Full Transcript: The Business of Nonfiction with Hollis Heimbouch
Harper Business publisher Hollis Heimbouch on proposals, positioning, platform, and the realities of nonfiction publishing in 2026.
It’s tough to be a nonfiction author these days. People are overwhelmed with nonfiction content, most of it free, and almost all of it engineered to be as enticing as possible: podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Substack, online courses… not to mention AI models that will instantly answer any question you have. With omnipresent options, and all of our attention spans shrinking like mushrooms in a hot saute pan, what would make someone still want to spend 10 or 15 hours reading a book?
To talk about this new landscape, I sat down with Hollis Heimbouch, publisher of Harper Business and Harper Edge, whose authors include Jim Collins, Chris Voss, Satya Nadella, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Clay Christensen.
During our hour-long Q&A, Hollis spoke candidly about a host of topics, including:
Why nonfiction publishing has become more challenging post-pandemic
The difference between having an audience and having a book-buying audience
What makes editors immediately pay attention to a proposal
How authors should think about platform, publicity, and positioning
What makes an author difficult to work with (and how to avoid it)
Why large advances can sometimes become a liability
The publishing myths she wishes authors would stop believing
Below is the (lightly edited) transcript from our live Author Insider conversation.
📺 Prefer to watch instead? Watch the video replay here.
📄 Prefer reading offline? Paid and founding members can download a PDF of the transcript at the end of the second section (Why Personality Matters More Than Ever).
What’s Changed in Nonfiction Publishing?
Panio Gianopoulos: Hollis, thank you for joining us. Hollis is a nonfiction legend. She runs Harper Edge and Harper Business and has seen it all and is really in that sweet spot—or at least what I find the sweet spot—of business, social science, and personal development… let’s start off. I have quite a few questions.
Hollis Heimbouch: Go for it. Glad to be here.
Panio: You’ve worked with a lot of the biggest names in nonfiction publishing. So when you look at the market today, 2026, what’s changed in the past five or even ten years?
Hollis: Yes, that’s a great question. We’re all trying to figure that out ourselves. I would say that there’s definitely a dividing line between the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic publishing.
During the pandemic, we were all home and had plenty of time to read, and we were seeing extraordinary book sales of fiction and nonfiction. And particularly for nonfiction, a lot of classics. I think a lot of people felt like, Oh, I’ve always wanted to read that book. Now’s my time.
So we saw a lot of increases in some of what we call our backlist, which are titles that are sort of three years or older, and a lot of interest in that. We saw less interest at that time in new titles and frontlist titles. And I think that’s just because people were going for the tried and true, not feeling like they wanted to take a lot of risks in their lives. They were already feeling like life was pretty risky. So we saw that was an interesting shift.
And coming out of that, I think the landscape is pretty different. There’s been a huge surge in fiction publishing. Publishing is sort of people who do fiction and people who do nonfiction. I’ve always done nonfiction publishing.
On the nonfiction side, we’ve seen a lot of pressure on nonfiction publishing because there are these new and better, to some degree for some people, outlets for getting the information that you want. So the proliferation of podcasts, the proliferation of social media, the Substackers, the audio publication, which is not just necessarily podcasts, but even short-form audio. We really saw a whole new kind of competition for attention for nonfiction.
And in many cases, people might have listened to one podcast and felt like that was sufficient. So I think for book publishers, our challenge is just to make books that make people want to buy them and feel like they’re going to get more than they could possibly get in a post on Substack or in even an hour-long podcast.
So that’s the challenge: to get people to want to buy a book because they feel like it’s going to add more than what they could already get.
I don’t have the statistics on how many books were published, but I don’t know that we’ve seen a decline in the number of books published. But we’ve certainly seen a decline in overall sales across—I’m talking about sort of big trade publishing, which would be the Big Five publishers in New York. The majority of the books published from nonfiction, there’s been an overall decline in the category.
Panio: That’s really interesting. I didn’t realize there was such this switch in types of books post-pandemic. Although it makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of people I know finally busted out Moby-Dick and…
Hollis: The Power Broker. A lot of people bought The Power Broker.
Panio: Yeah. So what I was curious about is you mentioned the podcast. Somebody can be on a podcast, they’ve got a great book, and then someone listens to 45 minutes and then that’s always the fear I think publishers and authors have. They’re like: That was enough. That was good. I get it.
So what do you think as a nonfiction author—say you’re putting together a proposal or even writing the book—what is the element? Is it the personal element? What makes that book more interesting than just, yeah, I get the five basic points. Thanks, ChatGPT.
Why Personality Matters More Than Ever
Hollis: Well, I think having a personality is really important now. Back in the day when I started publishing business books—this is a long time ago—they really felt more like medicine to be taken. The idea wasn’t that they were fun to read necessarily. They were not entertaining. But they were instructive, and they were necessary to have a better career.
The Malcolm Gladwell era really ushered in a higher quality of writing, more storytelling, more personal anecdote. And I think that’s the playing field today: you do have to have a kind of personal warmth. Use personal anecdotes, use life experience when you can.
And then I think you also have to find a way to say something that is both intuitively true and timely and timeless. It’s hard to do all those, but I think it has to be something that people are urgently feeling like they need to understand right now. But also, because of the life of a book, it needs to be something that matters in five or ten years. Maybe that’s a long life cycle, but at least beyond two weeks. It has to last for a year or two or three.
And then I think somehow when you hear about it, it has to intrigue you, but it also has to speak to you as something that might absolutely be true. It feels true to you, and now you want to know more.
That’s one shorthand to think about what a book proposal needs to do. And then obviously, to do more than just what you could do in a podcast is to offer not just more stories, but more prescription if it’s a more prescriptive book, or more insights, more high-level frameworks—something that can’t be reduced to just a 45-minute podcast.
