Dad Books Aren’t Dying. The 700-Page Hardcover Is.

The Wall Street Journal would like us to know that dad books are… dying.

Their evidence is that Mark Twain, by Ron Chernow, published last Father’s Day with all the marketing tonnage Penguin Press could muster, has only sold a measly 119,259 hardcover copies. In comparison, his 2017 Grant, with the same publisher and the same prominent display table at Barnes & Noble, sold 381,604.

In just eight short years, two thirds of the audience for the sort of book serious men give other serious men for Father’s Day has gone and evaporated.

And the WSJ has a name for what’s happened. Dad Lit is dying. Which is the polite way of saying it has ceased to be. It is bereft of life. It is pining for the fjords. It is, like the dodo, the great auk, and the publishing executive who can find Bookstagram on a map, an ex parrot.

To be fair, the numbers sort of support their argument. Adult nonfiction print sales are down nearly 8% year on year. Politics and current affairs, down 19%. Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling hit the top of the NYT nonfiction list on 26 April selling a paltry 13,468 copies in its first week while, in an eight to one kicking, the top fiction debut on the same list, Devney Perry’s Rites of the Starling, sold 105,396.

(For the curious, Starling features dragons, a tournament, a love triangle, and the epically explicit content traditional publishing seems to have started pretending it doesn’t notice while quietly building a $610 million genre around it…)

However, what the WSJ piece doesn’t mention in its jeremiad is Damien Lewis.

Lewis is a British military historian whose 2024 SAS Daggers Drawn sold 28,385 hardbacks. His 2025 follow-up, SAS The Great Train Raid, sold 48,640. That’s a seventy percent rise. In the year nonfiction print sales fell 8 percent.

Yes. Shocking, isn’t it? The dad book is dying so quickly that one of its most successful living practitioners is up seventy points in a year and has the film-rights bidding war to show for it. I can’t help thinking this is the obituary equivalent of writing a moving piece on the death of football the same week England beat Germany seven-nil.

The WSJ’s culprit for this ‘death’ is what one of its sources calls “the smorgasbord factor”. Podcasts. Substack. Netflix documentaries. YouTube videos of an articulate man in a leather jacket explaining the Battle of Stalingrad to camera. Their thesis is that men have left books for talk. The HarperCollins president sombrely quoted in the piece puts it bluntly. The man who wants American history is now tuning into history podcasts… You’ve scratched that itch.

But that’s to woefully misunderstand what’s actually happening.

Because, yes, men are listening to podcasts. 62 percent of men consumed a podcast last month, up from 46 percent in 2023. That’s a real number. But the WSJ treats the podcast as the cause and the book as the casualty, when the relationship in fact runs the other way around. Because history podcasts have to talk about something, don’t they? And, guess what? They talk about the books! Lewis himself notes that the YouTube channels covering the Great Train Raidare, almost without exception, doing it on the back of his book or his interviews about his book.

Books supply the podcasts. The podcasts don’t replace the books. They market them!

But the WSJ isn’t wholly out of line. Something is, in fact, shuffling off its mortal coil. It has expired. It has gone to meet its maker. It is the corpse the WSJ couldn’t identify if you laid it out on the floor of the bookshop.

And that is one specific publishing model. Namely, the 1,200-page hardcover monolith, art-directed for the dust-jacket review, released into a marketing apparatus that ends at the bookshop window, with the audio sold as an afterthought.

Chernow’s Twain is exactly that, and it sold a third as many as Grant did when that model still worked. On the other hand, Lewis’s Great Train Raid is a 90,000-word thriller-packaged Second World War raid story with a film-trailer title, Matt Bates narrating the audio at parity with Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe, and a marketing campaign that runs through the same podcasts the WSJ thinks are killing the genre.

One author is selling seventy percent more than last year. The other, sixty-nine percent less than eight years ago.

If you’ve read this far and you’re a dad wondering when reading stopped being something dads do, the news is better than the WSJ would like to suggest. Because the dad books that work are still working. They’re simply being written and packaged by people who’ve noticed the publishing industry isn’t the only ladder.

So, to finish, I’ve got three suggestions, free of charge.

The first is that genre fiction is where it’s at, guys.

Dan Roberts, who runs the Dad Lit Pod, makes the argument that the way back into reading for the average male reader isn’t through Marilynne Robinson. It’s through Warhammer 40K tie-in novels. From which the reader moves to Clancy. From Clancy to The Right Stuff. And from The Right Stuff to Hemingway hunting lions in Africa. The on-ramp is genre and the destination is the canon. And anyone who tells you this is anti-intellectual has never tried to get a teenage boy to finish Old Yeller against his will. The research also backs his argument up. Cubillos and Rousseau, working with American boys in 2024, found that giving them genre fiction they actually wanted, with choice and time built in, raised reading volume by sixty-seven percent.

Not enjoyment scores. Pages, people.

Second, buy the audio!

The WSJ’s central claim is that audio is cannibalising reading, but that rests on the pretty ropey assumption that audio isn’t actually reading. But it is! It’s reading delivered through one of the only windows of attention that we poor modern dads have left, which is to consume during the commute, the walk, the gym, and that half hour between dinner and bedtime.

The American Time Use Survey makes it clear that men have plenty of leisure time (slightly more than women, in fact). And the question, really, is what window of attention a book can actually fit inside. A 1,200-page hardcover, obviously, fits into zero. But a 40-hour Jeff Hays narration of Dungeon Crawler Carl will fit into nearly all of them. Thus, any publishing model that decides to puts audio at the back of the queue and doorstep hardback at the front needs to understand that it’s optimising for a market that, quite literally, no longer exists.

On the other hand, the model that puts audio at the very centre of its marketing will be the one that is selling seventy percent more than last year.

But finally, and most importantly, dads need to start reading and discussing the books that their sons are reading. Because, if you haven’t yet noticed that the Dungeon Crawler Carl series has sold rather a lot of copies, and that Cradle sold an awful lot more, and that the entirety of Royal Road has spent the last fifteen years becoming a whole male-coded reading economy that traditional publishing fails to recognise exists, then your references need updating.

Your son has noticed you’re not reading. And he’s learning from you how to be a man.

So, nah. The dad book isn’t dying. But a very specific publishing model is, as the men who used to buy its products relocate to a parallel ecosystem.