Hello Obama. Good Bye Non-Fiction Boom.
On September 11, 2001 I spent the whole day at work. I mean the whole day — 19-20 hours. My boss stayed home. His wife was in New York and was visiting the towers. He dared not leave his house in case there was news (she was OK), so I worked his closing shift. Needless to say no one was shopping but we didn’t dare close. So I spent the day running a bookstore on the periphery of town, that itself was on the periphery of the event. For the few that stumbled off the subway, we were a literal outpost of reason. By early afternoon people were asking for books on Bin Laden and Islamic terrorism. Still in shock, they needed some mechanism to make sense of things.
The past decade has been a golden age for non-fiction. The books on 9-11 eventually came. A raft of books on history and politics followed. The Bush presidency has been a book selling engine ever since. With Bush gone, publishing is due for the same chill as The Daily Show — the fountain of rich source material will be turned off. Not to oversimplify — health, nutrition, and cooking books have also sold tremendously well during the decade. The publicity-flashing effect seen with books like The Atkins Diet was caused by a concentration of media power that is now fragmenting — more correctly consumers’ interest in concentrated media is fragmenting. That is all to say the non-fiction book market is crashing. The retailers think so anyway. It is as if they forgot (or never knew) what bookselling was like before the South Beach Diet and Stupid White Men.
But I digress. I managed the bookstore all day on September 11 and all day, the day after that. I wasn’t glued to my TV. I didn’t see the towers fall. I didn’t experience the event in real time. I was isolated from all the news and horror. I am an absolute news junkie so that was weird. I think that is why I am drawn specifically to novels that touch on the event. The news passed me by, but I can still get a hold of the missed feeling in a novel. That is also why I read Cheryl Miller’s essay “9/11 and The Novelists” with so much interest. It reminded me that the cycles in publishing are needed and welcome. Interest in fiction will eclipse non-fiction again, and for good reason. Barack Obama’s books will outsell Michael Moore’s, and for good reason. The equilibrium between fiction and non-fiction will be restored and book retail will conform and adjust. It is a change we need.
In a side note: I wanted to plug Abigail Carter‘s book The Alchemy of Loss one more time. It made the Globe’s best of the year list but I figure it can get all the help that it can get.
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