The Publishing Industry Stopped Believing in Its Readers
The success of Theo of Golden suggests readers never stopped craving ambitious fiction—and exposes the publishing industry's assumptions about modern audiences.
Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden is this summer’s go-to read for BookTokers and academics alike—and it broke every rule in contemporary publishing.
This past week, The Wall Street Journal ran a feature on Levi’s unconventional journey to literary fame following the publication of his bestselling novel Theo of Golden. While I tend to gloss over most contemporary fiction news (which often pertains, as The Wall Street Journal admits, to BDSM or vampires), this particular story immediately captured my attention: Since its publication, three years ago, Theo of Golden has sold 2.5 million copies—amazing for an originally self-published work.
That fact alone should give every editor in New York City pause: If a novel capable of reaching millions of readers could not initially find a home in the traditional publishing industry, then literary professionals have erroneous assumptions about what readers desperately crave today.
Upon its initial release, Theo of Golden sold three thousand copies—a more than respectable number for a self-published title. It continued to reach indie fiction lovers across the country until Simon & Schuster finally recognized what readers knew long ago: Our culture is in desperate need of serious literary fiction.
As someone who has spent the past few years analyzing trends in the publishing industry, I can only chuckle at the reaction of Levi’s literary agent, who felt like she was “walking into the woods and discovering a unicorn.”
No hate for Theo of Golden, which abounds with beautiful sentences and complex ideas, but the irony is, of course, that the book only appears to be a unicorn because the publishing industry has spent decades engineering a literary landscape in which slow, introspective, and profound books have become exceedingly difficult to find.
The rise of BookTok culture—a TikTok book community characterized by algorithm-driven content and bite-size recommendations—has increasingly conditioned readers to expect stories that deliver immediate gratification rather than those that require sustained intellectual engagement. Several “BookTokers,” in fact, admit to reading only dialogue in novels while skipping over “slower” scenes, creating a reading culture where books are almost literally reduced to screenplays. Publishers, in turn, cater to the BookTok community, and the cycle continues.
In other words, Theo of Golden has only earned its claim to uniqueness precisely because the publishing industry systematically turns away all other books like it.
Every year, the publishing industry churns out hundreds of new fiction titles that all sound the same. Teeming with short sentences and declarative phrases, these books no longer require readers to consider what a work of fiction means. The value of a book has been reduced to its ability to provide quick, digestible entertainment rather than to challenge its reader.
The result is an entire literary ecosystem that has surrendered its capacity for reflection—and a broader culture that has lost its ability to think critically about our world.
Let’s look at some examples from recent literary fiction bestsellers, starting with Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell.
She’s still wearing her school uniform, but she’s taken off the sweater, so it’s just the blouse and skirt, and she has no shoes on, only tights.
Oh, hey, he says.
Come on in.
She turns and walks down the hall. He follows her, closing the door behind him.
Rooney’s sentences are simple to a fault. Her prose contains overly simplistic words and ideas, communicating only the bare minimum information required to advance the plot.
One could excuse the publishing industry if it were just Rooney writing in this infantile style, but such literary minimalism has infested nearly every single literary fiction title that lines our shelves today.
Let’s take a look at another bestselling example—Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, the literary rave of the past few months.
THIS IS THE LAST DAY of the life I imagined for myself.
I woke up two minutes before my alarm went off, like usual.
Five fifty-eight and bing: eyes wide open, ready to greet the day. I’ve never had a hard time waking up in the morning. Never used the snooze button, either, not once in my life. Sobriety helps. I don’t drink. Discipline helps, too.
Burke’s prose follows much the same pattern as Rooney’s: short, declarative sentences move the reader rapidly from one assertion to the next. We can describe Burke’s prose as utilitarian, creating a novel that is easy to consume but difficult to contemplate.
Let’s contrast these examples with the opening of Levi’s Theo of Golden:
On his first full day in Golden, Theo woke early, pulled back the curtains of his hotel room, and looked out over the southern dawn. He had arrived the previous afternoon from his home in New York City, where winter, with a newsworthy late-season mixture of snow and ice, was in full fury. The flight to Atlanta (on a private jet) and the drive farther south to Golden (in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car) had transported him to a world of warmth, abloom in myriad shades of green, yellow, lavender, and pink.
The difference is almost immediately apparent. Where Rooney’s prose reports, Levi’s evokes; where Burke explains, Levi reveals. Theo of Golden demonstrates that language is not simply a vehicle for plot but an art form in its own right. Levi trusts his readers to slow down and savor the cadence of a well-crafted sentence—and the meaning of his ideas as a whole.
Theo of Golden therefore stands as a direct antithesis to the prevailing wisdom of the contemporary publishing industry. It challenges the broader orthodoxy that readers want fiction that reads like a movie script.
But if readers are clearly willing to embrace the thematic and stylistic complexity of Theo of Golden, why, then, does the publishing industry keep pushing out didactic and minimalist literature?
The fact is that the stylistic similarities among the novels we examined above are not accidental—they reflect an editorial philosophy that increasingly equates literary quality with accessibility.
In the contemporary publishing world, minimalism has become not only the norm but a hard requirement. Publishing professionals routinely claim that any sentence over fifteen words causes readers to “concentrate too hard.” Such language suggests that the publishing industry has not only become convinced that readers of contemporary fiction do not have the attention spans to digest long, flowery sentences but also that the industry itself has shaped the tastes of its own readers.
Operating in this paradigm, writers are frequently told to avoid “poetic prose and metaphors,” with one agent offering the following advice on her blog:
Often times the writers will focus on sounding “literary” and write meandering, prosy or metaphor laden sentences. While it is a style choice, it’s not usually a successful one… Flowery prose and metaphor often detract from your writing.
Thus, this type of “literary” voice becomes not only the less desirable writing style but an active faux pas. Writers who take after Fitzgerald or Nabokov face rejection, while writers who produce “legible” writing see their books line our shelves. Over time, these editorial preferences have created the very reading habits they claim merely to reflect: Readers are told they no longer have the patience for long, intellectually demanding books but are rarely given the opportunity to encounter them in the first place.
Despite this, the success of Theo of Golden offers hope for a civilization that has increasingly abandoned its capacity for reflection.
Publishing shapes our culture more than we like to admit. The very books championed by our publishing professionals become the books that we not only read and discuss but also aspire to write ourselves. If year after year the publishing industry rewards simpler, faster, and more disposable fiction, then readers inevitably become accustomed to “fast-paced” books that require no afterthought.
If, on the other hand, publishers start championing ambitious, intellectually rich novels again, then there is every reason to believe readers would rise to meet them.
As our literature loses its capacity to challenge readers, an entire generation of thinkers becomes less comfortable with complexity—but we can restore the critical thinking brought by complex stories by daring to publish difficult books again.
Perhaps, then, the real lesson of Theo of Golden is not that readers suddenly rediscovered serious literary fiction but that they never stopped wanting it.
So maybe it’s time for the publishing industry to take notes from Theo—and to believe in its readers again.
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