20,000 readers of literary fiction...?

A few days ago, I quickly posted a TikTok about this piece in the Atlantic, which opens with an anecdote from a Columbia university professor named Nicholas Dames. One day, “a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. [The Literature Humanities course] often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.”

Students are reading fewer books than ever before—and we can debate why that is—making “reading books…akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time,” Rose Horowitch writes in the Atlantic.

On TikTok I said, “As an author who’s still alive today, I don’t want to think of my vocation (writing books) as something retro or something that’s dying or going out of style but I also know that there are about 20,000 readers for literary fiction. That’s not a lot of people.”

Several commenters (rightfully) asked me where the hell I got that number from.

Huh.

Where did I get that number from?

At first, I couldn’t remember. Did I learn it from an agent? I DM’d several people in publishing to ask if they’d ever heard this stat before. No one knew what I was talking about—but now they were curious about the source, too!

Finally, I found it in Christian Lorentzen’s review of Dan Sinykin’s book Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.

Here’s Lorentzen:

The editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house recently told me that she believes there are about 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in America and publishing any novel of quality is a matter of getting that book to them by any means necessary.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, because I’ve already heard it from everyone who’s mad at me on TikTok. How can I cite this number that has no actual data to back it up! What about all the people who read classics! What about all the people who aren’t American! What about Sally Rooney! What about [that other book that sold a lot of copies]!

All I can offer in my defense is that I read that number (20,000) in a review in July and it stuck in my memory because it sounds true. It might not be accurate, and I would love to see real data on this, but I’ve worked in the publishing industry since 2008. I’ve sold six books. I know first-hand how hard it is to sell literary fiction—and by sell I mean both to a publisher and to readers.

Literary fiction accounts for only 2% of the fiction market, according to Circana. There are, of course, literary novels that are launched into the stratosphere with all the publicity and marketing muscle that Big Five has to offer, hitting the bestseller lists and garnering critical acclaim and award nominations (look at All Fours or Martyr!, both from Penguin Random House). But is that because there’s such a huge audience for literary fiction, or is it because these books get so much hype that they reach readers who normally gravitate toward more commercial fiction?

Then there are literary novels from independents like McSweeney’s. Yr Dead by Sam Sax is one. It was longlisted for the National Book Award and has 6 (not a typo) ratings on Amazon.

I think it’s more plausible that a novel like All Fours captures all the “serious and consistent” literary fiction readers plus readers of other genres than it is that there are 100,000 diehard literary fiction fans out there. Is this All Fours reviewer part of the litfic fandom?

If you’re an author of literary fiction, you’ll be heartened to know that a lot of readers on TikTok are insisting there is a huge audience for your work.

I also got comments like this one, from readers who feel alienated by contemporary literary fiction.

I think one antidote to this distaste, or reluctance, is literary novels with genre elements. Sally Rooney is so successful because her novels are easy to read—and they’re romantic. Liz Moore’s God of the Woods was huge this summer because it’s a literary mystery.

The literary agent Danielle Bukowski wrote recently about taking cues from fandom to make lit fic more popular, so that Big Swiss and All Fours and Intermezzo aren’t random successes (“that’s why we are the Random House!”¹):

We need people to find books that they love and talk about them and then buy more and enjoy those and on and on. If they find those books while scrolling or from a bucket hat, I don’t care. But if we’re worried about literary fiction, we need to do a better job at locating and creating fans of literary fiction.

There are a lot of fans of literary fiction on TikTok. That’s why I joined the platform in 2022.

After spending the last two years trying to convince writers to pay more attention to BookTok, I’m thrilled to say that this week the New York Times called my client Betsy Lerner a 64-year-old “TikTok Star.” Betsy hired me to help with her content and outreach strategy for her debut novel Shred Sisters, a coming-of-age(s) about two sisters that Joan Frank in the Washington Post says is “the kind of novel readers won’t want to end…”

Shred Sisters is all over BookTok right now.

Betsy told the Times, ““After I got past the naked cowboys and kitty cats and all that, I found the BookTok people, and I was blown away. It’s just people loving books. And it’s actually made me love publishing again.”

If I’ve made you BookTok curious, I hope you’ll join me this Friday for my Chat Room conversation with creator Stacey Yu, who has over 100,000 followers on the platform. I’ll ask Stacey what writers should know about joining TikTok in 2024, best practices for doing outreach to creators about your book, and what tips she has for creating content.

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1. “Everything is random in publishing. That’s why we have that name. So the founder thought: Everything is random. Success is random. Best sellers are random. So that’s why we are the Random House.” — Markus Dohle, the head of Penguin Random House, during the DOJ trial