2021 in Books: `Everything feels magnified'

NEW YORK (AP) — Books and authors mattered in 2021, sometimes more than the industry wanted.

A 22-year-old poet became a literary star. The enthusiasms of young people on TikTok helped revive Colleen Hoover's “It Ends With Us,” and other novels released years earlier. Conservatives pushed to restrict the books permitted in classrooms at a time when activists were working to expand them. And the government decided that the merger of two of the country's biggest publishers might damage an invaluable cultural resource: authors.

“Everything feels very magnified,” says the prize-winning novelist Jacqueline Woodson, whose books have been challenged by officials in Texas and elsewhere.

“One day I hear that Texas is trying to ban (the Woodson novels) ‘Red at the Bone’ and ‘Brown Girl Dreaming,’ and the next moment we see Amanda Gorman speaking truth to power. Maybe it's because of social media or the pandemic, but it all feels much more intense," she says.

Sales were strong in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, and climbed higher in 2021. The number of books sold through the end of November increased by 10% over 2020, and by 20% over the pre-pandemic year of 2019, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks around 85% of the print market. The Association of American Publishers reported revenues of $7.8 billion for trade books through the first 10 months of 2021, a 14% jump over last year.

“You're not hearing much these days about how people don't read anymore,” says Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, the trade group for the country's independent bookstores.

A year after the ABA worried that hundreds of stores could shut down because of the pandemic, Hill says membership is growing, with more than 150 new stores opening and around 30 going out of...