Everybody Wants to Write a Novel. Nobody Wants to Read One.

David Baldacci spent three decades building a career as one of the best-selling thriller writers alive. And every time he publishes a new novel, three AI-generated "companion books" appear on Amazon the same day.

In a recent interview, Baldacci described it plainly: "They're companion books to my book that say 'oh, you don't need to read Baldacci's book. We'll tell you everything that's in the book right here in a really summarized form so you can read it in like 30 minutes instead of reading his novel.'"

Looking past Baldacci's righteous indignation, I'd like to talk about the impulse of a person who spends money on a companion book. Someone who would rather pay money to spend a mere 30 minutes skimming a novel summary instead of reading the actual novel. Let's all try not to vomit while we envision the multitudes of supposed "readers" who looked at the existence of a new David Baldacci thriller and thought: I wish there was a way to read this without actually reading it.

The companion books wouldn't exist if there weren't a market for them. And be assured, there is a market.

The Companion Book Racket

The "companion book" industry for fiction is exactly what it sounds like. Someone uses AI to generate a summary of a newly released novel, slaps a cover on it, uploads it to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform, and prices it just low enough that an inattentive buyer might grab it instead of, or alongside, the real thing. These products are filed under categories like "study guides" or "biographies" to claim fair use protection, even though their entire commercial purpose is to divert sales from the actual book.

The pipeline feeding this industry is the KDP side-hustle community, which has produced roughly 90,000 TikTok tutorials on generating passive income through constant AI publishing. These are aspiring passive-income entrepreneurs who often have the nerve to call themselves authors while pumping out a 40-page PDF about someone else's book.

Amazon's own content guidelines technically prohibit companion books based on copyrighted works without permission from the copyright holder. But enforcement is reactive, not proactive. The burden falls on the author to police the listings personally in a store that processes 1.4 million self-published titles per year.

For nonfiction, you can at least argue that a summary serves a legitimate research function. But for a thriller? A literary novel? A mystery? The experience of reading the book is the entire point. You can tell someone the detective figures it out in chapter twelve, but you haven't given them the experience of getting there. You've just ruined the surprise.

So who's buying these things? Amazon doesn't publish those breakdowns and the companion books operate in a gray market, so we're not really sure. But the answer, circumstantially, is obvious: people who want to talk about books without reading them (like "bookish" content creators, hypothetically). People who want to seem well-read as part of their manufactured identity are another category, who treat fiction as content to be consumed and referenced rather than experienced.

Forty Percent of Your Target Audience... Isn't

In 2025, 40% of American adults did not read a single book. The median American read two. A YouGov survey found that 19% of American adults did 82% of the country's reading. A University of Florida study found that daily leisure reading has declined over 40% in the past two decades.

And young adults are the worst off. Americans aged 18 to 29 read an average of 5.8 books in 2025, the lowest of any generation. Adults over 65 read an average of 12.1. The people with the most years ahead of them are reading the least.

You'd expect these numbers to mean book sales are collapsing, but they're actually stable, which creates a peculiar cultural atmosphere. Books still carry prestige. Being "a reader" still signals intelligence and depth in social settings. The identity of reading persists long after the habit has evaporated for most people. And so you get a predictable consumer behavior: people buying books as aspirational props, the same way they buy running shoes they never jog in.

The "special edition" phenomenon in fiction is a bit of a mask-off moment for the state of book sales. Limited edition covers, sprayed edges, exclusive dust jackets, collector's box sets. BookTok is full of people displaying their shelves organized by color, spine out, never cracked, showing off multiple copies of the same book in different editions. These are collector's items that happen to contain stories. It's the stationery and planner community, but with a higher unit price and a more intellectually flattering aesthetic.

There's nothing wrong with beautiful books. But when the dominant mode of engagement with fiction is acquisition and display rather than reading, something significant has shifted. The book has become merchandise. It's no longer about the story, the characters, or how they affect the reader.

The Eighty-One Percent Who Want to be Your Competition

As the reading public is shrinking, somehow, the writing public is exploding. A survey by the Jenkins Group found that 81% of Americans believe they have a book in them and should write it (this includes both fiction and nonfiction). A more recent OnePoll survey found that 55% think their life is worthy of a book deal, though only 15% have started writing a novel and just 6% have gotten halfway through.

This is why booktubers never offer writing or publishing advice beyond the beginner level: Their core audience never progresses past that point.

On the production side, self-published titles with ISBNs hit 2.6 million in 2023, outnumbering traditionally published books by more than two to one. Amazon KDP alone releases over 1.4 million self-published titles annually. The supply side of publishing has never been larger. And 75% of self-published authors earn less than $1,000 per year.

I can tell you from experience what a lot of these aspiring authors look like, because many of them have been my clients.

I run an editing and ghostwriting business. The clients I love working with are the serious ones, who read voraciously in their genre, who have studied the craft, and understand that a novel is a piece of engineering as much as it is a piece of art. These writers exist, and some of them produce genuinely extraordinary work, genre fiction that would embarrass half the Big Five's catalog with its tight, original, page-level craftsmanship.

And most of them struggle to sell.

But there's another kind of client. The person who shows up wanting to be ghostwritten into an author, carrying no outline, no characters, no research into their genre, just a one-sentence concept and a credit card. They want me to build the plot, invent the people, write every word, and hand them a finished novel they can put their name on. The writing service is incidental. What they're purchasing is the identity of author.

