Merry Christmas to all who celebrate. Many of you will no doubt be marking the occasion by cracking the real or virtual spine of a new book. And as my reflection on the year moves away from AI, that’s the perfect segue into thinking about what kind of book most people are likely to be receiving from Santa.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Romantasy has yet again dominated the year’s reading and will no doubt be the one genre to rule them all in the Christmas stocking contest. Spotify’s end-of-year summary confirmed that romantasy dominated audiobooks this year just as it did print and e-books, with Sarah Maas and Rebecca Yarros commandeering the year’s bestseller lists.
Interestingly, from an indie perspective, the breakout sensation of the year, SenLin Yu’s Alchemised, began life as fan fiction on the hugely popular platform Archive of Our Own. That same Spotify roundup contained the fascinating prediction that dark themes, and horror in particular, might be starting to creep back up the marketplace and may be worth watching (and publishing) in 2026.
Audiobooks and a Maturing Market
Spotify was omnipresent elsewhere in the news. While the company notably claimed it had helped improve audiobook sales across all platforms (and indeed for publishers) by introducing new listeners to the format, subsequent surveys have suggested the market may be beginning to slow its growth, with future years’ battles likely to be for a share of the existing audience rather than carving out entirely new ones.
A Quietly Transformative Shift
The most exciting story of the year for me was not about AI nor about audiobooks, but about the format that made so many indie options possible in the first place. This year, Bookshop.org expanded its offering into e-books, first in the US and later in the UK.
Bookshop.org is the platform that lets people anywhere in a market order books online and choose an independent bookstore to take a slice of the cover price.
It is the perfect platform for readers who want to support artisanal and local businesses, including indie authors, and the move into e-books—indies can distribute through several platforms such as Draft2Digital—means that natural partnership can finally come of age.
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