I was at a publishing conference in late 2022 when someone on a panel said, with considerable confidence, that the pandemic’s effect on reading habits had been “temporary” and that things were “returning to normal.” I wrote down the quote because I wanted to remember it, not because I agreed with it. I disagreed then and I disagree now. The pandemic changed how, what, and why people read, and many of those changes are permanent. Publishing will be dealing with the consequences for decades.

I want to be specific about this, because the conversation tends to drift into vague generalities about how “people read more during lockdown.” That’s true, but it’s the least interesting part of the story. The interesting part is what happened next, after the lockdowns ended and people went back to their normal lives, carrying new reading habits with them.

The Audiobook Explosion

Audiobooks were growing before the pandemic, but the growth rate was modest. What happened during 2020 and 2021 was closer to an explosion. People who had never listened to an audiobook before started listening because they wanted to consume books while doing other things: cooking, cleaning, exercising, staring at the wall in existential dread. Many of those new listeners kept listening after the pandemic receded.

The numbers tell part of the story. Audiobook revenue in the US has roughly doubled since 2019. But the numbers don’t capture the qualitative shift, which is that audiobooks went from a niche format used primarily by commuters and frequent travelers to a mainstream format used by a much wider range of people. I know retired teachers who now “read” three books a week by listening while they garden. I know college students who listen to course readings while working out. The identity of the audiobook consumer has changed, and it’s not changing back.

For publishers, this has real implications. Audio rights, once an afterthought in contract negotiations, are now a major revenue line. The quality expectations for audiobook production have gone up dramatically. In 2019, a competent narrator reading in a quiet studio was sufficient. Now listeners expect full performance, distinct character voices, pacing that matches the emotional content of the scene. We’ve had to rethink how we approach audio for every book we publish, and we’ve had to budget accordingly.

There’s also the question of whether audiobooks are “really reading.” I find this debate tiresome and slightly elitist. If someone absorbs the contents of a book through their ears instead of their eyes, they’ve read the book. The delivery mechanism doesn’t change the content. What does change is the relationship between reader and book, and I think publishers who pay attention to those differences will make better audio products. A book that works beautifully in print might need a different kind of narrator, or even a slightly different edit, to work in audio. We haven’t fully figured this out yet as an industry, but we’re getting there.

The Genre Shifts

One of the most visible pandemic-era changes was a massive shift in genre preferences. During the worst of the lockdowns, readers moved away from thrillers, true crime, and anything involving disease or societal collapse. This was understandable. When you’re living through a global health crisis, the last thing you want is a novel about a global health crisis.

What replaced those genres was surprising. Romance and fantasy saw enormous growth, which made sense as escapist choices. But so did literary fiction about small, domestic subjects: family relationships, community life, the ordinary textures of everyday existence. I think people were looking for reminders that normal life existed, that there was a world of small pleasures and manageable problems beyond the overwhelming global situation.

The interesting thing is that these genre shifts have persisted. Romance continues to dominate in a way it didn’t before 2020. Fantasy, especially the subgenre sometimes called “romantasy,” has become one of the biggest categories in publishing. And that market for quiet, domestic literary fiction? It hasn’t gone away. Readers who discovered they liked novels about people having dinner and talking about their feelings have kept reading those novels.

At ScrollWorks, this affected our thinking about what to publish. We’d always leaned toward literary fiction, but the pandemic reinforced our belief that there’s a real, sustainable audience for books that don’t rely on high-concept plots or genre hooks. Still Waters is a good example. It’s a quiet book about ordinary people in an ordinary place, and it’s found readers who connect with it deeply precisely because of that ordinariness. Pre-pandemic, I’m not sure it would have found the same audience.

The Rise of BookTok and Social Discovery

I remember the first time someone mentioned BookTok to me. It was 2021, and I didn’t understand what they were talking about. A year later, BookTok was driving more book sales than any traditional marketing channel, and publishers who had spent decades cultivating relationships with newspaper book reviewers were scrambling to figure out how to get a twenty-two-year-old in Austin to make a sixty-second video about their novel.

The pandemic accelerated the shift from professional gatekeepers to peer recommendation as the primary discovery mechanism for books. People stuck at home turned to social media for book recommendations, and they found that recommendations from regular readers, people who just loved books and wanted to talk about them, were often more useful and more trustworthy than recommendations from professional critics. BookTok was the most visible manifestation of this, but it happened across platforms: Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Discord servers, group chats.

This has been genuinely disruptive to the publishing industry’s traditional marketing model. For decades, the path to book discovery ran through a handful of major newspapers and magazines. If the New York Times reviewed your book favorably, you’d see a sales bump. If NPR mentioned it, your book would appear in bookshops across the country. These channels still matter, but they no longer dominate. A single BookTok video can sell more copies than a New York Times review, and the demographics of the audience are completely different.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, the democratization of book discovery is genuinely good. Books by diverse authors, books published by small presses, books that the traditional media establishment would have ignored, now have a path to finding readers. That’s wonderful. On the other hand, social media discovery tends to favor books with strong hooks, beautiful covers, and content that translates well to short video. Literary fiction with subtle pleasures that unfold over 300 pages is harder to sell in sixty seconds than a romance with a killer premise.

