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I went back on Before the Bestseller with Alex Strathdee to talk about how AI is changing book sales in 2026. Alex runs ShelfLife, and he asks the questions authors are afraid to ask out loud.
We dug into why nonfiction books that only answer questions now compete with ChatGPT. Then we turned to fiction, where politics fatigue is hurting some genres and male readers are flocking to LitRPG.
The oldest rule still wins. Write for one real reader, and word of mouth does the rest.
Key takeaways
- AI is opening up book production the same way word processors did. Complaining about it won't protect your sales.
- A nonfiction book that only answers questions competes with ChatGPT. Lean on pathos and ethos to win.
- Readers have grown tired of politically charged books in both fiction and nonfiction.
- Men are an underserved market, and LitRPG authors are selling millions of copies to them.
- Word of mouth is still how most readers find their next book.
- Write for one specific reader. Thrill that person and you can thrill many.
- An AI chatbot trained on your books needs marketing to find users, just like a book needs marketing to find readers.
The State of Book Marketing in 2026
Alex Strathdee: Welcome to Before the Bestseller, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of today's top nonfiction authors. I'm your host, Alex Strathdee, and today I'm joined by someone I genuinely geek out over. If you listen to the Novel Marketing Podcast, the number one book marketing podcast I personally follow, you already know who this is. Thomas Umstattd Jr., welcome back.
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Thanks, Alex. Great to be back.
Alex Strathdee: Thomas is the founder of Author Media, host of the Novel Marketing Podcast, and founder of the Novel Marketing Conference. He's been in book marketing for over a decade, coached thousands of authors, doubled a publisher's sales in 18 months as their marketing director, and had a blog post reach a million people in a matter of weeks.
Thomas, if you had to describe the state of book marketing in 2026 in one sentence, what would it be?
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: It's in flux in some ways. What readers want hasn't changed at all, but there is a big changing of the guard.
I was talking with a very influential person in this space earlier today about this. With the ability to easily write books with AI, there's a whole new generation of writers replacing some of the incumbents. The same thing happened when word processors came along.
Back in the typewriter days, you had to be good at outlining and writing solid first drafts. Those were key skills. They were still helpful with word processors, but word processors opened up a whole new way of writing. You could write a terrible first draft because editing became so easy. That more than doubled the number of people writing books. We went from tens of thousands of people writing novels to hundreds of thousands, because the word processor democratized writing and allowed people to write who never would have done it on a typewriter. Just as the typewriter had done to the quill pen.
We're seeing that same thing happen again with AI. A lot of incumbent authors really hate AI. There's this big anti-AI response, and it's having effectively no impact on a new generation of younger writers who are using AI to write more books faster. In some genres, these newer writers are already gobbling up twenty, thirty, forty percent of market share.
Whining isn't a strategy. You have to compete. Just like those typewriter authors, some kept writing on typewriters for the rest of their careers. Some switched to word processors. Both strategies are valid. But if you're writing on a typewriter, the expectation is that your spelling is better than before, because every word processor writer has spell check built in.
What AI Changes About Reader Expectations
Alex Strathdee: So what is the thing readers now expect you to be better at, now that AI exists?
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Speed is the biggest thing. People using AI can produce more books faster. The really rabid readers, the whales reading 300 books a year, they don't want to wait a year or two between books. They want your next book faster. If you're doing rapid release, which isn't a strategy I recommend for everyone, it really helps to use AI as much as possible throughout the process. If not for the writing, then for the editing. If not for the editing, then for publishing, marketing, promotion, and packaging. There are a lot of ways to work AI into the process, and if you're doing everything by hand, you're just not going to be able to keep up.
Alex Strathdee: It's kind of like your favorite Netflix show. You binge it all in a week, you're left with nothing, so you cancel your subscription. The streaming platforms all know they need more content. If you're not providing it, readers are going to go to someone else.
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Exactly. Netflix is a good example because some of their shows take over a year between seasons, sometimes two, and you lose all your momentum during that time. Meanwhile, people are doing storytelling on TikTok with a new episode every day, and that's where the viewership is moving.
