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Why are debut novels failing to launch?

For first-time writers, it’s harder than ever to break out. That poses an existential crisis for publishing—and disturbing limits on your access to exciting new voices.

When publicist Nicole Dewey started working in publishing twenty-five years ago, she says, there would be “reams” of advance copies to send to booksellers, along with a robust ecosystem of national papers and magazines eager to review books. When Kyle Dillon Hertz published his debut, The Lookback Window, which The New York Times called “gripping and savagely beautiful,” he got the impression that because he “wrote a very gay, very queer, very explicit book,” he says, his publicity team believed that he “would know the people to whom the publicist or marketer should connect.” But he didn’t. “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.

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