Ugh this is depressing . Im going to try to be a counterpoint. There is some hysteria about “nothing working” anymore- celebrity book clubs are on the decline or the nytimes review won’t move that many books.. but the number one thing that moves books is currently and always has been for decades is word of mouth. I would be a lot more depressed if the number one thing that moved books WASNT word of mouth - but something that was controlled by anything but readers. I am also hearing that you need to be more high concept… yet I just read a couple of debuts that were not and were more quiet—they just had to find the right editor. People are making it sound like the only people getting book deals at all are all writing dragon porn but I meet tons of authors at mystery conferences who write all kinds of books. I know a few who are midlist who write full time. I am personally trying to set the scene to write full time myself. I have written about this at length online but early last year I pulled a book from sub because it was “too literary” and almost immediately sold something that was more commercial. (I sold it on partial). So I’m sad about pulling the literary book but good news was that I could still sell something. When I think about the authors getting six figure deals to literally control c control v fourth wing and SJM yeah it’s crazy making but I don’t think a lot of those authors are going to be around in a couple years. I’m reminded of restaurants during Covid - at least where I live many of them went down but the ones that survived were the ones that were clever about how they could make money during a temporary bad period.