Everyone talks about Netflix being the biggest streaming platform. That's not true. YouTube is the biggest streaming platform. Netflix is actually adding more shows in a YouTube-style format. They signed MrBeast for millions of dollars specifically because they're having a hard time competing with YouTube. On YouTube, there's a vast mix of AI content, human content, and combinations. Humans reading AI scripts. AI reading human scripts. All human productions. It all exists in one competitive ecosystem where whoever can thrill the viewer best wins. Publishing is heading the same way.
Speed, Culture, and the Stories That Resonate Now
Alex Strathdee: After this episode, I'm headed out fishing with a fishing YouTuber who's become a friend. She has no team. It's just her, and she has a quarter of a million subscribers. Netflix is competing against that. Their multi-million-dollar budget for a show, and people are just watching her talk about fishing.
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: She can react to trends so much faster. She sees what's happening in culture and adapts because she doesn't have a two-year window. That Netflix show that just wrapped a great season is now being written, then filmed, then edited, to release two years from now. We'll have a different president two years from now. The world will be an entirely different place. The stories that resonate then may not be the stories that resonate right now, especially during this big cultural shift we're going through where the kinds of stories that are working are genuinely changing.
I've started a whole new podcast called Author Update, and a big part of that show is just covering all of these shifts in culture.
Alex Strathdee: So let's go there. One way to measure culture is what's selling. Jane Friedman's newsletter has covered how some genres are down as much as 40% in the UK market. There's a big drop in readership. A lot of nonfiction authors I've spoken with are seeing their book sales shrink, especially if they're focused on one market. What are you seeing? What data are you paying attention to?
The Biggest Threat to Nonfiction Books
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: The biggest challenge in nonfiction is this: if your book answers questions, you are now competing with ChatGPT.
There's a nonfiction book I collect. I have every edition of it because it's a perfect example.
Alex Strathdee: What to Expect When You're Expecting?
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Yes. I've been going to the What to Expect website waiting for their AI chatbot to launch, and we're now coming up on the one-year anniversary of it. They launched it quietly, but it's there. If you have a question about morning sickness, you can read the book, you can post in the community with other expecting moms, or you can chat with a chatbot trained on all of their medical advice and intellectual property. It will synthesize an answer for you.
For nonfiction content, there's a lot more money in creating an AI experience of that knowledge than in creating a paper book of that knowledge. They don't necessarily compete, but it's worth understanding the difference.
I have the longest-running book marketing podcast in the world. We've been turning those episodes into blog posts, so we have 500-plus episodes in written form. I used all of those past episodes to train an AI chatbot called AI Thomas. This was my most expensive undertaking, because when we started, everything was expensive. The technology is way easier now.
AI Thomas can answer questions based on my approach and the Novel Marketing method. We've played around with different pricing strategies, and currently we're giving it away for free. We used to charge a subscription and may go back to that, but I got so busy with a new baby, got behind on email, and just made it free for everyone. It promotes our patron toolbox in every answer. It promotes our courses in every answer. It reduces the emails coming to me in every answer. Those three benefits make it worth the cost, because every time someone clicks Submit, it costs me money. But it's hyper-targeted value. You type in a question, it gives you an answer based on all my episodes. It writes you a custom blog post of about 1,500 words, and as part of that post it mentions any courses or tools I've built that help with your specific problem. Laser-guided missile instead of carpet bombing, in terms of marketing strategy.
How to Build an AI Experience That Actually Works
Alex Strathdee: You said an AI experience is where the revenue is going. We've seen the biggest genre to drop is strictly how-to content. So what does an AI experience actually look like, and how do authors build one that people will use?
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: The easiest way to create an AI experience is to take all of the books you've already written and load them into a RAG for an AI chatbot. You can do this with custom GPTs. I use a tool called Pickaxe, and I've been working with them for years. They let you build out the prompt and choose your model, so I'll often switch between Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, or whatever gives the best bang for the buck. I build a lot of tools using Pickaxe and give them to my patrons. The nice thing about Pickaxe is that it also handles the monetization side. If you have a website, you can add Pickaxe to it and charge for access to your knowledge.
I'd say this is in addition to your book, not instead of it. If you're speaking, you need books to sell in the back of the room. You can't sign someone's chatbot subscription. People want a physical artifact of your expertise.
But I think this does change how you write books. The more a book reads like a dictionary or encyclopedia, a pure reference resource, the worse it will perform. The best way to write nonfiction for this new era is to get back to Aristotle's Rhetoric.
