Against every weather forecast, London Book Fair 2026 was almost sunny. People trooped in, fuelled by coffee and pastries, armed with laptops and printouts, handing out business cards; talking politics, talking finances, talking books. The atmosphere was buoyant and determined. Editors, agents, authors, marketing folks and sales teams moved in waves from stand to stand where publishers and publishing-adjacent companies showcased everything from upcoming titles to the next big translations grant. It felt like the bookish world had clustered on ground zero.

This year I had the chance to accompany a colleague from a previous life in publishing to LBF. Together we had the task on which literary agents sharpen their teeth: pitching a catalogue of books from the Global South for takers in the UK market. We were prepared in the myriad ways one could think of: a long list of meetings scheduled and reconfirmed with some of the biggest, and some particularly selective publishing houses, a catalogue assessed and reassessed for quality and substance, a rote list of necessary numbers – prizes longlisted and shortlisted for, prizes won, copies sold, authorial influence on social media, rights available, genre of fit and sales of comps – and above all, the essential recalculation of what makes a story from South Asia worth something in the West.

We suspected, with good reason, that pitching would be difficult.

To begin with, a story well told is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for publishing these days. The author must have a following. A hive on Instagram or Twitter that will fall upon any offering. An unpredictable industry now wants predictability; a minimum number of the book must sell, irrespective of its appeal to the population of readers. Marketing a book sometimes has little to do with its quality, especially if books are now just classified as another kind of merchandise that influencers on social media hawk as part of a selection of products to produce passive income.

Then of course, there’s the slant with which one pitches a book from South Asia for a British market. Why should you, reader who may never see the chaotic streets of Bombay, never know much about the geopolitics of Tibet, never experience the messy, complicated intergenerational trauma of a Sri Lankan family, never believe in the myths of a pantheon of jealous Gods, care about these stories? For the same reason, perhaps, that thousands of South Asian readers read Shakespeare and Philip Pullman and Hilary Mantel. To push the limits of their imagination; to seek the core of commonality of emotion; to understand how the world is connected (when America sneezes, the UK catches a cold, and South Asia braces for the fever). It was our job to find those reasons for each book we wanted to pitch.

And above all we expected a great weariness from the publishing community. In a growing age of AI generated slop feeding itself in the name of content, in the era of competing against social media and video games and other forms of entertainment designed by their nature to be addictive and intellectually desensitising, books require sustained attention, an exercise of the imagination, memory, time and the ability to hold threads of thoughts together until you see the point. Attempting to remain profitable in such conditions over the last few years has been a struggle.  

Yes—everyone is keeping an eye on pushback from marketing and acquisitions, but conversations with editors felt like a breath of fresh air.

We expected to pitch the books on our catalogue with these difficult barriers in mind; to defend debut authors for a lack of social media following, to reimagine works into ways palatable for the UK market, to talk about narrative hooks and commercial viability. What we found, instead, was that the cynicism we had encountered at bookshops, on cold emails, in panels regaling audiences with datastreams about sales and franchising was being quietly counterweighted by the keen, careful eye of editors, who felt much more free in conversations to not only vent their frustrations at these barriers, but also launch a counterattack against this evolving face of the industry.

Yes—everyone is keeping an eye on pushback from marketing and acquisitions, but conversations with editors felt like a breath of fresh air. It was life-affirming to speak of books with bone-deep love and critical passion. Recentring the conversation on books was my biggest, most valuable takeaway from the 2026 edition of the book fair. In twenty meetings over the three days, every conversation upheld the value of quality writing, the need to champion voices that are subsumed by tidal waves of whatever passes for influence these days, and the urge to cultivate a publishing list that believes in the intelligence of a reader, that is determined not to produce a generation of readers without the critical faculties to engage with literature.

This is what publishing is about. Stories, of this world or otherworldly, in every form and from every discipline. At the core of this industry is the human need to narrativise; to invent; to cohere; to imagine. When the cultural zeitgeist swings away from this core, when it decides to focus its eyes on celebrity book clubs and endorsements and sales, it fails to recognise that the unpredictability of what the industry produces is what makes it run. You never know which story takes the world by storm. A good agent, a good editor, an incredible author might all make excellent guesses, but what captures a reader can’t be pinned down by numbers and categories.

Perhaps this is what I’d reiterate: the publishing industry has a cultural responsibility. It is the structure on which the art and craft of writing now rests. It shapes the conditions under which stories are told, shared, and understood. Within its constraints, editors walk the tightrope of commercial success and literary integrity, recognising that the unpredictability of what makes a good book is a strength, not a weakness. By refusing to define the ‘product’ based purely on anything but what can excite and compel one’s mind, they protect that novelty which readers go seeking in different books.

We had a great time pitching, my colleague and I, ultimately because of how meaningful it was to think of literature at its purest even in the context of industry. It reminded us that publishing may operate as an industry, but it endures as a responsibility: to protect the space where stories can still surprise us, challenge us, and expand what we think is possible.