That "illusion of choosing" another commenter mentioned also operates in the world of advertising, where so many people walk around internally believing "advertising doesn't work on me."
The sad truth advertising reveals is how cognitively fatigued we are. It doesn’t work on people who are alert. But when you land in a strange city at 11:30 at night and need to rent a car, you’re going to influenced by brand name. The effectiveness of advertising, in short, reveals how many of us—and how often—are in that kind of state.
For convenience goods, I like to buy generic. That's often cheaper, the quality might be the same or even higher, and I buy them often enough to risk a bit of trial and error. If it's a scam, not much money is lost and I can just go back to the familiar brand next time. For investmenent goods, I do my research. But there's a range of goods somewhere in between, which I buy infrequently enough to be annoyed by a bad bet, but which aren't important enough to warrant days of deliberation. I have other hobbies than shopping, and I sometimes like to save on transaction costs. The example of having to make a fairly quick decision in an unfamiliar environment is also a good one. I think it's not just a question of fatigue, but also of opportunity costs. There are just more fun things to do when travelling for instance, then endlessly comparing offers. In such cases, relying on familiar brands is not the worst mental short-cut one could come up with. Brands may not guarantee the highest quality, but they guarantee some degree of consistency. Quality may not remain consistent over time - we are now by all sufficiently aquainted with the process of enshittification - but the degradation has to be at least somewhat gradual. Companies invest a lot of money in building up their brands, and any too sudden, to egregious drop in quality would be a risk to that investment. The higher visibility of established brands also invites more scrutiny, which ideally results in at least some semblance of accountability. Brands have a reputation to lose. All this is of course based on the assumption of a market with somewhat healthy competition. So people making the safer bet too often, giving too much market share to the few big brands, eventually erodes the validity of the signal they would like to rely on. But that's one those inescapable central ironies of the market.
I've heard so many doom-and-gloom things about publishing that this was oddly comforting to me: "Ironically, it is thus not true that all publishers want is best-sellers." Thank you for sharing your insights, Nick!
Ouch. But yes. There was a bestselling author who used to say that midlist books were “just there to fill out the Pinterest board,” and I couldn’t help resenting that statement from someone who was in the center of the board, but yes, wallpaper.
I still believe in the power of weird little books to find readers and vice versa, but I realize publishers don’t share my naïveté.
A book that “sells mostly to people who don’t buy a lot of books” is the best definition of bestseller that I have ever heard. The bestseller is AM radio, while all the good stuff is left of the dial. All the best writers have day jobs.
Pretty depressing. But seems right to me. You didn't spend much time on 'self-published' books. I was hoping you'd have more to say about them, since that's the only route today for serious writers who refuse to work to the new formulas demanded by lit agents and Big Publishing. (Yeah, I know there are lots of hacks who self-publish.)
"The average book is now “wallpaper” Awful, but true. What's even sadder is that self-published books--shunned by the snobs who run bookstores and believe that only commercially published books are any good--cannot even aspire to be 'wallpaper' in books stores.
Dreams die hard. Mine is gasping for air in the new literary world of fem-schlock, political cultism, and sexual deviancy masquerading as sophistication. But I won't stop dreaming.
I think what's so interesting about what Nick is saying is that most books were in a sense *always* wallpaper, that even at its 20th-century heights, the dynamics of publishing as a business drove the publication of many more books than the market of readers could support, in order to provide an illusory abundance that in itself overwhelmingly appeals to readers, even though only a small number of those books will actually sell well enough to make money. This isn't a bad thing, since the alternative isn't a world where no books are wallpaper, but a world in which all those wallpaper books aren't published at all.
Well, you have a point. I never thought I’d be saying something like this, but maybe big publishing should be more discerning about what they publish. There are people in the biz now saying what many people assumed, that most books that are published only sell 300 copies at most. Could it be that a large percentage of books are published to ‘push’ a certain agenda? Did I ever tell you I was paranoid?
