietly Kill Literary Fiction

My July 2025 study establishing that literary agents almost never read submissions for quality drew some notoriety and even animosity, but a surprising result was that a few people who worked in publishing reached out to thank me. An insider, who has asked not to be named, has given me access to significant information, which I have corroborated with other sources. The gist of it is that traditional publishing is not only aware of its impending cultural obsolescence, but actively planning it, with 2028 cited as the transitional year in which literary fiction, long held to be the pinnacle of prestige literature, is slated to lose nearly all of its institutional support. The major players want out.

This surprises people; the case must be laid out for it.

1: Publishing Is Actually Profitable

Publishers offer low salaries and expect their workers to spend long days in shabby offices. Editors’ administrative tasks comprise a full-time job; book-related work, if done at all, is relegated to evenings and weekends—often, the first person to read an entire manuscript is a freelance copyeditor. The argument publishing uses to justify this behavior is that it is a low-margin, difficult business. Is it?

No. Publishing is highly profitable. These are publicly traded companies; you can find the numbers yourself. Bibles sell. Classics sell. Cookbooks sell. Franchise authors sell. Celebrity memoirs sell. New releases sell… when the publisher shows up to market them. The industry benefits enormously from the free marketing it compels from authors, ranging from debut novelists who really should not be asked to throw their life savings into their own marketing (but who often must do exactly that, or this book deal will be their last) to celebrities with personal publicists. The “Big Five” behave the way they do not because they are struggling, but because they are cheap. Smaller presses, on the unfavorable end of the monstrous institutional advantages the large ones confer on their titles, do struggle—they suffer not because the book trade is inherently difficult, but because publishing’s veneer of gentility masks a cutthroat, zero-sum game of positioning and publicity.

Individual titles are high-variance assets—a single book might fail, might make millions—but portfolio publishing is a robust business; the major players print money for themselves and use the claim that “it’s a difficult business” to justify sharing as little of the rewards as possible.

2: … But New Releases Are a Mess, and Not for the Reasons You Think

Publishing is profitable; new releases cause trouble. Publishers feel expected to produce them, but it’s harder to convince readers to prefer them over books that have been tested by time. Most serious readers are so burned out by trade publishing’s fast-fashion culture, their filtering method is: Wait ten years. Reviews and TV spots were traditional sales drivers for new books; the former are less available, and the latter have become less effective. The bigger issue, though, is not that publishers don’t know how to make new releases profitable, but that it’s politically touchy. A new book brings career risks to those who support it. Reading a manuscript that later becomes controversial can end an editorial career. Lead titles that do not earn out their advances become scarlet letters for everyone who worked on the book. Most importantly, a publisher that does too good a job for a new title risks drawing resentment from authors who were poorly treated in the past. The main reason word count limits are stringently enforced is that editors don’t want to deal with complaints by authors who were forced to butcher their books and who—correctly—blame the mandated butchery for weak reviews and lost longevity.

Editors tell authors not to hold high expectations because “we don’t really know what works.” The truth is that they know exactly what works; the problem is that, if it becomes known, every author will demand it. This makes each new release a new variable in a system of political equations. The text, notably, is not all that relevant. Publishing is all about leverage and social status. Text only matters to the industry when something is quoted online by someone taking offense.

3: Publishing Expects to Veer Right

Publishing isn’t “woke.” It’s capitalist. Publishing holds the uncharitable view of readers that they will only accept authors and protagonists of their own race and gender. Most buyers of new releases are women; thus, male authors are seen as sales liabilities. This is a problem, but it gets worse. The aspirational and photographic culture of social media favors the gender that both men and women prefer to look at, and that’s not us dudes. There’s no conspiracy to drive white men out of publishing; it’s just commercial optimization. And it is absurd to suggest that racial minorities are privileged in publishing across the board, when it is only wealthy and extremely well-connected people in those groups who benefit from publishing’s diversity initiatives. A black American at the median income has the same chance of signing a literary agent as an average white man: clap-ass zero.

White men can, in fact, get published. The best way to find a literary agent has always been through one’s family publicist, and plenty of the people who have those (in fact, most) are white. If you’re white and male but don’t have a family publicist, you can take the JD Vance route—you shit on the place you grew up, so publishing can magnanimously recognize you as the one who got out. And this is exactly the same deal publishing offers non-whites! If neither of those works for you, you can always join that subset of public intellectuals in which there is the least competition: conservatives. As a centrist-liberal, you are competing against an entire Ivy League of well-connected and polished speakers who have been trained for decades to say nothing but say it well. As a leftist (i.e., someone who truly understands sociology and economics) you will be inadmissible into most institutions no matter how much you excel; the smarter you are, the more you piss them off. But there’s plenty of room on the right, and the identity politics of the aggrieved white male are a natural fit.

Publishing’s embrace of so-called “woke” politics, in the 2010s, was profitable. In the past few years, though, we’ve seen a surge of successful right-wing publishing efforts, and one of the top-line executive conversations in trade, although few will admit to having taken part, is the question of how to steer resources toward them without drawing general resentment. One of the most impactful and famous bestsellers of all time was written by a right-wing white man, a veteran with a flair for political speech. No publisher would want to miss out on the next book like that.

4: AI Is Everywhere

In March 2026, Hachette canceled the U.S. launch of Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl after accusations were made that she had used generative AI to write the book. In reality, she was dropped for sales; the U.K. launch underperformed expectations, and the publisher wanted out. Still, the opportunity to grandstand as “being on the side of humans” was not overlooked. It therefore continues to propagate itself that traditional publishers are staunchly anti-AI, when in fact they use it for all sorts of purposes. Comparable titles (“comps”) are determined using it; those proposed by an author or literary agent are typically deemed too flattering, and ignored in favor of those the LLM selects. Sensitivity risk analysis is also performed using these tools; in spite of common complaints about the pervasiveness of sensitivity readers, ordinary titles are typically not seen to merit the price of a full read.

