Letters from a Reader 8.13.26

Here’s a question that may bring you up short if you spend a lot of time reading or writing about books and maybe have written a few: Which sells better in America, fiction or nonfiction?

I’m sorry to tell you that you get no points if you said something like: “Fiction, obviously! Romantasy is the hottest trend in the country. Everybody’s reading about women who have sex with werewolves.” Or: “It has to be fiction. My book club won’t read anything else.”

Nonfiction vastly outsells fiction in America partly because so much more of it gets published. Or so I learned from Laura McGrath’s Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2026).

But here’s a fact that may console you if you just flunked Realities of Publishing 101. I couldn’t have answered my own question with 100% confidence even after having been the book critic for an eight-million-circulation magazine and a daily newspaper once tossed into muddy driveways all over Northeast Ohio.

Unless there’s a scandal, as there’s been this month with the tawdry story of a Cambridge professor who apparently has been sucker-punching above his weight for much of his career, fiction tends to grab the headlines. It’s just more interesting to read about why women want to have sex with werewolves than books that have spent 350 weeks—seriously—on the New York Times Advice, How-to & Miscellaneous bestseller list, like James Clear’s scarily titled Atomic Habits.

Yes, I stopped scrolling through that Times “Advice” list for a moment when I saw its newest arrival: The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery (Tyndale, 2026), by the Nebraska neurosurgeon W. Lee Warren. But I knew Tyndale was a Christian publishing firm and that the book probably had something to do with Jesus, whose metaphorical scalpel-wielding abilities you already hear a lot about when you live in the most religious region in America, as I do. If I was right, how much trust could you put in a book with a title that seemed inspired more by Marie Kondo than by the Sermon on the Mount, especially that part where it says, “Blessed are the meek”?