I think another flaw in the wallpaper strategy or formula is that Big Publishing puts big money on a tiny percentage of their books while putting no money on the bulk of the others, simply making them available, spine out, no promo. As a mid-list writer in the 1990s, my own experience with big publishing was likely not untypical. The publisher ‘out-of-print-ed’ the second book of my trilogy as the third book was being published. And having talked to several ‘mid-list’ authors over the years, I heard about other screw ups indicative of corporate laissez faire.
Well, I’d love to change the world… But, it’s just the way it is, just business.
I’m with you, I think. Though I personally don’t think there’s an ‘agenda‘ beyond the fact that literature reflects more often than it transcends the prevailing ideologies of any period’s, shall we say, “literary class,” and the present is no exception...
Yes. In some cases. I would say, to do well in self-publishing, you either need to have two skills, have them in spades—the ability to write well AND the ability to promote and sell. If you don’t have the latter, but have lots of money, you can pay others to promote and sell your work.
I like to think I can write. Some people who know good writing have said mine is good. However, I don’t have the huckster gene. Not knocking it, just saying that it didn’t come with my tool set.
I don't know where you're getting your sales figures from but even a failure from The Big Five would sell a thousand copies or more. When I was a small press only one book didn't sell out of twenty years of publishing. Between ebooks, print, and subsidiary sales it wasn't hard. And when we worked with S&S and we were printing 25,000 copies a failure was something that failed around 25% or even less sell-thru.
“Kristen McLean, lead publishing industry analyst for BookScan, revealed findings from BookScan’s study of print retail sales in the U.S. of new titles by the top ten publishers in the U.S. trade market (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley). BookScan found that only 33.9 percent of these titles were selling more than 1,000 copies in their first year (Kristen McLean response to the blog “No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies” by Lincoln Michel, September 4, 2022). A more recent study of BookScan data found that close to 90 percent of titles published by the Big Five trade publishers fail to reach 2,000 copies sold (“The Economic Realities of Traditional Publishing,” For the Writers, January 16, 2026).”
Bookscan doesn't measure ebook sales, library sales, book club sales, nor many sales from independent bookstores, special sales (non-bookstores that carry books) etc. Even your own cite dilutes the claim, looking at top ten rather than Big 5--two of the top ten, HMH and WW Norton, have many hybrid academic/trade titles as well. You can easily double bookscan #s to get a better idea of total sales
Broadly similar. Kindle resolved the historical problems with self-publishing, distribution and quality. Anyone with a phone, much less a Kindle device, can find and read a self-published book now. And quality is handled by price: Kindle Unlimited means that books are "free" and even the individually priced books are much cheaper than print royalty published books. Some random horror novel might be only a tenth as good as Stephen King, but it's one thirtieth the price. People also don't care if their Dollar Store spatular breaks after two months, but would be livid if their Williams-Sonoma spatular broke so easily,
As far as the wallpapering, it remains the same: a book is uploaded onto kindle every fifteen seconds or so. The subscription service of Kindle Unlimited fundamentally promises a new kind of World's Biggest Bookstore, and low risk because the books are free with membership. Individual self-published writers have to be very prolific to keep their audience--more than one book a year, a novella for free with newsletter sign-up, lots of audiobooks, a patreon etc.The most successful self-pub books almost inevitably get reissued by a big publisher though, e.g., Colleen Hoover, Dungeon Crawler Carl, etc.
For the sort of literary fiction Substackers seem most interested in, KU seems much chancier, and creating a small press to first publish one's self might be smarter, but one needs capital to invest.
Hey, thanks, Nick, this was great! I've been trying to get my novel published for the past few years, and needless to say, feel discouraged by the whole query-letter-literary-agent-rabbit-hole, and your deep dive into the systemic failures of publishing at least makes me feel less alone in my disappointment.
