A Glimpse: Good News in Publishing in 2025
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If you’re involved in any way with the writing community, it’d be hard to miss that publishing is in a state of transition and uncertainty. Information, updates, and breaking news flood our devices 24/7, a surf that pounds away at our attention while we try to scoop waves into a bucket. However, instead of trying to keep up, the two of us would like to offer an alternative—a step back to consider the whole picture.
We’ve included plenty of links throughout so you can dig deeper, but on the whole, this is a glimpse at what’s happening. Keeping sight of the big picture can help you stay focused on what you can do right now and do it well. There’s good news out there. Even better, you’re a big part of it. If you take nothing else away from this glimpse, carry this with you—people are craving authenticity now more than ever, and being true to your calling as a writer is exactly what they’re looking for from you as a storyteller.
Changes fuel a drive for authenticity
For many reasons, 2024 was a crucible of technology, ideology, change, and experiments that have boiled down into where we find ourselves in 2025. People are reconsidering the ways they’ve been doing things. Whether it’s reassessing social media and smartphone use or becoming more discerning about AI-generated content, people are seeking authenticity. Even Forbes has noticed how savvy consumers are becoming in regard to recognizing content that feels automated or generic. The natural response to an outpouring of automated content is a renewed interest in the real. Quick, snappy messages are meaning less and less to people who want to sit with ideas or stories rather than scrolling past them. In the book world, we’re seeing more readers grounding themselves with physical books and in-person events. A few notable changes have led to this, and we’ll start by looking at one of them: the impact of self-publishing.
The expansion of self-publishing
2024 brought many changes to the publishing industry, and while the scary ones dominated the headlines, there are promising changes in the back pages. For perhaps the first time in history, big-name celebrities opted to pursue self-publishing, including Taylor Swift. Self-publishing is on the rise in response to the pitfalls of traditional publishing; self-publishing allows for exploration, writing to niches, faster release schedules, and higher profit margins. While the financial benefits of self-publishing can be significant, this expansion also indicates another push for authenticity—readers are finding books they want to read outside the framework and forms of traditional publishing.
Legacy publishing, as it’s also called, is facing increasing pressure to find ways to continue to be relevant in a landscape where authors have access to the services and tools that were previously exclusive. While traditional publishing does move slowly, we’re already seeing some promising developments in response, including the appearance of profit-share models, such as Author Equity and Bloom Books, which indicates we might be seeing the emergence of a new path to publishing. These models show that there are viable alternatives, and authors are already discovering new ways to reach their readers in ways that weren’t possible before.
Readers want to interact with what they love
The increase in the number of deluxe editions for new releases are just part of the trend that shows people want to give reading a place in their lives. Sprayed edges, gilding, illustrations, plushies, and book swag are just a few of the ways reading expands beyond the covers of a book. People value connection, and books are physical expressions of that value. Beautiful books work on two levels—firstly, by establishing a physical book as something valuable, and secondly, by creating continual value for the reader who purchases it. The story becomes more real to them, claiming shelf space and mental space in ways an ebook simply can’t. Even readers who are being realistic about how many books they can stack on their bedside table can enjoy engaging with stories in the real world through posters, playlists, temporary tattoos, and more.
Bookstores are rebounding
The rise of more in-person events and the new “indie bookstore” approach taken by Barnes and Noble is another positive indicator for authenticity. Experts predict that readers, authors, and other people in the writing industry will increasingly seek out spaces and experiences that offer genuine human connection. We’re seeing more bookstores incorporate coffee shops and places to sit and read. This change is attributed to creators who share their interests by making videos for social media, capturing book hauls, doing reviews, showcasing bookshelves, and giving recommendations. Between the increased number of readers sharing online and the demand for in-person experiences, it seems clear people are looking to find others through books, not just themselves.
“The rise of direct sales, physical products, and in-person connection with readers will continue. Authors are now empowered to offer beautiful print editions, subscriptions, and in-person events, bringing readers closer and offering them greater value while also making a sustainable living. There are exciting times ahead!”
—Joanna Penn, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and creator of The Creative Penn (in “Publishing Leaders Share 9 Bold Predictions for 2025 and Beyond”)
AI is a tool, not a complete solution
As we mentioned above, the explosion of AI has brought quite a bit of change. Widespread adoption means we’ve been bombarded with warnings and worry about what this means for authors—even to the point of wondering if people will even need to write books in the future. But despite AI looming like a tidal wave, there is more than enough evidence to show that human connection and human touch wins out over efficiency. AI is best seen as a tool rather than a solution to get around the hard part of books—the actual writing of them.
