What will readers want in 2025?
What other market sectors can (and can't) teach us about emergent trends in book publishing.
It’s soft! It’s warm! It’s rich! It’s unchallenging!
No, it’s not William Howard Taft, twenty-seventh President of the United States—it’s “Mocha Mousse,” Pantone’s just-announced Color of the Year for 2025:
“Mocha Mousse” is brown—sweet, unthreatening, gloppy brown. It’s warm like a Starbucks hot chocolate or a Calvin Klein coat. It’s tasteful but also attainable, like a masculine-coded comforter from Macy’s. It’s indulgent, if only in a limited, pudding cup kind of way. It’s…fine.
Mocha Mousse is the first shade of brown Pantone has ever selected for Color of the Year. It was purportedly picked by a panel of experts who spent the first half of 2024 traveling the world to observe emergent trends in visual culture, fashion, cosmetics, and design.
In their research, this A-team observed that consumers are no longer quite as aspirational as they used to be. They just want to rest, really, at least for now. They might have found brown rather boring once, but now…well, “boring” sounds like a nice break, doesn’t it. “Boring” sounds like a place where burnout recovery is possible.
In their official and rather undergrammatical press release, Pantone executives called Mocha Mousse a color “underpinned by our desire for every day pleasures.” It’s “flavorful,” “sensorial,” and “discrete” (I think they meant “discreet”). It signifies “our desire for comfort,” they said, “and the indulgence of simple pleasures that we can gift and share with others.”
In other words: Mocha Mousse is not too difficult. It’s not too expensive. We can get our hands on it with mercifully minimal exertion, and then we can be done with it and go to sleep.
That’s what consumers apparently want in 2025: a little dessert, a little warmth, a little nap, and a little permission to give up, at least for now. We’ve all been trying SO HARD for SO LONG, and look at where that’s gotten us.
Guh.
Poorly-written press releases aside, Pantone ain’t wrong.
Right now, consumers want…well, less. They want to regress a bit, to nestle. They want—actually need—to aim down, or else they are never going to recover their airspeed in this time of terrifying aerodynamic stall.
Evidence of this is everywhere. It being December, consumer trend predictions for 2025 are dropping all over the place…and all of them are picking up on some Big Mocha Mousse Energy in the zeitgeist.
In fragrance, for example, WGSN predicts a boom year for gourmand, milky, and savory notes: i.e., perfume that conjures almonds, cherries, chocolate, cookies, coffee, and the like. Consumers apparently want to feel “edible”—less a sex thing, methinks, than a function of untrammeled loneliness combined with deep longing for carbohydrates.
In home goods, WGSN—kind of the consumer trends authority, if you’re unfamiliar—predicts a rise in fake food: banana lamps, trompe l’oeil wallpaper, lollipop stationery. I repeat: we all want carbohydrates right now, and we want them everywhere we look.
In fashion, they say it’s going to be all about pajamas that can pass as daywear—especially in the resort space. On vacation, people apparently now want all pajamas, all the time. There’s less to pack that way.
Most interesting to me as a literary agent is what WGSN predicts for the wellness and outdoor industries: LAZINESS. They see more and more people rejecting Pelotons, Goop, marathons, and equipment-heavy hobbies in favor of activities that are easy, comfortable, and low cost. Think “bed rot” (a Gen Z term for having a perfectly lovely day in bed, complete with snacks and an affordable skincare mask); bird watching; hiking.
Consumers, in other words, are nesting. I’d even go so far as to say that somewhere deep in their subconscious, they wish they were babies again, nursing semi-comatose until their diapers fill with humanity’s version of Mocha Mousse—after which Mommy or Daddy makes the mess go away and it’s time for a nice, long nap.
What does all of this tell us about consumer trends in book publishing?
Nothing certain, of course. Even the best trend forecasts are almost never completely right about straightforward consumer goods like clothes and makeup—and the book market is much, much more complicated than that, among other things because it takes about two years to bring a book to market. It’s more or less impossible to trend-chase.
Still, though: I think we have a pretty good sense now of what emotional needs consumers are looking to fill through discretionary purchases in 2025. I bet we’ll see some Big Mocha Mousse Energy in book world—in acquiring editors’ buying habits no less than in readers’. And if you’re an author trying to sell something this year, you’re going to want to remember that.
I’m not telling you to scrap whatever book you’re writing in favor of some kind of literary pudding cup. Rather: I want you to remember the longing that is currently making readers think, “man, I sure could go for one of those pudding cups that always used to make me feel better when I was five,” then craft your sales pitch (and other marketing materials) to meet them where they are.
Remember: