Walk into your favourite bookshop on any given day and you will be greeted with tables upon tables of expertly curated titles. Right now, I’d bet Booker-shortlisted novel The Safekeep would pull your eye, or perhaps Natasha Brown’s gripping Universality. But as you observe the colourful book spines and the shouty quotes (“UNPUTDOWNABLE,” “GRIPPING”, “VITAL”), has your mind ever drifted to the machine that brought them to you?

To those outside of the opaque world of the publishing industry, it is a secretive beast, worth over £11 billion in the UK. And, contrary to concerns that we’ve all stopped reading in favour of scrolling, it’s the height of its powers: fiction sales were up 18% last year, according to the Publishers Association, a trend that continued into 2025 with Waterstones reporting a 5% increase in profits. Audiobook sales, meanwhile, were up almost by a third in the UK last year, reaching a record £268 million.

In many ways, however, publishing is also a strained industry facing rapid change. From the threat of AI and the pressures of BookTok to the urgent need for ‘sensitivity readers’, books today are being born into a startlingly different landscape to that of just 10 years ago. So what does it really take to make the bestsellers list in 2025? In an effort to discover just that, we took a peek behind the curtain at the publishing world in 2025 – hearing from industry insiders about the secrets of a book’s success and how they really predict what we’ll all be hanker to read next summer.

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