Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 

10

   

Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction

Part I – The Context 

1. The Market

The popular perception is that sales of literary fiction are not doing well. 

Our survey bore this out, revealing that 68% of respondents believed 

that the market for literary fiction was shrinking. 

Are sales of literary fictions falling in your view?

68%

32%

YES

NO

Many of our interviewers agreed. However, amongst those we 

interviewed there was often a more nuanced view – that while things 

might be OK at the top, it was the so-called midlist that was struggling. 

‘My guess,’ said Nicholas Clee, Editor of BookBrunch, ‘is that at the 

top of the market they are holding up; but that sales of midlist titles are 

declining. This is probably true of every area of publishing.’ The novelist 

Alex Christofi, formerly an agent and now an editor, concurred. Sales, 

he argues, ‘are being pushed to extremes, so that each year there are 

a handful of runaway hits, a few dozen that sell into five figures, and 

an increasing majority that feel lucky to reach four figures. Most of 

the breakout literary books borrow from genre fiction for commercial 

appeal.’ Our interviewees, then, did not report a positive picture – at 

best there was a serious bifurcation in the market between a few 

successful stars and a struggling mainstream. 

What about the data? The truth is that the print market is flat or slightly 

falling; not just for literary books but across the board. Later on we will 

factor in ebooks as well, but in this section we will focus on print sales. 

The Total Consumer Market (TCM) value of print books sold peaked for 

hardbacks in 2007 and for paperbacks in 2008. Since then, there have 

been declines or plateaus (which often are declines in real terms due 

to inflation), although there has been a tentative recovery since 2014. 

Today the total market remains substantially down on both those years. 

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