HOW THE WEST WAS WON

PUBLISHERS IN 2025 PLAY TO WIN WITH A FULL HOUSE OF WESTERN HISTORY ROYALTY.

- EDITED BY STUART ROSEBROOK

Just when you believe the Western history genre is on life-support, publishers across the country, including those big houses of publishing on Madison Avenue, went back to the future and delivered fans of the mythic era a set of the most important books produced on the topic in over a decade.

On the fiction side of the West, we are seeing a major shift in publishing. More and more authors are self-publishing as the genre has nearly disappeared from New York imprints, while university publishers are adding more fiction to their catalogs, a shift for many academic houses that were known strictly for nonfiction.

Dedicated fans of Western history and fiction should find solace in the strong set of big Western history books published by New York imprints, but scholars, researchers and aficionados of the genre should continue to support the smaller independent and university imprints who are bringing voice to a new generation of authors.

I believe the greatest challenge publishers of Western history and fiction are facing is the age-old question: how to keep the genre relevant at a time when the Old West continues to fade further and further into the past, and the most popular era of Western culture in film, television and novels is 1970 to the present. Craig Johnson, C.J. Box, Anne Hillerman and Taylor Sheridan prove that again and again every day. I believe we must embrace a broader perspective on what we define as a Western, and True West, in partnership with Western Writers of America, is where that conversation should begin.

For the past 15 years, we have chosen an editor's and a readers' choice book of the year. In a new tradition in 2026,