Oldpub’s Slow Death Goes Public
Every few years, oldpub attempts to assure everyone, mostly itself, that everything is fine.
“Sales are up!”
“Readers are excited!”
“New voices are flourishing!”
What they ignore are the layoffs, imprint closures, and mergers that look more like mutual hostage situations than a business strategy.
Despite it all, the Big 5 publishers managed to maintain the illusion … until it finally shattered against reality.
Buried in industry coverage, but obvious to anyone paying attention, lay a simple devastating fact: Trade publishing sales dropped 9.4% year-over-year in a single month.
And according to Author Media’s reporting, it isn’t a blip driven by holiday calendars or supply chain hiccups. It’s structural.
And it’s terminal.
Meanwhile, the indie scene that oldpub has spent a decade dismissing as low-quality and irrelevant, is growing.
Why is newpub soaring while deadpub is, well … dead?
Let’s break it down.
Oldpub still clings to sales metrics built for 1998:
bookstore data
Nielsen BookScan illusions
the New York Times bestseller list.
As if that last item represents anything other than coordinated marketing.
But I digress.
Even when Amazon seized more than half the U.S. book market, oldpub kept insisting that the digital revolution was temporary.
But as The Top Author bluntly put it in their 2025 industry outlook:
“Self-published ebooks and audiobooks continue to outpace the growth of traditionally published works.”
And those numbers are no longer obscure. Thanks to a birds-eye view of global publishing trends, the truth is unavoidable:
Self-published eBooks dominate genre fiction
indie audio books are booming due to flexible pricing and rapid production
newpub authors are earning more per sale than their traditionally published counterparts; sometimes by an order of magnitude.
Readers now buy from Amazon, Kobo, Webtoon, author websites, Patreon, and Kickstarter; not from brick-and-mortar stores measured by BookScan.
In other words …
Oldpub is measuring the wrong market.
Their readers haven’t vanished, they just left the decaying, overpriced Manhattan building for the wide open air of newpub.
In short, the Big Five built a market that no longer wants them.
Author Media’s breakdown points to the problem nobody in Midtown wants to mention out loud: Most of oldpub’s output simply isn’t written for the readership that actually buys books.
Legacy houses chase trends that died years ago. They aim their marketing at people who don’t purchase books. They staff their editorial departments according to the preferences of Columbia studies grads instead of the preferences of the audience.
The result?
Books written for …
committees
sensitivity readers
award juries
Twitter
In other words, no one who still reads for pleasure. And certainly not younger readers.
When you build an industry on chasing prestige rather than serving customers, collapse is just a matter of time.
Meanwhile, newpub quietly eats your lunch.
While oldpub was obsessing over sensitivity reader dictates and repositioning imprints, indie authors spent the last decade doing the unthinkable:
They wrote books people actually wanted.
Genres cast out by olpdub like urban fantasy, space opera, techno-thrillers, harem fantasy, and Christian adventure fiction have exploded. And they’ve done it on Amazon, patronage sites, and author-owned platforms.
Newpub treated readers like customers, not political obstacles. What’s more, they took the lesson to heart that books aren’t propaganda, but entertainment.
And here’s the part that finally toppled the media firewall:
Even as traditional publishing shrinks, the indie sector keeps expanding.
More authors are going full-time. Genres once given up for dead are thriving. And every day, more and more readers are changing their buying habits permanently.
If that pattern looks familiar, it should. The same hubris and aloofness destroyed Hollywood.
Most commentary frames oldpub’s demise as a crisis when it’s really a return to the historic norm.
The cultural monopoly that once decided what counted as “real literature” has lost its grip. Readers have already embraced a future in which the storytellers who deliver consistent value inherit the industry.
Legacy publishing doomers were wrong after all. The fall of oldpub isn’t the end of reading, just the shattering of the bottleneck.
And that’s great news. Because when the dust settles, the authors who survive will be the ones who always understood the first principle of writing:
Stories exist to entertain, uplift, inspire, and speak truth; not to appease bureaucrats in glass towers.
Oldpub spent decades ignoring that truth.
Newpub built its entire model around it.
That’s why one is collapsing and the other is rising.
The future belongs to those who show up for their readers. And that’s good news for everyone who still believes storytelling matters.
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Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.