But being totally honest with myself, I must confess I like 'wallpaper'-flashy visuals vs. weighty substance. Take book cover design-I'm much more likely to choose a book with that extremely tasteful, often wonderful design layout so many 'serious' literary novels wrap themselves up in these days, regardless of what's between the covers. But isn't this is one of the fundamental aesthetic problems, that whole form-vs-content thing?
Personally, I blame Jaqueline Susann for all this. Valley of the Dolls was the very first novel that was marketed and sold strictly as a 'product', and La Jackie, with the help of her reptilian husband, Irving Mansfield, pioneered all sorts of shameless practices to move her book off the shelves, even showing up at the warehouses early in the morning to bribe the deliverymen with coffee and donuts. Still, it's hard to dislike the woman who staged getting hit by a car at the very same corner where the author of Gone With the Wind died, or who had this reaction to the Kennedy assassination: hearing the news while promoting her first book, Every Night, Josephine! (which was about toilet training her toy poodle), leopard-skin-pillbox-hatted Jackie fumed: "Why did this have to happen NOW? This will just RUIN my book tour!"
I buy books that have been mentioned on the Internet, that sound interesting. I don't browse bookstores much anymore because they're overpriced and the offerings dull, with terrible blurbs and the suggestion they're hust more factory-produced social justice pap produced by humans willing to write anything to be a Published Writer. Used bookstores are better, though.
On returns falling in a specified window usually (3-12 months after publication) and can use that credit to order new titles to tempt the unsuspecting. The labour required to track unsold titles is not to be taken lightly. The labour required to read with deliberation the titles from small presses and imprints and try to encourage the unsuspecting customers into purchasing them because they are excellent, surprising, or different is no small thing. Belittle the independent bookseller at your peril!
I've been an independent bookseller (Books Inc., Berkeley--I was also the store's event coordinator.) Of my co-workers I was probably the most enthusiastic about independent press titles. Even with an ancient Wordstock POS system (see pic at link for terrifying example) it wasn't that challenging to pull returns. It was a bit harder to be the store re-buyer, especially if one's tastes didn't match the clientele, but nothing challenging.
Whenever I walk into a store I scan the shelf-talkers to locate The Shop Weirdo and I sample a lot of great books that way, but sadly the industry is not comprised of weirdos.
Nick, it does feel impossible--but we do write in spite of all that you say, get published anyway and hang in there for reasons that don't operate via reason. See my newest reissue by Empress Editions and my short story that appears on this site: https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/sine-die
Until your very latest comment what you didn't give a hoot about was selection size. Now you only give a hoot about a minor title.
But we'll let you play that palmed card. In what sort of bookstore are you more likely to find that minor title? One with a larger selection.
Now, given prior comments that non-bestsellers are duds because they are boring, we can reasonably conclude that consumers like you are also likely to buy best-sellers--in fact, we know it! By definition people are more likely to buy best-sellers. That's what makes the book a best-seller.
So which bookstore are you likely to go to:
a small store that only has best-sellers?
a small store that only carries niche titles?
a big store likely to have what you want whether minor title or best-seller?
an online store attached to many many warehouses and POD technology for instant printing?
We know this answer! The bestseller-only stores barely exist anymore, even as mere departments or shelving bays in drug stores and supermarkets. The format catering to these (mass-market) is all but defunct. There are still many best-sellers and types of best-sellers! More than one shelving unit at a CVS can hold.
The last few decades saw a massive culling of the second type of store, whether brick and mortar or specialty mail-order. There has been a bit of an uptick recently though.
Fifteen years ago, nearly half the giant stores just vanished. The remaining half floundered for a bit, reduced inventory to fill up with toys, but then after being sold, refocused on their shelves and have improved performance by having lots of books.
The big giant online store? It got so big it finally has become hard to navigate thanks to an influx of free books, fraudulent books (e.g. repackaged wikipedia articles about a best-selling book etc) and non-edited books (e.g. fivver-ghost writers) thus giving a smidge of room in the marketplace for the smaller curated stores to regain a teeny bit of share.
