I watched an interview with Jon Yaged, the CEO of Macmillan Publishers.

One sentence stayed with me:

“There were a bunch of people out there reading things or wanting to read things that we weren’t publishing.” 

That sentence followed me through the Leipzig Book Fair. Because everywhere I looked, I saw proof.

Genres exploding that feel almost invisible in traditional catalogs. Niche fiction, hybrid formats. And still: people were buying them.

They were not “approved” by a data-driven gatekeeper like a big publisher. They connected.

And that tells me something important: Demand exists before the industry recognizes it.

“I would say conservatively we publish less of than one in 10. It’s probably more like one in 20 or 30 (…)”