Publishing: Then & Now with Elizabeth Kostova

More than two decades after The Historian became an international bestseller, Elizabeth Kostova is returning to its world with Mystery Play, in which her debut novel becomes a book within the story itself. It’s a fitting development for a writer whose dazzling career helps readers and writers alike ask: what makes a book worth publishing, how it finds its readers, and what allows it to remain meaningful long after its initial success?

Elizabeth Kostova has spent much of her career exploring how stories, art, and history travel from one generation to another.

In her 2005 debut novel, The Historian, a young woman discovers a cache of letters in her father’s library and is drawn into a centuries-spanning search for the truth about Vlad the Impaler. Her latest novel, Mystery Play, which Ballantine published on October 13, returns to the world of The Historian through the lens of the last living member of that same family, who learns about his strange family history after reading about it in The Historian. 

Twenty-one years after The Historian first appeared, the novel has not only endured in the real world but found a new life inside her fiction, becoming an artifact for another generation of characters to discover.

The novel Kostova spent a decade writing has become, within her own fictional world, a record passed from one generation to another. Her exploration of literary longevity and how literature can become an intergenerational record through these novels also offers an interesting perspective on Kostova’s own publishing career.

Kostova’s debut is industry lore. She worked on The Historian for ten years before Little, Brown published it in 2005, when she was 40. The publisher had reportedly paid $2 million for the manuscript following a heated auction, generating considerable anticipation well before publication. The novel became the first debut to enter the New York Times bestseller list at No. 1, and within a month, Little, Brown had more than 800,000 copies in print. It has since been translated into 40 languages.

Her second novel, The Swan Thieves, published by Little, Brown in 2010, was also a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 28 languages. In 2017, Ballantine published The Shadow Land, a novel steeped in Bulgarian history. Alongside her writing career, Kostova co-founded the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, which supports Bulgarian writers and translators and fosters literary exchange between Bulgaria and the English-speaking world.

When I asked how publishing had changed over the course of her career, Kostova returned not to the extraordinary success of The Historian, but to the years she spent trying to get published in the first place.

“Staggeringly difficult and terribly easy”

“My path to publishing my first novel, The Historian, was a long one—it came out when I was forty, and I’d worked on it for ten years,” Kostova told me.

Before the novel sold, she had spent years writing and submitting shorter work. In the pre-Submittable era, “We submitted by snail mail and received rejections that were physical slips of paper, in return,” she recalled. Eventually, she accumulated enough to fill a box.

Alison Owings, the first author I interviewed for this series, also reminisced on the once physical side of rejection: the many typed letters and printed manuscripts that moved slowly between writer, agent, and publisher. But while Owings reflected on how the mechanics of publishing have changed, Kostova raises a different question about what those changes have meant for writers trying to get published in the first place.

In her view, “It’s become staggeringly difficult and terribly easy to publish,” she said.

A writer can submit work in seconds, publish it online just as quickly, and potentially reach readers without ever involving an agent, editor, or publisher. But the same ease has dramatically increased the amount of work competing for attention.

“The volume of submissions has skyrocketed,” Kostova said. “Many writers don’t hear back at all, even from small literary magazines. Publishing a novel of any seriousness has become equally tough.”

At the same time, she worries about what happens when publication becomes almost frictionless: “too few checks on quality, too few guardrails, too little focused attention on what does get published there.”

That distinction between “publication” and “attention” is particularly important. For a writer trying to break in, the old gate has not exactly disappeared; there are simply many more ways around it, and many more people arriving on the other side. A work can be publicly available without necessarily being read, edited, or seriously considered.

Kostova’s own debut represents almost the opposite publishing dynamic. The Historian entered the market with extraordinary institutional support behind it. Before its June 2005 publication, The Historian had already generated considerable industry buzz. Little, Brown sent out 7,000 advance copies and mounted a major campaign; when the novel went on sale that June, it sold roughly 70,000 copies in its first week.

No author can reasonably expect a launch like that, then or now. But the scale of it makes Kostova’s point about attention. Publishing a book and creating an audience for it are two separate acts. The second requires people to notice, choose, and read one title among all the others available to them—and then ideally review, recommend, and share that same title with others.