The Print Resurgence

Here’s something I didn’t expect. Print book sales went up during the pandemic and they’ve stayed up. Not ebooks, which saw a temporary spike during lockdowns and then returned to their pre-pandemic plateau. Physical, hold-in-your-hands print books. This defied every prediction I’d heard from tech-minded industry observers who were certain that the pandemic would accelerate the shift to digital reading.

The explanation, I think, is that people who spent all day staring at screens for work wanted something different when they sat down to read for pleasure. A physical book offers a kind of sensory relief that an e-reader doesn’t. It has texture, weight, a smell. It doesn’t ping you with notifications. You can’t accidentally check your email while reading a physical book. In an era of overwhelming digital stimulation, the analog object became more appealing, not less.

This has practical implications for publishers. We’ve invested more in the physical quality of our books: better paper, more thoughtful cover design, special editions with features that make the physical object worth owning. I think the era of treating the print book as just a delivery mechanism for text is ending. The physical book is also a design object, a piece of craftsmanship, something that you display on a shelf and that signals something about who you are. Publishers who understand this and invest in the physical quality of their products will have an advantage.

The Subscription and Serialization Models

Another pandemic-era development that has reshaped publishing is the growth of subscription-based reading. Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, and similar services were already established, but the pandemic pushed more readers toward subscription models, partly because of convenience and partly because reading more books per month made a flat subscription fee more economical than buying individual titles.

This is a complicated development for publishers. On one hand, subscription models increase readership. On the other hand, they tend to compress the economic value of individual books. When a reader pays $10 a month for unlimited access, the per-book payment to the publisher can be quite low, especially for longer works. This creates incentives that I find worrying: pressure to publish shorter books, to use cliffhangers and serialization to keep readers subscribed, to prioritize volume over quality.

Serialization, in particular, is having a moment. The pandemic created an audience for serial fiction, partly through platforms like Wattpad and Royal Road and partly through Substack and Patreon, where writers publish chapters on a regular schedule. Some of this is excellent. Some of it is obviously rushed, published before it’s ready because the subscription model demands regular content. As a publisher who believes strongly in the editing process, the pressure to publish fast and frequently makes me nervous.

The Mental Health Connection

One of the most significant and least discussed pandemic changes is the explicit connection that readers now make between reading and mental health. Before the pandemic, people read for entertainment, education, and pleasure. Those motivations haven’t gone away, but a new one has been added: people now read as a conscious mental health practice, in the same category as meditation, exercise, and therapy.

I’ve seen this in our reader surveys and in the reviews our books receive. People write things like “this book got me through a difficult time” or “reading this helped with my anxiety.” These aren’t just figures of speech. They’re literal descriptions of how people are using books. The pandemic made everyone more aware of their mental health and more intentional about the activities that support it, and reading is one of those activities.

For publishers, this means that the emotional experience of reading a book matters more than ever. Not in a manipulative, engineered-for-tears way, but in a genuine, does-this-book-make-the-reader-feel-something-real way. The books that succeed in this new environment are the ones that offer authentic emotional experiences, whether that’s the comfort of a well-told romance, the intellectual stimulation of a great piece of nonfiction, or the catharsis of a novel that deals honestly with difficult material.

Where This Leaves Us

The publishing industry has a habit of treating disruptions as temporary. Digital publishing, self-publishing, social media marketing: each time, the initial reaction was “this will blow over,” followed by years of scrambling to catch up when it didn’t. The pandemic reading shifts are no different. They’re here to stay, and the publishers who adapt to them will thrive while the ones who wait for “normal” to return will struggle.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve tried to lean into these changes rather than resist them. We’re investing in audio. We’re building relationships with online book communities. We’re paying more attention to the physical quality of our print books. We’re thinking about the emotional experience our books offer and whether that experience matches what modern readers are looking for.

I don’t think any of this is revolutionary. It’s just paying attention to how the world has changed and adjusting accordingly. But in an industry that can be surprisingly resistant to change, paying attention feels like a competitive advantage.

One final observation. The pandemic didn’t just change individual reading habits; it changed the conversation about reading itself. Before 2020, talking about what you were reading was a niche activity, something you did with fellow book lovers or in the context of a book club. During and after the pandemic, reading became a mainstream topic of conversation in a way it hadn’t been for decades. People posted their reading stacks on Instagram. They discussed novels in group chats. They treated their reading lives as part of their identity in a public, visible way that would have seemed unusual ten years ago. This cultural shift benefits everyone in publishing, from authors to booksellers to publishers like us, because it means reading is no longer a private, slightly eccentric hobby. It’s a shared cultural practice that people are proud to participate in. That’s the pandemic’s most lasting gift to the book world, and I don’t think we’ll ever go back.

You can explore our current catalog and see how we’re putting these ideas into practice at scrollworksmedia.com/books.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We think about this stuff so our authors can focus on writing.