Nonfiction, Still Withering

I published a version of this newsletter in September 2024. This morning I was writing a new post about this same topic, and whaddya’ know, the situation two years ago was not all that different than it is now, so this is a revised and updated version.

There seems to be less researched nonfiction being published, and even less being acquired. Theories for why include the increasing difficulty of getting a large enough advance to buy one’s time to write, changes in employment that leave fewer with the ability to take time off to do the research, lessening interest from readers, and the popularity of newsletters like this, as well as podcasts.

At Belt, we receive numerous queries daily, but we receive few for the kind of nonfiction I’m eagerly looking to publish. Many of the queries we receive are for memoirs; if they are also researched, they are usually family histories. We also receive many queries for historical fiction about an interesting event in the history of the region: sinc…