More ways to publish have not removed that problem. If anything, they may have made it more acute.

What sells, and what lasts

Kostova has worked with the same literary agent, Amy Williams of The Williams Company, throughout her publishing career, even as she has moved between editors and publishing houses. She speaks of the people who have helped bring her books to readers with deep affection. 

“I’ve been very fortunate in my relationships with my agent, my editors, and my publishers, and I have huge respect for their hard work and generosity,” she said. “Those careers are almost always labors of love—love for books, reading, creativity.”

What worries her is the growing pressure on those professionals to make decisions based on a book’s immediate commercial potential.

“As in all parts of our social/economic world, those people are under tremendous pressure to put the bottom line at the top,” she said, “which inevitably leads them to have to prioritize work that will sell rather than last in order to keep their jobs.”

“I find that heartbreaking.”

The distinction between books that sell and books that last is particularly interesting coming from Kostova, whose debut achieved both. The Historian was an enormous commercial success, but more than two decades later, it continues to find readers. The two outcomes are hardly mutually exclusive, although publishers have far more tools for predicting short-term sales than determining a book’s staying power.

An acquisitions team can examine an author’s sales history, compare a manuscript with similar titles, and calculate projected revenue. Once a book is published, preorders and first-week sales offer immediate measures of its performance. What those numbers cannot reliably predict is whether readers will still be discovering, discussing, and recommending the book 20 years later.

Of course, no publisher can guarantee that kind of longevity, just as Little, Brown could not guarantee the extraordinary success of The Historian simply by investing heavily in its launch. As Publishers Weekly reported at the time, the novel benefited from an ambitious, carefully coordinated publicity campaign, but its lasting success would ultimately depend on readers continuing to embrace and recommend it.

That remains one of publishing’s central uncertainties. It is the grand, propulsive bet made every single day, not just by agents and editors, but by publicists, marketers, sales representatives, booksellers, and everyone in between. A publisher can invest in a manuscript, give it a major launch, and put it in front of thousands of readers. What happens after that—and whether the book will still matter to readers decades later—is much harder to predict. 

The author moves closer to the reader

One provision in Kostova’s first publishing contract now feels like a relic of an era far more distant than 2004. “The hardcopy of a book was the focus of publishing,” she remembered. “In fact, my first contract stipulated that the e-book of my novel wouldn’t be released until the book had been out for a year!”

That delay, she added, is “hard to imagine now.” Yet the shift since then is less straightforward than a story about print giving way to digital might suggest.

In 2025, print still accounted for 76.3 percent of U.S. trade publishing revenue, while e-books and digital audio together represented 21.5 percent. Physical retail revenue grew 7.2 percent that year. The publishing ecosystem expanded rather than simply replacing one format with another.

What changed more dramatically, in Kostova’s experience, is how much of the work around a book now belongs to its author.

When The Historian was published, she remembers publishers handling far more of the publicity and marketing. Today, writers across almost every level of the industry can be expected to participate in building their own audiences. Since COVID, she has also watched traditional tours shrink as travel became more expensive and bookstores became accustomed to remote programming.

“Most authors (including me) arrange many of their appearances,” she said.

As a publicist hired directly by authors rather than publishers, I see that shift firsthand. Author appearances still matter, but I think their value has changed: bookstore events now serve a broader purpose than the direct sales publishers may once have prioritized. That may help explain why many houses seem less willing to invest heavily in traditional tours.

Today, an event often functions more like true PR. The goal is not simply to sell 30 or 50 books in a room. It is to activate an author’s existing network, reach adjacent communities that have a reason to care about the subject, create a compelling local or institutional angle around the book, and give readers another reason to talk about it. A strong event can bring together an author’s professional contacts, alumni network, academic community, conversation partners, booksellers, journalists, and other people who may continue carrying the book outward long after the chairs are folded up.

That also changes the work required to make an appearance worthwhile. An author appearance is still an author appearance, but getting one on the calendar—and getting the right people into the room—increasingly depends on a patchwork of publisher outreach, personal relationships, bookseller interest, local connections, direct emails, social media, and sheer persistence. An author who might once have been asked simply to show up is now often deeply involved in creating the audience and the reason for the event in the first place.

