What Nobody’s Telling Querying Writers About What’s Happening to Publishing Right Now
I’ve started this post four times. Deleted it three of those times. Not because I don’t know what I want to say—I know exactly what I want to say—but because I’m aware of how sensitive and personal this will be.
If you’re querying right now, or you’re on submission, or you’ve been in the trenches for a while wondering why everything feels harder than it used to… it’s not in your head. The industry has genuinely shifted, and the advice still circulating online hasn’t caught up to what’s actually happening. This is my attempt to close that gap, for whatever it’s worth, coming from someone who is also in the middle of this.
What’s Actually Happening
Baker & Taylor, the country’s largest library book distributor (in business since 1828) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March. Dial Books for Young Readers just shut down, and yesterday, we got news that Roaring Brook closed as well. Multiple major distributors collapsed or closed within the same short window of months. And those are just the names that made news.
When an imprint closes, the submission pool shrinks. If your genre was primarily being acquired by three or four imprints and one disappears, your agent now has fewer places to send your book. Which not only makes it harder to sell, fewer editors competing for your manuscript also means less leverage, which means lower advances and royalty rates.
When a distributor goes bankrupt, publishers lose real money. Baker & Taylor owed Penguin Random House alone more than $23 million when it collapsed. Publishers who absorb that kind of loss get financially conservative fast. They acquire less. They tighten their lists. That caution flows directly to the acquisition meetings, which is where your book gets a yes or a no.
And when editors get laid off—which has been happening steadily—the ones remaining absorb the extra workload. Less time to read submissions. Longer response times. And they (understandably) get pickier about what they say yes to.
Where I’m Coming From
Yes, I’m a literary agent, but I’ll be honest, it doesn’t pay the bills. I started on the author side and while I love agenting, my books are what pay my family’s bills. So this isn’t abstract for me. When advances drop across the board, mine drop too. When submission lists shrink, that affects my clients and my own career. I came from teaching, which has it’s own issues, and publishing is giving me the same feeling lately.
What Writers Should Know Right Now
If your dream list of agents to query was built more than a year ago, rebuild it. Not all of those agents will still be open to queries, may have left the industry, or may be changing up their lists to adapt. If you’re already agented, respectfully ask your agent to chat about strategy for your upcoming submissions or your current project. (Just please be patient and kind about it—there’s so much we still don’t know!)
Sales data follows you. Publishers right now are intensely focused on track records. If you’ve published before, traditionally or through self-publishing, that data is part of the conversation whether you want it to be or not. And it could be the difference between a yes or a no.
Platform has moved from “nice to have” to a real factor in acquisition conversations, especially for nonfiction but increasingly for commercial fiction too. Publishers want evidence of an existing readership before they commit. That doesn’t mean you need 50,000 followers, but a newsletter people actually open, or a social presence that demonstrably moves books, is being weighed in ways it wasn’t a few years ago.
What I Think Happens Next
I’ve been asked enough times that I’ll just say it directly: here’s where I think this goes. Just remember, this is 100% my opinion.
Self-publishing is going to keep growing. The numbers already reflect this. Last year, total US book publishing jumped 32.5%, led almost entirely by self-published titles, while traditional publishing grew only 6.6%. That gap is going to widen. The traditional model is contracting and self-publishing infrastructure keeps improving. More writers are going to run the math and choose a different path, or build a hybrid career that doesn’t depend entirely on traditional gatekeepers.
Hybrid authors (writers who are both self and traditionally published) are probably going to fare the best through this stretch. They have multiple revenue streams, they own their reader relationships directly, and they’re not entirely at the mercy of what any single publisher decides to acquire in a given season.
The industry isn’t going to bounce back until the economy does. Full stop. Publishing is a consumer discretionary market. When people are stretched financially, books and hobbies are where family spending gets cut. The macro picture has to improve before the industry can meaningfully stabilize, and nobody controls that timeline.
Agents are going to have to fight harder for every deal. Which means authors are going to have to fight harder to get agents. Agents can only take on what they believe they can realistically sell, and that bar is moving.
Here’s the one I’ve been most hesitant to write, but I think it needs to be said.
When publishers tighten their lists, they don’t cut evenly. The books that get dropped, the authors who find themselves quietly deprioritized, the manuscripts that don’t make the cut in a leaner acquisition season disproportionately belong to BIPOC, disabled, queer, and neurodiverse authors. Marginalized writers who fought harder to get in the door in the first place are often the first ones pushed back out when the industry decides it needs to “focus.”
The conversation about diversity in publishing made real (albiet sloooooow) progress over the last several years. Some of that progress is going to erode in this moment through acquisition decisions that are framed as financial rather than editorial. Nobody will say “we’re publishing fewer diverse books.” They’ll say “the market isn’t there” or “we need to focus on proven performers.”
The books that get cut in a down market are not the safest bets—they’re the most “risky,” which is often just industry code for “different from what we already know sells.” It’s not fair and it’s not okay, but knowing it’s happening is better than being blindsided by it.
Agents who care about this are going to have to be more deliberate about who they sign and how hard they fight for them, even when the market makes it difficult. Especially then.
What Still Holds
People are still getting agents. Debut authors are still breaking through. In 2025, Publishers Marketplace reported 390 debut deals, and that database doesn’t capture everything, since not all agents report their deals. Books are still getting published. Readers are still buying. The appetite for stories hasn’t collapsed. The infrastructure around those stories is what’s under strain.
What I know from having been on every side of this: the writers who come through hard markets are the ones who stayed informed, asked honest questions, made intentional choices about their path, and didn’t confuse a contracting industry with a verdict on their work. Those are different things.
It’s harder right now. That’s real. But “harder” and “impossible” are not the same word, and I’m not willing to use them interchangeably.
The way that this hit my inbox at the perfect moment... Thank you for the transparency and honesty. I've said for at least a year or two that self-published books have come such a long way in both quality and freshness. You can, quite literally, find a book for everyone. My tween goes to the chain book store once a week just to see what's out there. So far, she can't find anything that keeps her attention because the stories are so spoon-fed and feel like they're talking down to her because she's younger. So she goes on my Amazon account and looks through what's there for her age group. Nine times out of ten, she chooses a self-published book.
This is equal parts depressing, validating, and freeing. Thank you!