Aristotle wrote the book on writing books. It's one of the few books in my life where I finished it and immediately started again at the beginning. And in Rhetoric, he lays out three elements for a good nonfiction book: logos, pathos, and ethos.
Logos is the logic and substance of what you're saying. That's where you have the hardest time competing with AI. The way you beat AI is in the other two.
Ethos is your authority and credibility. I know ChatGPT is telling you this, but I'm telling you ChatGPT is wrong. For example, we're getting our kitchen redone after a flood, and I was checking things with AI but also talking to the plumber. I mentioned what Claude suggested, and he said, "Don't listen to Claude. I'm looking at it with my own eyes and professional experience, and what you need is copper fitting." That's ethos. It comes in different forms. "I've helped a thousand people." "I've been there too." There are different ways of establishing credibility.
The third element is where Aristotle really shines, and that's pathos. Your ability to move the reader emotionally. AI is exceptionally weak here. When you ask a chatbot a question, it gives you an answer, but it's not trying to move you. It's not using setting, dialogue, tension, drama. It's not telling you the story of trying to lose weight and then going on a cruise and showing you the obstacle and the struggle. Stories bring the transformation readers actually want, and that's something chatbots genuinely cannot do well.
Alex Strathdee: Going back to the AI chatbot question, I've seen it done where it just feels like, "Why wouldn't I just go ask Claude?" No one's using it, it's dead. Why does that happen, and what can authors do differently?
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: There are a few issues. First, is it really based on your material? That depends on how you built it. If you just say "base this on the work of John Smith," the AI may not be that familiar with your specific material. You need to actually use a vectorized database of your books so the chatbot is referencing that in every answer and synthesizing from it.
One advantage of AI Thomas being built on blog posts is that the answers include hyperlinks. So when it gives you a custom post answering your question, you can click through to hear actual human Thomas on the podcast or read the blog version. That's often the missing piece, and you need real sophistication when putting it together. You have to test it. It's work. You have to respect it as its own craft.
But the second issue is a completely different problem. You built this amazing chatbot and no one's using it. That's the same problem as writing an amazing book no one's reading. It's a marketing problem.
The classic way to visualize the marketing journey is three steps: attract, engage, convert. Also known as know, like, and trust. Writing an amazing book or building a great chatbot or having a great website, all of that lives in the middle or bottom of the funnel. It's about engagement and conversion. It's not about attracting the attention of strangers in the first place.
It's very common for authors to keep working on engagement and conversion because that part is mostly labor. They're unwilling to put money into attraction, because attraction often just costs money. There are some free ways to get attention, but they're rarely as free as you think. Starting a YouTube channel sounds free until you factor in your time, editing, optimization, cameras, and consistency. To do it well requires investment. A certain kind of author expects everything to be free and can't figure out why they're stuck in their bubble. The answer is usually that they're unwilling to spend money to reach strangers.
Fiction Trends: What's Working and What Isn't
Alex Strathdee: Let's talk fiction. What are the trends you're seeing right now on that side?
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: There's a trend hitting both fiction and nonfiction, which you could broadly call politics fatigue. Particularly left-leaning politics fatigue.
In 2020, the top books on bestseller lists included titles like White Fragility and a lot of explicitly political books that were predominantly left-leaning. If you looked at the top 50 bestsellers, there were a few Republican books near the bottom. That has completely shifted. In 2025, I believe there were zero Democrat political books in the top 50. There was one Republican one. So it dropped from many for Democrats to zero, but it also dropped for Republicans.
Politically charged content is not selling like it used to. And this isn't just true for explicitly political books where it's most obvious. It's also true for politically charged fiction where there's a sermon underneath the story about diversity and inclusion and girl power. People are tired of that. The market's crowded, supply is going up, demand is going down, and it's a bloodbath for authors in that space. The demand hasn't disappeared entirely, but there are fewer buyers and far more sellers.
The other major shift is men carving out new genres, partly because they got pushed out of their old ones.
Fantasy was historically a male-dominated genre, both readers and writers. Fantasy has now been taken over by romanticism.
Alex Strathdee: Rebecca Yarros and all the fantasy smut.