So even by not giving a hoot, yes you do give a hoot. Even if there were a sizeable number of best-seller-avoiders, who also somehow have disparate tastes from one another, they would still end up in the biggest store... and that store would also be centering its best-sellers. After all, you and your cothinkers don't give a hoot--a Sally Rooney section isn't driving you away from the store, but the wallpaper attracts everyone.
You are positing a world where browsing in a store (a practice positively correlated with square footage) doesn't exist or is some kind of obscure minority pursuit? And one where almost nobody sees something else in a store, say, on the shelf they march right over to, and buys that as well? B&N has its 3-for-2 tables for no reason or has no data about how well they work? And in which people only rarely talk to anyone else, read a newspaper, see complaints or praise about best-sellers online (not even on substack!), or even see the "bestseller" signs in the store they go to? Well, no need to even refute that. You don't live on Earth.
And of course you don't mean commercial viability: you previously denounced non-bestsellers as "boring." Not my problem that you can't keep your own ideas in your head for more than a few hours, not even when they're written down.
That "illusion of choosing" another commenter mentioned also operates in the world of advertising, where so many people walk around internally believing "advertising doesn't work on me."
"It doesn’t work on people who are alert. " -- this is what I mean. Show me that evidence.
The sad truth advertising reveals is how cognitively fatigued we are. It doesn’t work on people who are alert. But when you land in a strange city at 11:30 at night and need to rent a car, you’re going to influenced by brand name. The effectiveness of advertising, in short, reveals how many of us—and how often—are in that kind of state.
For convenience goods, I like to buy generic. That's often cheaper, the quality might be the same or even higher, and I buy them often enough to risk a bit of trial and error. If it's a scam, not much money is lost and I can just go back to the familiar brand next time. For investmenent goods, I do my research. But there's a range of goods somewhere in between, which I buy infrequently enough to be annoyed by a bad bet, but which aren't important enough to warrant days of deliberation. I have other hobbies than shopping, and I sometimes like to save on transaction costs. The example of having to make a fairly quick decision in an unfamiliar environment is also a good one. I think it's not just a question of fatigue, but also of opportunity costs. There are just more fun things to do when travelling for instance, then endlessly comparing offers. In such cases, relying on familiar brands is not the worst mental short-cut one could come up with. Brands may not guarantee the highest quality, but they guarantee some degree of consistency. Quality may not remain consistent over time - we are now by all sufficiently aquainted with the process of enshittification - but the degradation has to be at least somewhat gradual. Companies invest a lot of money in building up their brands, and any too sudden, to egregious drop in quality would be a risk to that investment. The higher visibility of established brands also invites more scrutiny, which ideally results in at least some semblance of accountability. Brands have a reputation to lose. All this is of course based on the assumption of a market with somewhat healthy competition. So people making the safer bet too often, giving too much market share to the few big brands, eventually erodes the validity of the signal they would like to rely on. But that's one those inescapable central ironies of the market.
Insightful. Can't take away from people the illusion that they are 'choosing'.
I've heard so many doom-and-gloom things about publishing that this was oddly comforting to me: "Ironically, it is thus not true that all publishers want is best-sellers." Thank you for sharing your insights, Nick!
Ouch. But yes. There was a bestselling author who used to say that midlist books were “just there to fill out the Pinterest board,” and I couldn’t help resenting that statement from someone who was in the center of the board, but yes, wallpaper.
I still believe in the power of weird little books to find readers and vice versa, but I realize publishers don’t share my naïveté.
(Typo: haruspex!)
Thanks! Dear @The Republic of Letters, please fix!
A book that “sells mostly to people who don’t buy a lot of books” is the best definition of bestseller that I have ever heard. The bestseller is AM radio, while all the good stuff is left of the dial. All the best writers have day jobs.
