The Top 4 Books & Publishing Trends of 2025

Growth of indie book publishing and self-publishing

Romance novels are a surprisingly big business. Not only does the category generate $1.5B in sales each year, but it also accounts for nearly half of all mass-market paperback sales.

In 2007, when Amazon launched the Kindle, they also rolled out Kindle Direct Publishing, a move that kicked off the earliest Amazon book trends—giving independent authors a direct path to readers. This was the first time the bar for publishing a book was simply having an email address, and it led to many authors suddenly being able to generate income, sparking one of the most important digital publishing trends of the last two decades.

Romance readers also, on average, read far more romance books each year than readers of other genres. This benefits self-published writers who can move more quickly and publish more books per year, keeping pace with the latest book trends in binge-worthy, serialized storytelling.

Fifty Shades of Grey, the most popular romance novel today, was self-published and sold 4x the number of Kindle ebooks than print editions. While this was an early outlier, today’s romance bestsellers are often propelled by TikTok book trends, where passionate fanbases turn unknown indie titles into mainstream hits.

Publishing books is increasingly used as a status symbol, in a world where the bar to stand out keeps getting higher

Reedsy—a marketplace that lets self-publishing authors hire editors and book designers, and even ghostwriters—caters to a unique sort of author, tapping into one of the most notable current book trends: publishing for prestige, not profit. In careers like marketing and finance, it's common for entrepreneurs to use a book as evidence that they're an expert, but the book itself doesn't need to be especially good.

What they're paying for isn't the service of publishing a book: it's the way to use a picture of their book in their social media header photos, so hiring a good cover designer is a must. It's also being able to add "author" to their LinkedIn title. In this sense, it's a downmarket version of O'Reilly Publishing's model: O'Reilly produces reams of technical books. Authors get paid for this, but the real money they make is from the jobs they get from having written a book.

Reedsy's growth also comes from a change in the dynamics of the publishing industry. The traditional book publishing business was built around distribution to bookstores and other large sellers. Today, Amazon and Gumroad have infinite shelf space, which means the problem is not getting a book distributed—it's getting the book noticed.