You'll never find next year's talent by copying last year's hit

Flicking through TikTok the other night, I found a literary agent bemoaning the many challenges facing the publishing business, seemingly oblivious to the fact that one of the industry's biggest problems is entirely self-inflicted.

One major challenge, she said, was correctly identifying and reacting to coming trends in literary fashion. Romance is big right now, she commented, so most of the big publishers have a raft of romance titles on their slate. But what, she worried, if the demand for romance was about to slump?

Publishing being as swift as a concussed snail, many of the titles the big publishers battled to snap up last year won't hit bookshop shelves until 2026. And by then, fretted the agent, who knows what the next big trend will be?

Publishing is a business, and good art is its occasional by-product, but it's increasingly a business that's chasing its own tail: One smash-hit book about a super-powered wizard boy births a slew of Bargain Books-bothering copycats, until the public is sick of boy wizards and other assorted magical pre-teens and looks for something else to read. And so it goes, with each stand-out book inspiring every other publisher to seek out their own ersatz version in the hunt for the next big hit.

Well, here's a crazy idea – what if the next big trend isn't for one genre or another, but for books that are actually good, no matter what category they fall into? What if – and, please, stop me if I'm going too far here – the industry made variety and quality their primary focus, instead of trends?

Because here's the deal: There's always going to be a market for romances, fantasy books, historical fiction etc etc etc. Demand might ebb and flow, but readers will always seek out the best of whatever tickles their literary tastebuds. What they won't seek out is sub-standard versions of their favourite genres chucked out just to fill the shelves and chase whatever's seen as the current trend.

If the business is losing customers, it's because it isn't giving customers what they want. It's giving them what it thinks they want, several years after they bought better and more original versions of it.

There's snobbery at work here, too – the industry pats itself on the back for occasionally issuing the kind of thoughtful literary fiction that picks up chin-stroking reviews and statuettes while selling next to nothing but treats commercial fiction like the marketing of baked beans.

Commercial fiction doesn't need to be derivative, unimaginative or unchallenging. The best of it can be full of blockbuster action, big characters and zippy dialogue and still be as thoughtful and perceptive as the best literary fiction. Setting up divisions between 'high art' and 'low art' is for the birds. We read what we like; everything else is window-dressing.

The problem is that the business underestimates its readers – and if it finds itself with too many underwhelming books on its hands in 2026, that's because those are the books it spent years telling writers it wanted to see. Conditioning writers to rein in their imaginations and corral their creativity to suit market projections is bad for both art and business.