Pretty depressing. But seems right to me. You didn't spend much time on 'self-published' books. I was hoping you'd have more to say about them, since that's the only route today for serious writers who refuse to work to the new formulas demanded by lit agents and Big Publishing. (Yeah, I know there are lots of hacks who self-publish.)
"The average book is now “wallpaper” Awful, but true. What's even sadder is that self-published books--shunned by the snobs who run bookstores and believe that only commercially published books are any good--cannot even aspire to be 'wallpaper' in books stores.
Dreams die hard. Mine is gasping for air in the new literary world of fem-schlock, political cultism, and sexual deviancy masquerading as sophistication. But I won't stop dreaming.
I think you should reconsider your position on sexual deviancy.
Why?
So you can have something to live for.
I've lived long enough to have tried that if I was so inclined. No interest in that. Seems like you do, though.
I think what's so interesting about what Nick is saying is that most books were in a sense *always* wallpaper, that even at its 20th-century heights, the dynamics of publishing as a business drove the publication of many more books than the market of readers could support, in order to provide an illusory abundance that in itself overwhelmingly appeals to readers, even though only a small number of those books will actually sell well enough to make money. This isn't a bad thing, since the alternative isn't a world where no books are wallpaper, but a world in which all those wallpaper books aren't published at all.
Well, you have a point. I never thought I’d be saying something like this, but maybe big publishing should be more discerning about what they publish. There are people in the biz now saying what many people assumed, that most books that are published only sell 300 copies at most. Could it be that a large percentage of books are published to ‘push’ a certain agenda? Did I ever tell you I was paranoid?
I think another flaw in the wallpaper strategy or formula is that Big Publishing puts big money on a tiny percentage of their books while putting no money on the bulk of the others, simply making them available, spine out, no promo. As a mid-list writer in the 1990s, my own experience with big publishing was likely not untypical. The publisher ‘out-of-print-ed’ the second book of my trilogy as the third book was being published. And having talked to several ‘mid-list’ authors over the years, I heard about other screw ups indicative of corporate laissez faire.
Well, I’d love to change the world… But, it’s just the way it is, just business.
I’m with you, I think. Though I personally don’t think there’s an ‘agenda‘ beyond the fact that literature reflects more often than it transcends the prevailing ideologies of any period’s, shall we say, “literary class,” and the present is no exception...
Self-published books can do surprisingly well, especially if you have a platform.
Yes. In some cases. I would say, to do well in self-publishing, you either need to have two skills, have them in spades—the ability to write well AND the ability to promote and sell. If you don’t have the latter, but have lots of money, you can pay others to promote and sell your work.
I like to think I can write. Some people who know good writing have said mine is good. However, I don’t have the huckster gene. Not knocking it, just saying that it didn’t come with my tool set.
“as small as 20,000”—don’t the majority of Big 5 books sell less than 1k?
no and 2. also we’re talking lifetime of the product including secondhand sales, libraries, gifting/borrowing until the pages crumble.
66% of Big 5 books sell less than 1k copies. Very few books make it to 20k even after a lifetime of secondhand sales and borrowing.
I don't know where you're getting your sales figures from but even a failure from The Big Five would sell a thousand copies or more. When I was a small press only one book didn't sell out of twenty years of publishing. Between ebooks, print, and subsidiary sales it wasn't hard. And when we worked with S&S and we were printing 25,000 copies a failure was something that failed around 25% or even less sell-thru.
“Kristen McLean, lead publishing industry analyst for BookScan, revealed findings from BookScan’s study of print retail sales in the U.S. of new titles by the top ten publishers in the U.S. trade market (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley). BookScan found that only 33.9 percent of these titles were selling more than 1,000 copies in their first year (Kristen McLean response to the blog “No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies” by Lincoln Michel, September 4, 2022). A more recent study of BookScan data found that close to 90 percent of titles published by the Big Five trade publishers fail to reach 2,000 copies sold (“The Economic Realities of Traditional Publishing,” For the Writers, January 16, 2026).”