Human content is superior to synthetic data
To understand the good news here, we’ll do a little backtracking to establish what we’re talking about when it comes to AI. In this context, we’re talking about large language learning models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. These models are trained on large data sets that teach them how to respond to inputs, which, to give a very simplistic explanation, is a more complex version of the AutoFill option in your text messaging. The more data they take in, the better they perform in terms of providing what we’re asking them for. However, there’s a caveat to this.
Hands down, the best AI models are the ones trained with 100 percent human-created data, but the proliferation of AI-generated content means models are now consuming synthetic content. This means AI is now being trained on itself, and, like a copy of a copy, the results are getting less useful and less accurate in relation to reality. This is why we’re seeing publishers working out agreements with tech companies and Reddit making deals with Google. Human content is always superior, and more of it is needed to enhance AI, which tends to become less precise and helpful over time as it consumes information it generated. This is why many people have noted that the tools they were using one to two years ago seem to have diminished in capacity or usefulness. This is true for editors as much as writers (take a look at conversations happening with r/Grammarly ).
All of this is to say that even if AI is capable of writing a book—technically assembling words into arcs—AI can’t sustain its output without fresh content, and it needs the creativity and out-of-the-box thinking of humans to make it valuable. In short, the genius of AI is you. While there are likely to be more changes with AI in the field, nothing about these advancements changes the heart of what you do as a writer. You have something you want to say, and your voice is the greatest vehicle to tell that story.
Humans simply write better books
Along these lines, it’s a fact that people write better books than machines do. Writing is more than putting one word after another, and though AI can produce content, it is not producing literature or true storytelling, which, we argue, is the whole point of writing. Stories help us make sense of our world and ourselves; they are ways we ask questions about what is and what can be. In a brilliant article titled “Why AI will never supplant human novelists—or win the Booker Prize,” Ian Leslie says LLMs only provide answers, writing about what is already known. But there are readers who seek questions as well as answers, and this means good writing is less a puzzle to solve than it is a mystery: “The nature of existence is a mystery, so is the nature of desire or love; the more we find out about these things, the more they stump us, and the more we are fascinated by them.”
Humans wonder, dream, and ponder. We put big ideas into colors and textures, we pour them out into differently shaped containers, and we experiment. Above all, people love books because they are conversations between people, between authors and readers. Again, people are striving for connection, not content.
“In a certain sense, I believe that we always write about something we don’t know: we write to make it possible for the unwritten world to express itself through us.”
—Italo Calvino (in “The Written World and the Unwritten World”)
Our four cents on AI as editors
As editors who are writers themselves, we can say without hesitation that humans are better writers, regardless of skill level. Both of us have worked on AI-generated books for companies we subcontract for, and no matter how impressive they seem at the start, there’s a certain hollow quality that becomes apparent by about page two or three. By the halfway point, there’s often a strong sense of forgetfulness about what’s been said already, simply because AI doesn’t remember or keep track the way a person does. When you’ve worked on and read as many books as we have, you can just feel when something wasn’t written by a person. There’s an inherent quality people bring to their words that machines can’t replicate. Instead, it creates flat, generic writing that keeps the reader at arm’s length, if not on the other side of the street. The authors who choose this path may feel that their own voices are insufficient, but we’re here to say that your voice is always the best one for your story.
Even authors who aren’t technically proficient, even writers who lack experience don’t have the same feeling to their work. Jane Friedman, a publishing industry analyst agrees: “Humans would—funnily enough—do a better job being bad.” So let this encourage you—no matter where you find yourself in your writing journey, the heart behind your words means you’re already a better writer than AI.
Wondering more about what you have that AI doesn’t? Tap here to read our article “Will AI Replace Authors?”
Discoverability
While there are many concerns with AI and how it will impact the industry, one of the biggest concerns people have identified is discoverability and the idea that the ones who pay the most will be the ones who get found. However, we’ll point you back to what we’ve already talked about: readers are looking for authenticity. Being yourself and being a writer in public—whether you’re doing large reader events or being brave enough to tell others that you write—that is what will matter the most in the end. You don’t have control over these external factors, but deciding to be yourself is something you control, and people are attracted to what’s genuine.
"People pay to see others believe in themselves."
—Kim Gordon, singer/songwriter
Be yourself
Being yourself isn’t easy in a time when authors are expected to market and put themselves forward in increasingly impersonal spaces in order to get reviews, to make sales, to be financially successful. However, I hope this article will give you some encouragement that there are tremendous benefits in what you are doing now—putting together the words that speak to you so that you can speak to others. There are people looking for you and what you’ve written.
Photos thanks to Unsplash!
