People Never Stopped Wanting to Read
Everybody’s known for years that Americans are losing interest in books.
Apparently, everybody forgot to tell bookstores.
Books-A-Million, America’s #2 bookstore chain, is having another banner year. Customer transactions are up, new stores have exceeded expectations, and the company plans to open fifteen more locations.
And even more surprising, it isn’t any overhyped self-help book or celebrity biography that’s driving physical book sales.
It’s good old fiction.
Along with manga and graphic novels, fiction has been one of the biggest causes of Books-A-Million’s growth this year. CEO Terry Finley described sales as “an inch deep and a mile wide.”
That statement suggests the results aren’t coming from one or two blockbuster titles propping up the rest of their business.
Readers are buying lots of different books. And the latest numbers suggest this growth isn’t limited to a single bookstore chain. New publishing industry data released yesterday show total sales rose 3.9 percent during the first half of 2026. And contra the sticks-in-the-mud who tell us only nonfiction is important, adult fiction grew more than twice as fast.
And the story doesn’t end there. Sales increased 8.2 percent through June, including a 19.3 percent jump that month alone. Not to be left out, trade paperback sales were also up 8.4 percent.
That’s before we even get into manga …
Read the full post on Substack.
Ten years after readers made my hit novel Souldancer a Dragon Award winner, I’m bringing it back in a definitive hardcover edition alongside the new companion novella The Other Side of Fear.