Then there's the editing client who hands me a self-insert novel written at an eighth-grade reading level and asks, sincerely, how I can make it a bestseller. Editors improve manuscripts. They fix structure, sharpen prose, catch inconsistencies. They do not manufacture commercial success from raw material that hasn't been developed yet. If these "writers" had watched even one YouTube video on the topic of self-publishing, they would know that.

These clients share a common trait: they want the status of authorship without the apprenticeship of reading. And I understand the appeal. "I'm writing a novel" is one of the most impressive things you can say at a dinner party. "I read a lot" is not. One is an act of creation that implies vision, discipline, and talent, while the other is a hobby, slightly more respectable than television but less impressive than running a marathon. And with the current trends in publishing (particularly for women), there's a risk of people interpreting "I like to read a lot" as "I enjoy hardcore literary smut."

The culture rewards declaring creative ambitions, and social media rewards it even more. You can build an entire online persona around being "a writer" without finishing a single chapter. Writing journals, aesthetic desk setups, steaming coffee mugs next to one of those clicky-clack typewriter-inspired keyboards, Pinterest boards full of character inspiration photos. The consumer products surrounding the identity of "writer" have become their own market, entirely decoupled from the production of actual writing.

But Why Fiction?

I understand why people want to write memoirs. Everyone thinks their life is interesting, and occasionally someone is right. Likewise, I understand the urge to write self-help or business books. If you've built something successful, packaging your knowledge for sale is rational. These are ego projects with at least a logical foundation.

But wanting to write a novel when you don't read novels is something else. And it's worth asking what, exactly, these people think a novel is.

I think many of them believe a novel is a long story. That the skill involved is just the patience to type enough words in a row. They've seen movies based on books. They know the basic shape of a narrative: beginning, middle, end, conflict, resolution. They figure the rest is just filling in details.

This is roughly equivalent to believing you can perform surgery because you've watched a medical drama on television.

A novel is a series of technical decisions executed at the sentence level across 70,000 to 100,000 words, encompassing point of view, tense, pacing, scene structure, dialogue cadence, information control, and subtext—all coming together to form a swell of emotion and complex thought in your reader. Every one of these skills is learned through extensive reading. You absorb the engineering of fiction by experiencing it, the same way you absorb the grammar of your native language by hearing it spoken around you for years before you ever diagram a sentence. (Yes, I know, schools don't make the kids diagram sentences anymore)

Writers who don't read produce a recognizable product. The prose is flat, the pacing is wrong, and the dialogue sounds like people explaining things to each other rather than talking. The story moves in a straight line from A to B without the controlled digressions that make fiction feel alive. An editor can identify a non-reader's manuscript within two pages, often within two paragraphs.

I've been a lifelong movie and TV lover. Highbrow and lowbrow. And I have never once seriously considered directing a film or acting in one. I have no training, no instinct for it, and no confusion about that fact. I just like watching. The thought of inserting myself into the production side has never occurred to me as reasonable. And yet people who don't even read much decide they should write novels, and nobody treats this as the bizarre mismatch it is.

A Better Use of Your Time

Here is where I'm supposed to encourage everyone to follow their dreams and believe in themselves and never give up. I'm going to do something different instead.

If you want to be an author because you love stories, because you read constantly, because you have something specific and urgent to say through fiction, then keep going. Study craft. Read in your genre. Write badly, then write less badly, then revise until it's good. The path is long and the money is terrible and the audience is shrinking and you should do it anyway, because the readers who remain are devoted and they deserve the best you can give them.

But if you want to be an author because you like the idea of being an author, because you think it would be cool to have written a book, because you want the identity more than you want to do the actual work of learning how stories function at the sentence level, then I have good news. There are better outlets for your energy that will pay more, reach more people, and give you the creative satisfaction you're actually looking for.

Copywriting and content writing are in constant demand. The companies building AI tools are themselves hiring human writers to create, edit, and refine their content. The fear that AI will consume the entire copywriting industry has been somewhat overblown by the fact that AI sales copy doesn't convert well and even casual readers can clock AI cadence immediately.

Scripting for video content and podcasts is a growing field with a structural advantage over novel writing: discoverability. A YouTube video or podcast episode can find its audience through algorithms and search for years after publication. A novel has roughly six weeks on the shelf before it's buried by the next wave of releases. If you have strong instincts for narrative and dialogue, scripting for visual and audio media puts those skills to work in a format that actually gets consumed by the audiences who have stopped reading books.

The gaming industry is one of the biggest employers of narrative talent in the world. Video game budgets now rival or exceed Hollywood productions, and the demand for writers who can build worlds, create branching storylines, and write convincing dialogue is immense. If the part of novel writing that appeals to you is world-building and character creation, game writing offers that plus a team, a salary, and an audience that will spend 40 hours inside your story instead of abandoning it on a nightstand.

Authorship is a beautiful pursuit when the motivation is telling stories to people who want to hear them. But when the motivation is wearing the identity, the identity alone isn't worth the years of work that a good novel requires. Find the medium your audience is actually using and meet them where they are.

Baldacci put it simply in his interview: "At some point, the sales are gonna nosedive, the market's gonna be flooded with these cheap AI-generated books, publishers are gonna start losing money, and start shutting down. And guess what, you don't have any great writers emerging anymore."

The readers are still out there. They're fewer, and they're pickier, because they've been repeatedly screwed over by derivative shit. They're hungry for stories worth their time. If you're going to ask for their attention, make sure you've earned it. And if you haven't done the reading, you haven't earned it.

Leave the novels to the novelists. And for God's sake, read the book, not the summary.