Bookscan doesn't measure ebook sales, library sales, book club sales, nor many sales from independent bookstores, special sales (non-bookstores that carry books) etc. Even your own cite dilutes the claim, looking at top ten rather than Big 5--two of the top ten, HMH and WW Norton, have many hybrid academic/trade titles as well. You can easily double bookscan #s to get a better idea of total sales
Well, doubling those numbers are not very big numbers.
What’s your take on self-publishing alternatively?
Broadly similar. Kindle resolved the historical problems with self-publishing, distribution and quality. Anyone with a phone, much less a Kindle device, can find and read a self-published book now. And quality is handled by price: Kindle Unlimited means that books are "free" and even the individually priced books are much cheaper than print royalty published books. Some random horror novel might be only a tenth as good as Stephen King, but it's one thirtieth the price. People also don't care if their Dollar Store spatular breaks after two months, but would be livid if their Williams-Sonoma spatular broke so easily,
As far as the wallpapering, it remains the same: a book is uploaded onto kindle every fifteen seconds or so. The subscription service of Kindle Unlimited fundamentally promises a new kind of World's Biggest Bookstore, and low risk because the books are free with membership. Individual self-published writers have to be very prolific to keep their audience--more than one book a year, a novella for free with newsletter sign-up, lots of audiobooks, a patreon etc.The most successful self-pub books almost inevitably get reissued by a big publisher though, e.g., Colleen Hoover, Dungeon Crawler Carl, etc.
For the sort of literary fiction Substackers seem most interested in, KU seems much chancier, and creating a small press to first publish one's self might be smarter, but one needs capital to invest.
TIL CoHo started as selfpub. 🙃
Hey, thanks, Nick, this was great! I've been trying to get my novel published for the past few years, and needless to say, feel discouraged by the whole query-letter-literary-agent-rabbit-hole, and your deep dive into the systemic failures of publishing at least makes me feel less alone in my disappointment.
But being totally honest with myself, I must confess I like 'wallpaper'-flashy visuals vs. weighty substance. Take book cover design-I'm much more likely to choose a book with that extremely tasteful, often wonderful design layout so many 'serious' literary novels wrap themselves up in these days, regardless of what's between the covers. But isn't this is one of the fundamental aesthetic problems, that whole form-vs-content thing?
Personally, I blame Jaqueline Susann for all this. Valley of the Dolls was the very first novel that was marketed and sold strictly as a 'product', and La Jackie, with the help of her reptilian husband, Irving Mansfield, pioneered all sorts of shameless practices to move her book off the shelves, even showing up at the warehouses early in the morning to bribe the deliverymen with coffee and donuts. Still, it's hard to dislike the woman who staged getting hit by a car at the very same corner where the author of Gone With the Wind died, or who had this reaction to the Kennedy assassination: hearing the news while promoting her first book, Every Night, Josephine! (which was about toilet training her toy poodle), leopard-skin-pillbox-hatted Jackie fumed: "Why did this have to happen NOW? This will just RUIN my book tour!"
I buy books that have been mentioned on the Internet, that sound interesting. I don't browse bookstores much anymore because they're overpriced and the offerings dull, with terrible blurbs and the suggestion they're hust more factory-produced social justice pap produced by humans willing to write anything to be a Published Writer. Used bookstores are better, though.
Yikes. So the book I’m writing must one of these: (cool)
A bestseller
A mid seller
A low seller
Wallpaper
Toilet paper.
Have Middle Earth or Narnia already been taken?
Booksellers don’t actually get a “full refund” or their money back. To be precise, they get credit with the distributor
A distinction without difference.
Read the rest!
On returns falling in a specified window usually (3-12 months after publication) and can use that credit to order new titles to tempt the unsuspecting. The labour required to track unsold titles is not to be taken lightly. The labour required to read with deliberation the titles from small presses and imprints and try to encourage the unsuspecting customers into purchasing them because they are excellent, surprising, or different is no small thing. Belittle the independent bookseller at your peril!