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: The covers have gotten cleaner. The content has gotten less clean. You don't have Conan on the cover with his big sword and his beard anymore. But if you open up Rebecca Yarros, Conan is still there. Same guy. It's just from the woman's perspective. He still has a sword. It's Conan the Barbarian for women, basically. And men don't want to read that. So men have gone and created new genres. The biggest one, the shockingly vibrant one, is LitRPG.
Alex Strathdee: I've heard a little about this.
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: It's going gangbusters. I've had authors on my podcast who are selling millions of copies of their LitRPG books and making serious money. And it helps if you've read Aristotle. My interview with Seth Ring, a LitRPG author who has sold millions, we actually discuss Aristotle in that episode. You might think LitRPG, role-playing games and literature, is low and unsophisticated. Don't judge it until you've read it. There's a whole world inside of LitRPG.
It's one of the few male-dominated spaces in fiction because in most of fiction, women are running the editorial boards, women are the editors, women are making the decisions. You have to make your book appealing to women to get it published through traditional routes. When you do that, it often stops being appealing to men. Traditional publishing has become so female-dominated that their ability to sell to men has fallen off a cliff. There are constant think pieces asking where the men went, why they won't come into bookstores anymore. The answer is you have to have a space for them. You have to write books for them.
A plumber was in my house recently, covered in tattoos, Mohawk, really rough-looking guy, but wearing headphones and binge-listening on Audible. He was frustrated with the feminized fantasy he'd been reading. I asked if he knew about Larry Correia and Son of the Black Sword. He didn't. I started telling him about it and he pulled out his phone and started taking notes. He said he was going to spend his next credit on it.
There's a huge market of men, truck drivers, tradespeople, who listen to enormous amounts of audio. You just have to make content for them. There's a lot of money in that underserved market, and it's easier to make money in an underserved market. If you're the only restaurant in town, people only have to be hungry. If there are a dozen restaurants, they have to prefer your food.
How Readers Are Actually Finding Books
Alex Strathdee: How are most readers finding books right now?
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: The boring answer hasn't changed in 50 years. It's word of mouth.
Especially for fiction. The quality of the writing still matters enormously. Good marketing can't save a bad book. But you have to understand that quality is subjective. We've all been in a bookstore, flipped through a book, thought it was awful, and then seen "New York Times Bestselling Author" on the cover. Quality is in the eye of the reader. Head hopping is a good example. Some readers hate it. I love it. When I see a head hop, I think this is going to be a fun book. I want to see this scene from different perspectives.
Knowing your reader and what they're looking for makes everything easier. Knowing whether you're writing for men or for women matters because they're looking for different things. If there are two targets and you shoot in between them, you miss both. You have to know who you're trying to thrill. When you do, it becomes so much easier to sell books.
Writing for One Reader to Reach Many
Alex Strathdee: I recently had a nonfiction author on, Jeremy Kyle, and he mentioned that when he writes, he starts with "Dear Mom" or "Dear" whoever his specific reader is. Like a letter to one person. It's a level of personalization I hadn't heard described quite that way before.
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: That's actually what I teach on my podcast. It's a technique called Writing for Timothy, and it's an ancient practice that comes from the Book of First Timothy in the Bible, written to a man named Timothy. If you look at ancient writings, a lot of them were addressed to a single person.
The Prince by Machiavelli was written to one man. The Hobbit was written for Christopher Tolkien. J.R.R. Tolkien writing for his son. And that focus doesn't limit your audience. Billions of people have read First Timothy. Millions have read The Hobbit. If you can thrill one person, you can thrill many. If you can't thrill anyone, you won't thrill anyone.
It starts with one reader. Blow their socks off.
What's Coming Next: AI Agents for Authors
Alex Strathdee: Thomas, I could spend hours with you here. Thank you for being on. Last time Thomas joined us, it was one of our most downloaded episodes, all about AI optimization when that was just emerging. He was on top of it then, and now he's done the same with Grok. He's built out a whole team of book marketing AI agents, including a PR agent and a book listing agent. We're going to have him back to talk through all of that in detail because there's so much there for authors to dig into. Thomas is coming back. Stay tuned for that.
Thomas Umstattd Jr.: Yeah.
Alex Strathdee: Thanks for listening to Before the Bestseller. If you got value from today's episode, share it with a fellow author. And if you want insider tips we don't share anywhere else, head to getshelflife.com and sign up for our newsletter. Thank you for being here today.
