Last fall, while reporting Esquire’s “Future of Books” predictions, I asked industry insiders about trends they’d noticed in recent years. Almost everyone mentioned that debut fiction has become harder to launch. For writers, the stakes are do or die: A debut sets the bar for each of their subsequent books, so their debut advance and sales performance can follow them for the rest of their career. For editors, if a writer’s first book doesn’t perform, it’s hard to make a financial case for acquiring that writer’s second book. And for you, a reader interested in great fiction, the fallout from this challenging climate can limit your access to exciting new voices in fiction. Unless you diligently shop at independent bookstores where booksellers highlight different types of books, you might only ever encounter the big, splashy debuts that publishers, book clubs, social-media algorithms, and big-box retailers have determined you should see.

BookTok—er, TikTok—is still considered the au courant emergent platform, but unlike Instagram and Twitter before it, publishers can’t figure out how to game the algorithm. “It’s a wonderful tool, but it’s an uncontrollable one,” Lucas says. As opposed to platforms like Twitter and Instagram, on which authors can actively post to establish a following, the runaway hits of BookTok (see: The Song of Achilles) grew from influencer videos.

These days, “in order to get exposure, you have to make the kinds of content that the platform is prioritizing in a given moment,” Chayka says. On Instagram, that means posting videos. Gone are the days of the tastefully cluttered tableaux of notebooks, pens, and coffee mugs near a book jacket; front-facing videos are currently capturing the most eyeballs. “A nonfiction author at least has the subject matter to talk about,” Chayka says. (Many nonfiction writers now create bite-size videos distilling the ideas of their books, with the goal of becoming thought leaders.) But instead of talking about their books, novelists share unboxing videos when they receive their advance copies, or lifestyle videos about their writing routines, neither of which convey their voice on the page. Making this “content” takes time away from writing, Chayka says: “You’re glamorizing your writer’s residency; you’re not talking about the work itself necessarily.”

“Energy tends to attach itself to wherever energy is already attached,” Lucas says. “Fewer debuts have a chance of really breaking through the noise in this climate, because all of the energy attaches itself to the ones that have made it past a certain obstacle.” In some cases, the energy starts building as early as when a project is first announced.

Because staff publicists at publishing houses must split their workload among several authors, there is an expectation that an author will now spend untold hours working as their book’s spokesperson.

The agent at the talent firm describes a “one strike and you’re out” mentality, with some authors getting dropped by their agents if their debut doesn’t sell well.

But one positive development amid this sense of precarity is the rise of the literary friendship. “On social media,” Isle McElroy wrote for this magazine in September, “writers are just as likely to hype their peers as they are to self-promote: linking where to buy books, posting photos of readings, and sharing passages from galleys.” There is now an all-ships-rise mentality among authors at every career stage, but particularly among first-time novelists. Now networks of writers are more important than ever.

When it was time to ask other writers for blurbs for The Volcano Daughters, Balibrera had friends who were excited to boost the book, but she could also rely on other writers who remembered her from Literati. “There was goodwill built up already,” Gibbs says.

The main problem with the book review today is not that its practitioners live in New York, as some contend. It is not that the critics are in cahoots with the authors under review, embroiled in a shadow economy of social obligation and quid pro quo favor trading. The problem is not that book reviews are too mean or too nice, too long or too short, though they may be those things, too. The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay. What kind of job or opportunity for the reviewer depends on her ambitions.

He wants honest reviews of novels; instead he gets hype and a dizzying, outrageous, stultifying profusion of adjectives. He wants serious literary criticism of novels; instead he gets withering assessments of the era in which said novels are written, which, by endlessly discussing the same five novels, only confirm his fears that literature has reached the unsustainably small gene-pool era of its long, slow slide to extinction. The contemporary reviewer is unhappy too: she works too hard, and still everything she does is wrong and insufficiently compensated. Her careful reviews end up reading like stenography, and when she swings for the fences her actual readers — unlike the trigger-happy tweeters — complain that she has swung too far.