I've been an independent bookseller (Books Inc., Berkeley--I was also the store's event coordinator.) Of my co-workers I was probably the most enthusiastic about independent press titles. Even with an ancient Wordstock POS system (see pic at link for terrifying example) it wasn't that challenging to pull returns. It was a bit harder to be the store re-buyer, especially if one's tastes didn't match the clientele, but nothing challenging.
Whenever I walk into a store I scan the shelf-talkers to locate The Shop Weirdo and I sample a lot of great books that way, but sadly the industry is not comprised of weirdos.
http://www.wordstock.com/wsmanual/chapter6.html
Yeah I was that weirdo…I was also the buyer so my wallpaper was pretty interesting.
Nick, it does feel impossible--but we do write in spite of all that you say, get published anyway and hang in there for reasons that don't operate via reason. See my newest reissue by Empress Editions and my short story that appears on this site: https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/sine-die
We should chat!
Wallpaper… 🙈🙃
a. and b. are not at odds.
Both are however are at odds with your prior claim about you and people like you not giving a "hoot" about selection size.
There's nothing desperate about knowing how the industry ones works in actually operates.
Until your very latest comment what you didn't give a hoot about was selection size. Now you only give a hoot about a minor title.
But we'll let you play that palmed card. In what sort of bookstore are you more likely to find that minor title? One with a larger selection.
Now, given prior comments that non-bestsellers are duds because they are boring, we can reasonably conclude that consumers like you are also likely to buy best-sellers--in fact, we know it! By definition people are more likely to buy best-sellers. That's what makes the book a best-seller.
So which bookstore are you likely to go to:
a small store that only has best-sellers?
a small store that only carries niche titles?
a big store likely to have what you want whether minor title or best-seller?
an online store attached to many many warehouses and POD technology for instant printing?
We know this answer! The bestseller-only stores barely exist anymore, even as mere departments or shelving bays in drug stores and supermarkets. The format catering to these (mass-market) is all but defunct. There are still many best-sellers and types of best-sellers! More than one shelving unit at a CVS can hold.
The last few decades saw a massive culling of the second type of store, whether brick and mortar or specialty mail-order. There has been a bit of an uptick recently though.
Fifteen years ago, nearly half the giant stores just vanished. The remaining half floundered for a bit, reduced inventory to fill up with toys, but then after being sold, refocused on their shelves and have improved performance by having lots of books.
The big giant online store? It got so big it finally has become hard to navigate thanks to an influx of free books, fraudulent books (e.g. repackaged wikipedia articles about a best-selling book etc) and non-edited books (e.g. fivver-ghost writers) thus giving a smidge of room in the marketplace for the smaller curated stores to regain a teeny bit of share.
So even by not giving a hoot, yes you do give a hoot. Even if there were a sizeable number of best-seller-avoiders, who also somehow have disparate tastes from one another, they would still end up in the biggest store... and that store would also be centering its best-sellers. After all, you and your cothinkers don't give a hoot--a Sally Rooney section isn't driving you away from the store, but the wallpaper attracts everyone.
You are positing a world where browsing in a store (a practice positively correlated with square footage) doesn't exist or is some kind of obscure minority pursuit? And one where almost nobody sees something else in a store, say, on the shelf they march right over to, and buys that as well? B&N has its 3-for-2 tables for no reason or has no data about how well they work? And in which people only rarely talk to anyone else, read a newspaper, see complaints or praise about best-sellers online (not even on substack!), or even see the "bestseller" signs in the store they go to? Well, no need to even refute that. You don't live on Earth.
And of course you don't mean commercial viability: you previously denounced non-bestsellers as "boring." Not my problem that you can't keep your own ideas in your head for more than a few hours, not even when they're written down.