Publishers are not yet ready to use AI for editorial decisions, though they’re slowly converging on it. Quantitative commercial scoring, once it is trusted, will put an end to the subjective debates that currently divide acquisitions meetings into warring factions. Publishers don’t have much direct interest in using AI to write, except to continue the work of franchise authors after they pass on; discussion focuses more on using AI to clean up celebrity books and possibly to mine slush piles, as those acquisitions come with human authors who’ll do free labor to market them.

5: Did HBO Kill Epic Fantasy… or Is That an Excuse?

HBO’s Game of Thrones began to deteriorate in the sixth season, but the seventh and eighth were so unpopular with fans that they turned one of the biggest television phenomena in history into a punchline. People still talk about The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. No one talks about Thrones except as a cautionary tale. The spinoffs have their fans, but Hollywood now considers general-audience penetration for fantasy series improbable, and book publishing has taken note. In the 2010s, epic fantasy series were seen as potential IP blockbusters; in the 2020s, they’re not, and so publishers don’t want them.

Readers still want epic fantasy. But publishers do not want—direct quote—“all the fucking conversations.” Epic fantasy runs long; traditional publishers don’t want to deal with authors who cite fantasy novels’ word counts when ordered to butcher. The genre is seen by publishing as ill-defined and indulgent. It can be steampunk rather than medieval. It can have sci-fi backstories. It can have 19th-century social norms in its settings instead of 13th-century manorialism. It can use Japanese or Korean storytelling conventions. To publishing, epic fantasy is seen as a troubling loophole through which innovations leak into other genres. They’re closing it up because they don’t want to worry about ideas they haven’t sanctioned, but also because they don’t want to deal with high word counts or market authors they consider demographically underoptimized.

Worldbuilding is out. Good and evil are out. Conlangs are, are you fucking kidding me? “Spicy” stories with star-crossed pairings between half-orcs and mindflayers are in.

6: Trad-Pub’s Real Fear: Direct Sales

Traditional publishing has suffered from enshittification, due to the disintegration it has inflicted on the places where people discover books, but enshittification is also an existential threat to self-publishing, thereby improving trade’s leverage. For a long time, Amazon has been a single-point-of-failure for independent authors. So long as that remains the case, traditional publishing will enjoy the advantage of authors eagerly taking lousy deals, for they’d rather do that than dedicate hours of each day to mastering an adverse sales platform. Traditional publishing can handle self-publishing’s existence as long as it doesn’t work very well—it enables them to cherry-pick the emerging successes while the financial losses are on someone else’s ledger.

Publishers believe that success in self-publishing relies on high-frequency output and massive, loss-leader ad budgets. So long as this is true, even successful self-publishing will face a prestige deficit. Indie books won’t be “real books” because the presumption will be that their popularity was engineered or opportunistic rather than organic or based on textual merit; the general public is still twenty years behind on figuring out how little trade publishing cares these days about text. If a platform using full-text recommendations emerged, making it possible for authors to find readers by writing well rather than manipulating social-proof systems, it would be a nightmare for traditional publishing, which to this point has been able to say, “You’re with us or you’re with Bezos.”

7: The 2028 Problem

You can say the word “twenty” in publishing and still be invited to boozy lunches and boozier after-work parties. You can also say “twenty-eight” and nothing will be taken amiss. I would advise you not to say “twenty twenty-eight” in trade publishing, as there is a good chance you will be heard by someone who knows what you are talking about. It may not come to pass—I am not a prophet, and not all things that are planned are done—but 2028 is the year in which publishing intends to take literary fiction up to the farm so it can run free. Epic fantasy was led to the gallows a decade ago—franchise authors are still allowed to write it, but nobody new will be built up to that level—and the reading public has not revolted. That was the test case.

As for literary fiction, the planned dereliction is more subtle. No one will admit directly that it is going on; the conversation will come out of a split mouth. Executives and senior editors will claim that publishing has for too long “allowed authors to write whatever they want” (which is not true) and that “participation in marketing is no longer optional.” Award-winners once considered invincible will be dropped for sales; this will happen in waves. There is a market-liberal sales pitch for this change, and there is a right-populist version; which one will be used depends on the political direction publishing assesses the nation to be taking at the time. All this will probably go off quietly, but if announcements must be made, the first of the Big Five is likely to do so in early September, and the other four will follow suit within the next two months, trusting the presidential election to pull media attention away from their own operations. This will be a very safe time for publishers to stuff authors into cannons and fire them off into the sun, so you should expect to see a lot of cancelled launches.

The long-held wisdom has been that literary fiction should not be—or even cannot be—self-published, as it is not algorithmically favored. Starting in 2029, self-publishing will be its only option. A few franchise authors will keep their institutional support, so long as they can keep their sales firm enough to spray money, but debuts will be dead if they depart from formulaic commercialism. Can literary fiction survive in a world where authors must build audiences outside of institutions? Maybe. Under the dominion of social media and Bezos’s algorithm, the answer is probably no—it will become as irrelevant as the eight-legged essay used for the Qing Dynasty’s civil-service examinations or the dactylic hexameter of Hesiod. But no one knows what will be built between now and then. Enough people care about the literary novel—not enough who work in publishing, but enough outside it—that it might survive.