Power in numbers: Why you shouldn’t lose your sh*t if someone’s publishing the same book as you
As with retinol products and heirloom vegetables, book publishing also follows market trends. Writers, after all, are natural-born observers, our cultural referees. It makes sense that the issues that fascinate and concern one writer would also interest someone else.
Accordingly, there are publishing seasons in which it feels like everyone is obsessed with the same topic. Follow me back to 2005, when ankle bracelets and vampire-themed novels were hot. After “Twilight,” things got postapocalyptic: Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” catapulted onto the scene alongside Edan Lepucki’s “California,” and Ben H. Winters’s “The Underground Airlines” came out one month before Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad.” The Trump era dumpster fires made the postapocalyptic fire burn hotter, with so many books devoted to the collapse of civil society that The New York Times referred to this publishing trend as “a collective panic attack.” In the year behind us, werewolves had a moment, and I think yetis are next.
Anyone who has tried to submit a book proposal recently knows that nonfiction is even more subject to market trends than novels. In 2016, Rebecca Weller’s addiction memoir “A Happier Hour” was followed by Leslie Jamison’s “The Recovering,” which came…