Kostova is not nostalgic about every part of the earlier system, and she does not think newer channels have made older ones irrelevant. In fact, she singled out one of the most traditional parts of book publishing as especially important.

“I’ve witnessed the enduring power of bookstores to help sell a book, both at its launch and over time,” she said, “especially indies, which are the heart and soul of many communities.”

She believes authors should advocate for publishers to continue investing in those relationships.

There is good reason to. Even as online retail remains the industry’s largest sales channel, physical bookstores have proved surprisingly resilient; physical retail revenue rose 7.2 percent in 2025.

A bookstore also solves the attention problem in a way an online marketplace does not quite replicate. It narrows the field. A bookseller reads from the flood of available books and decides which ones to order, display, put on a staff-picks shelf, invite an author to discuss, or press into a customer’s hands.

More books can reach readers directly than ever before. That has not eliminated the value of someone saying: start with this one.

What AI cannot have

When I asked Kostova about a change that truly felt unprecedented, she went immediately to AI. She is frequently asked whether she is afraid it will soon “write my books” for her.

“I find this a ridiculous question,” she said, “and only someone who’s never tried writing a book asks it in a serious way.”

However, this is not because she thinks AI will fail to generate books. She expects exactly the opposite.

“AI will produce many, many books in our human future, and those books will have many readers and make a few people lots of money,” she said.

What she rejects is the assumption that generating the finished text amounts to replacing the experience of writing it.

“No AI program can have my experience—or yours—of writing our books,” she said. “That belongs to each of us as writers.”

The rise of generative AI raises urgent questions for publishing, from copyright, training data, and disclosure to editing, job displacement, and the prospect of machine-generated work flooding an already crowded marketplace. 

Kostova spent ten years writing The Historian. They encompass the research, false starts, reading, revision, frustration, and discovery, as well as the everyday life that happened while she was writing. Whatever an AI system might eventually be capable of producing, it cannot have lived those years.

For Kostova, writing is more than a means of producing a book; it is something a person goes through. That led me to ask what, after more than two decades in publishing, she most hopes the next generation of writers and publishing professionals will preserve.

Her answer was simple: reading. 

“The deep well of the literary process”

“I hope the next generation of writers and publishers will continue to read all the best literature they can lay their hands on—old, very old, contemporary, translated in and out of many languages,” Kostova said. “That is the deep well of the literary process.”

Her answer reaches further back than any particular change in publishing technology. Before a book can be submitted—and then acquired, marketed, uploaded, downloaded, reviewed, recommended, or fed into an algorithm—someone has to develop a sense of what a book can be.

For Kostova, that comes from other books.

The idea runs through her career outside her own novels, too. The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation has spent the past two decades creating opportunities for writers and translators, particularly between Bulgarian and English-language literary communities. Translation makes the “deep well” larger: another literature, another tradition, another set of possibilities enters a writer’s field of vision.

And now Mystery Play takes that process and turns it into plot. 

It is a literal illustration of what Kostova is describing when she talks about reading across generations. Books come from other books—not in the sense that a writer simply copies what came before, but because literature gives writers forms to inherit, traditions to resist, questions to reopen, and possibilities they might never have imagined alone.

Today, publishing is an industry increasingly defined by abundance. It is easier to submit. Easier to distribute. Easier to publish outside traditional channels. There are more formats in which a book can exist, more ways to discover one, and more ways for an author to reach a reader directly. AI promises to increase the volume of available text further still.

Yet none of those changes make the reader’s attention infinite. Nor do they answer the question of what deserves it.

Twenty-one years after The Historian appeared, Kostova is returning to a world she first spent a decade creating. Within the new novel, her first book has become part of the historical record in more ways than one.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 

Ellen Yang is a publicist and the founder of Punctuation PR, where she works with authors, scholars, and other public thinkers on book publicity, marketing, and operations. She earned her B.A. from Stanford University and writes about books, publishing, and literary culture.