Making predictions is a fool’s errand. I am going to do it anyway, because we are at the start of a new decade and the publishing industry is changing fast enough that even a fool’s guesses might be useful as a starting point for conversation. These are my best assessments of where books and publishing are headed over the next ten years. Some of them will be spectacularly wrong. I am okay with that.

The Consolidation Will Continue, Then Reverse

The trend toward consolidation in publishing, which has been underway for decades, will continue for the first half of this decade. The big five will likely become the big four, possibly the big three. Corporate owners will continue seeking efficiency through mergers, and imprints that do not hit profit targets will be folded into larger ones or shut down entirely.

But I think the second half of the decade will see the beginning of a counter-trend. As the major publishers become fewer and larger, they will become more risk-averse and more focused on guaranteed sellers: celebrity memoirs, established franchise authors, books tied to existing media properties. This will create a growing space for smaller publishers to occupy, because the authors and readers who are underserved by the major houses will need somewhere to go.

I am already seeing signs of this. More literary agents are approaching small publishers with manuscripts that the big houses declined, not because the manuscripts were bad but because they did not fit the increasingly narrow commercial profile that large publishers require. Ten years ago, many of these books would have been published by mid-tier imprints within the major houses. Those imprints are disappearing, and the books they would have published are becoming available to independents like us.

The opportunity for small publishers in the coming decade is enormous, if we can solve the distribution and discoverability problems that have always constrained us. More on that below.

Audio Will Become a Primary Format, Not a Secondary One

Audiobooks have been the fastest-growing segment of the book market for several years, and I see no reason for this trend to slow down. But I think something more fundamental is going to change: audio will stop being treated as a derivative format and start being treated as a primary one.

Right now, audiobooks are produced after the text is finalized. The text comes first, and the audio version is an adaptation. I predict that within ten years, many publishers will be commissioning audio and text simultaneously, with some authors writing directly for audio performance and having their work transcribed to text rather than the other way around.

This is not as radical as it sounds. For most of human history, stories were primarily oral. The written-text-first model is a relatively recent development. The technology of recorded audio makes it possible to return to an oral tradition while preserving the permanence that writing provides. I think many authors, particularly memoirists and nonfiction writers, will find that speaking their books produces a more natural, engaging voice than writing them.

For publishers, this shift will require new skills. Audio production is a different craft from book production, and most publishers, including us at ScrollWorks, currently outsource it entirely. I expect that by 2030, audio production will be an in-house capability for any serious publisher.

Direct-to-Reader Sales Will Grow Significantly

The dominance of Amazon and other large retailers has been the defining distribution reality for publishers over the past fifteen years. I think the next decade will see a meaningful shift toward direct-to-reader sales, driven by both technology and economics.

The technology part is straightforward. Platforms for building direct sales channels have become cheap and easy to use. Services like Shopify and Bookshop.org have made it possible for even tiny publishers to sell directly to readers with professional-quality storefronts and fulfillment. The friction of buying directly from a publisher has dropped dramatically and will continue to drop.

The economics part is more interesting. When a publisher sells through a retailer, the retailer takes 40-55% of the cover price. When a publisher sells directly, they keep all of it, minus payment processing and shipping. For a small publisher with thin margins, the difference between a 45% margin and a 90% margin is the difference between struggling and thriving. As more publishers realize this, and as the tools for direct sales continue to improve, I expect to see a significant migration of sales toward publisher-owned channels.

This does not mean bookstores will disappear. Independent bookstores, in particular, provide something that no online channel can replicate: curation, community, and the serendipity of physical browsing. I think bookstores and direct sales will coexist, with bookstores serving as discovery engines and direct sales serving readers who already know what they want.

The Subscription Model Will Find Its Niche

Every few years, someone launches a new book subscription service and declares it the future of publishing. Most of these services fail within a few years. I think the model itself is sound but the execution has been wrong, and I expect someone to get it right in this decade.

The problem with most book subscription services is that they try to be Netflix for books, offering unlimited access to a vast catalog for a flat monthly fee. This model does not work well for books because the economics are different. A movie or TV show has high production costs but near-zero marginal distribution costs. A book has moderate production costs but non-trivial marginal costs, especially for physical copies. The Netflix model requires massive scale to work, and the book market is not massive enough.

What I think will work is smaller, more curated subscription services tied to specific publishers or communities. Imagine a subscription where you pay $20 per month and receive one new title from a small publisher you trust, along with access to exclusive essays, author conversations, and early readings. This model works because it is built on a relationship between the publisher and the reader rather than on brute-force catalog size. It also works economically because the publisher controls the margins and the selection.

We have been experimenting with something like this at ScrollWorks, on a very small scale, and the early results are encouraging. Readers who opt in report feeling more connected to our publishing program and more excited about receiving new titles. The economics are favorable because we eliminate the retailer margin and reduce return rates to nearly zero.

Literary Fiction Will Survive, but Its Business Model Will Change

I hear a lot of doom-and-gloom about literary fiction. Sales are declining. The audience is aging. Young readers prefer genre fiction or nonfiction. I think these concerns are partially valid but mostly overstated.

Literary fiction sales have indeed declined as a percentage of the overall book market. But the overall market has grown, so the absolute number of literary fiction readers has remained relatively stable. What has changed is that literary fiction’s share of publisher attention and resources has shrunk, because publishers are chasing the higher returns available in other categories. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: publishers invest less in literary fiction, literary fiction gets less visibility, literary fiction sells less, publishers invest even less.

I think the way out of this cycle is for literary fiction to develop a different business model than the one it currently relies on. The current model, where literary fiction is subsidized by the commercial fiction and nonfiction that pay the bills at major publishers, is unstable and getting more so. The alternative is for literary fiction to be published by smaller houses that are built specifically around it, with cost structures and revenue models that make sense for the actual size of the audience.

This is essentially what ScrollWorks and many other independent publishers are already doing. We publish literary fiction because we believe in it, and we have built a business that can sustain itself on the sales volumes that literary fiction actually generates, rather than the sales volumes that a major publisher would need to justify the investment. I expect more publishers to adopt this model over the coming decade.

Translation Will Have a Moment

Translated literature accounts for roughly 3% of books published in English, a number that has barely changed in decades. I think this decade will see that percentage increase meaningfully, though probably not dramatically.

Several forces are pushing in this direction. The international success of non-English-language media (Korean film, Scandinavian television, Japanese manga) has created an audience that is more receptive to non-English storytelling than previous generations. Translation prizes, particularly the International Booker, have raised the profile of translated fiction among English-language readers. And a new generation of translators, many of whom built their reputations through social media, are making the case for translated literature with an energy and visibility that the field has not had before.

For publishers, translation represents both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is access to an enormous global backlist of outstanding books that English-language readers have never encountered. The challenge is the cost. Translation is expensive, typically $5,000-15,000 per title, and translation rights negotiations add complexity to acquisitions. These costs are significant for small publishers, but they are increasingly offset by grants from cultural organizations in the source countries, many of which are eager to see their literature reach English-language audiences.

I expect ScrollWorks to publish more translated work in the coming years. It aligns with our mission to bring readers books they would not find otherwise, and the quality of work available in translation is extraordinary.

The Role of Physical Books Will Clarify

For the past decade, the book industry has been anxiously debating whether ebooks will replace physical books. I think this debate is essentially over, and the answer is: they will not. Ebook sales have plateaued at roughly 20-25% of the market, and physical book sales have stabilized or even grown slightly. The two formats have found their respective audiences and use cases.

What I expect to happen over the next decade is a clarification of the role of the physical book. As digital reading becomes more common and more convenient, the physical book will increasingly be valued for the qualities that make it different from a digital file: its materiality, its permanence, its design, its suitability as a gift, and its resistance to distraction. Publishers who invest in making beautiful physical objects, with thoughtful design, quality materials, and careful production, will be rewarded. Publishers who treat the physical book as merely a delivery mechanism for text, interchangeable with a digital file, will see their physical sales erode.

I think we will also see more experimentation with the physical form of the book. Special editions, illustrated editions, editions with unusual bindings or paper stocks, editions that are designed as objects to be displayed and collected as well as read. The collectors’ market for books has grown significantly in recent years, and I expect this trend to continue as the physical book is increasingly understood as a craft object rather than a commodity.

This is an area where small publishers have a natural advantage. We can produce small runs of beautifully made books that large publishers, with their need for standardized production at scale, cannot easily replicate. Our titles, from The Last Archive to The Cartographer’s Dilemma, are produced with a level of design attention that we consider part of the reading experience, not an afterthought.

The Wild Card: Community and Locality

One prediction I feel particularly strong about is that the next decade will see a resurgence of local and community-oriented publishing. The internet was supposed to make geography irrelevant, and for some purposes it has. But I think there is a growing appetite for books that are rooted in specific places and communities, books that speak to a particular readership rather than trying to appeal to everyone everywhere.

Small regional publishers, university presses, and community-based literary organizations are well-positioned to serve this appetite. They know their audiences. They have relationships with local booksellers and libraries. They can publish books that a New York-based publisher would consider too niche but that are exactly what a particular community needs and wants. I think this kind of localized publishing will grow as readers become more conscious of where their cultural products come from and more interested in supporting their own communities.

I will revisit these predictions periodically to see how badly I have embarrassed myself. I suspect I am wrong about at least half of them, but I am confident about the general direction: more decentralized, more relationship-driven, more attentive to quality, and more diverse in format and content than the publishing industry we have today. That is a future I am excited to be part of building.