Go Great or Go Home
by Andrey Sapozhnikov
The writing market is oversaturated with comforting mediocrity. Time to break the mould.
One of the most sophisticated forms of torture a modern person can inflict upon themselves is attending the Frankfurt Book Fair. Every year, publishers and literary agents from around the world flock to the bar of the grand hotel Frankfurter Hof to spend their evenings in collective nostalgia for the 1990s and 2000s — the “good old days”, when their professional activities did not seem quite so glaringly anachronistic. Complimentary champagne does an excellent job of dulling the bitterness of longing for the past, and the following morning these same people, grinning from ear to ear, are already at the Messeturm. Awaiting the announcement of the 1TikTok Book Awards, which will be won by an influencer with a ghostwritten young adult novel.
Back in 1970, the director of the respected publishing house that brought Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann to the world 2remarked, in the spirit of a cultural pessimist, that Frankfurt had become a place for “fair of actresses, pop singers, famous fliers and obsolete comic strips. I suppose great novels are a thing of the past.” It is unsettling to imagine how he would assess the fair in the 2020s. Frankfurt has long since forgotten the meaning of scandal, experimentation, or provocation (the 1976 Argentine military junta’s 3agressive attempt to pressure the fair’s director to rescind the invitation to Julio Cortázar; Neil Postman’s 1984 Amusing Ourselves to Death 4speech; the 1999 Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments fabrication 5disclosure; the 2003 6“Bookworms Reunion” between Russia and Germany; etc).
The bland, corporate atmosphere of the fair now resembles that of a Siemens sales conference, and each year it focuses ever more heavily on marketing, attempting to save the “dead” format of paper books by merging literature with social-media trends. This is, in general, a fairly rational strategy, given that the number of European readers has been steadily 7declining over the years, or that students at elite (!) American colleges are 8struggling to cope with reading assignments due to the attention-span crisis. Add to these “consumer factors” a toxic external environment for writing — as an icing on the cake, the escalation of 9journalistic and 10literary censorship around the world — and you begin to feel sorry for aspiring writers.
“Don’t try to write novels. At any rate, not literary novels, which as a genre are dead in the water”, The Critic magazine’s editorial board 11advises them, suggesting that in the 2020s only the trendy quadrant — namely memoirs, cosy crime, or “ideologically acceptable social history” — can deliver financially measurable results. If my observations in Frankfurt are to be believed, this (and I’d also add novels by TikTok influencers) is true. So please, if you wish to be a successful writer in 2026, focus on these genres. However, this success will also have a rather disturbing downside.
Because, in essence, it will become a reward for participation and, consequently, a legitimization and reinforcement of a cultural situation that can scarcely be described as anything other than 12stagnation and crisis. You will undoubtedly increase your chances of financial well-being if you decide to produce commercial hip-hop instead of underground industrial rock, or to mass-generate AI-brainrot content instead of creating hand-drawn animation. However, such attempts to please a spoiled, lazy consumer are detrimental to the quality of culture. A concept whose development depends directly on the willingness of its “architects” to experiment and to break the rules of the game. The process in which novelty is born, as was the case, for example, with the Beat Generation or the emergence of grunge music in the United States.
William Burroughs would undoubtedly have lived a more prosperous life, less mired in lawsuits and drug addiction, had he devoted himself to writing detective stories in the spirit of Tom Clancy (who, incidentally, was also not too shy about using ghostwriters’ labour), rather than to experiments with the psychedelic cut-up technique. However, refusing to conform to the status quo promises its own reward: greatness. A person becomes great not by successfully grasping the spirit of the times and capitalising on it, but by defining it and subjugating it to their talent — anything they touched become timeless, miraculous monuments.
When I lived in Tangier, Morocco, I frequented the bar at the El Muniria Hotel, where Burroughs once lived and worked. In his memory, the space’s design remains unchanged, save for the addition of ubiquitous portraits of the writer. Tangier and Burroughs are as inseparable as the Frankfurter Hof and Thomas Mann, whose signed portrait hangs in the hotel lobby. I cannot imagine his place ever being taken by TikTok Book Award winners or trendy cosy-crime non-fiction authors. A Netflix-esque, fast-food approach to cultural production that excludes continuity, longevity, and memory — and if those words mean anything to you, then it is high time to become great: meaning to be timeless, meaning not reading guides on “the best genres for debut novels in 2026.” Or do you prefer cash?
Das sind die Sieger: TikTok Book Awards 2025." Börsenblatt, October 19, 2025.
2. German Book Fair Shows New Trend." New York Times, October 11, 1970.
3. Knapp, Margit. "A Controversial Homage to Catalonia: Commerce Replaces Politics at the Frankfurt Book Fair." Spiegel Online, October 9, 2007.
4. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking, 1985.
5. At the Frankfurt Book Fair." The Guardian, October 15, 1999.
6. At the Book Fair, Russians Conquer Frankfurt." New York Times (International Herald Tribune), October 17, 2003.
7. Jeder Sechste in Deutschland liest keine Bücher mehr." Stuttgarter Zeitung, January 7, 2025.
8. Horowitch, Rose. "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books." The Atlantic, November 2024.
9. Freedom House. "As Authoritarians Invest in Online Censorship, Democracies Must Meet the Challenge." Freedom House, 2025.
10. PEN America. Banned in the USA: The Normalization of Book Banning. New York: PEN America, October 1, 2025.
11. The Secret Author. "My Advice to Young Writers." The Critic, June 12, 2025.
12. Kang, Jay Caspian. "Arguing Ourselves to Death." The New Yorker, Fault Lines.
13. Farago, Jason. "Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill." New York Times Magazine, October 10, 2023.
