Storiad

Absolutely thrilled to share the cover for my forthcoming short story collection, THE LETTERS, out from @AAKnopf on April 13, 2027!✉️ Here’s the preorder link: tinyurl.com/mt8f3kcf

Reading isn’t dead–stop writing its obituary. Here are 10 stats that show books are alive and well: 1) The global book market revenue is on track to hit roughly $142.72 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow toward $156 billion by 2030. 2) In the U.S. alone, print book sales actually rose slightly in 2025, reaching about 762 million units. 3) Bookstores are multiplying, not disappearing. The U.S. now has more than 43,000 bookstore locations generating close to $24 billion a year. 4) Independent bookstore counts have been climbing for over a decade. 5) People aren’t just buying books online in isolation—they’re showing up in person, at author events and reading clubs, in a format that was supposedly obsolete. 6) Audiobook sales grew more than 20% in 2024 and kept climbing into 2025. 7) Fiction is thriving, especially among the young. Romance and romantasy unit sales have surged in the BookTok era, and genre fiction overall still commands roughly a third of total book revenue. 8) Literary festivals are thriving: The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the largest in the country, pulls in more than 150,000 attendees annually. Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest draws over 100,000 visitors, and San Francisco’s Litquake now runs some 100 events with roughly 600 participating authors each year. 9) Dozens of cities and regional book festivals now run annually across nearly every state, from the Decatur Book Festival in Georgia to the Texas Book Festival in Austin to the Brooklyn Book Festival. 10) New book festivals keep launching, including a brand-new Laguna Beach Literary Festival in 2026 and a Black Authors Festival that expanded this year from one flagship event into pop-ups across six U.S. cities. "The obituary may be premature. Happy Reading!" These stats come from an excellent post by Meryl Moss–the CEO of BookTrib, who has worked in the publishing industry for 20+ years.