Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post where today I’m joined by the brilliant Sunyi Dean, author of The Book Eaters and cohost of the Publishing Rodeo podcast. Each year as part of the ToW Advent Calendar I invite an author to write about where they see SFF publishing going in the coming year(s), and with her unique perspective from both her writing and her work on the podcast, I couldn’t think of anyone better-placed to talk about this than Sunyi! If you have any interest in SFF publishing (and if you’re reading this then I’m guessing you probably do), read on for some fascinating thoughts about what might be around the corner for both readers and writers.
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Sunyi Dean: Hello, one and all! Today we’re here to speculate on the future of SFF, and some of the changes that are either happening right now, or might happen at some point down the road. The truth is, publishing is a constantly shifting, ever-evolving ecosystem. Both industry professionals and authors alike tend to respond to real world events and social trends, albeit in different ways.
While we can’t predict the future with any guaranteed accuracy, it’s still possible to take a quick snapshot of the genre in broad terms, and muse about what lies just around the corner. Without further ado, here are five possibilities that I think we may encounter.
More standalones, less big series
In recent years, SFF has been making the leap to mainstream audiences. Once a relatively niche genre, SFF is exploding onto the scene, with sales skyrocketing in trad. Big, popular SFF shows have changed the narrative on what your standard consumer is willing to try.
But mainstream readers have different buying and reading patterns from typical SFF genre fans, and that means publishers who want to capture this readership are now having to meet slightly different expectations.
Sunyi’s debut novel, The Book Eaters
Your average mainstream bookstore browser will pick up about 12 books a year, of which they’ll finish about 5, and those 12 will probably be picked up off a table display in a big chain bookstore. Those who aren’t buying nonfiction are often looking for faster paced, high-concept standalones, without the commitment of a multi book series or the daunting barrier of heavy worldbuilding elements. (There are of course many readers who don’t operate this way, but we’re talking in broad terms.) SFF books which can match this criteria have an advantage in capturing their attention.
Financially, standalones are also a safer bet for publishers, particularly when talking about debut authors. Even an amazing SFF trilogy will suffer from a diminishing readership across a series, sometimes quite drastically; in other words, less and less people will read each book as a series progresses. If you keep 75% of your readers from book 1 to book 2, you’re rocking it.
That means every series, no matter how strong, has a downward sales arc. The trade off is developing a core of loyal fans. But if the first book of a series doesn’t do well, then both author and publisher are chained to multiple underperforming books. For authors, this is deeply demoralising; for publishers, this is a financial stumble.
By contrast, standalone books are a gamble each time. Every new book gains readers, but also loses them. But while it’s hard to predict whether an author can replicate their success over and over, this path does have the significant advantage that every new book the author puts out is a fresh chance at success – even at heightened success. Downward sales trajectory isn’t guaranteed, and the first book bombing isn’t such a big deal.
That doesn’t mean SFF series will go away! There might just be less of them at debut level, in the near future – and (more on this below) perhaps a lot more of them in indie spaces.
More cross-genre books
On a happier note, I think we’ll start to see a lot more cross-genre books hitting shelves in a big way.
When SFF manages to successfully break into the mainstream, it’s often the cross-genre books which are making that leap. Think Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, or Gideon the Ninth, or The Echo Wife, or Station Eleven. And many more examples. The rise of Romantasy is arguably about a whole cross-genre taking flight.
As mainstream and litfic start to borrow more and more speculative elements unashamedly, SFF has likewise started to adopt mainstream and literary techniques to tell their narratives in new and exciting ways. This goes beyond just throwing in a sprinkling of elements from other genres; it’s about transplanting whole structures and tropes. It’s about playing with reader expectations while also challenging them.
For those of us who still love more ‘traditional’ SFF, this is still good news. Cross-genre speculative books which net a wider readership can function as a gateway drug to yet more SFF, changing the boundaries of what those readers consider to be mainstream, and encouraging them to step outside their usual bounds.
The epic fantasy migration
As cross-genre standalones take up more oxygen, some of the bigger SFF imprints are, to a degree, pivoting away from epic fantasy/more ‘traditional’ fantasy. The readership hasn’t shrunk, but it’s also not growing particularly at the moment, and as we talked about above, long series can be expensive and risky investments for publishers. Especially re. debut authors.
But in indie spaces, the rules are different. What a big corporation thinks of as a “niche” readership is, proportionally speaking, more than sufficient to support individual indie authors, who are typically working with lower overheads and higher royalty rates. The buying and reading patterns of earnest, fan-driven SFF are also well suited to indie, as is the ability to cultivate closer reader/author connections.
My guess is that epic fantasy will continue to go from strength to strength in indie, which is typically a friendlier environment for long series and devoted fan groups. Luckily, indie publishing is able to step into the space that the big 5s – while not vacating entirely – are not prioritising at the moment.
An oasis in the science fiction desert
If fantasy has a smaller slice of pie than crime, thrillers, or romance, then it’s worth noting that science fiction in particular has even less. Sci-fi is considered one of the more niche genres and sells far less than fantasy on the whole.
Whereas the speculative elements of fantasy can be used either to complicate or simplify a story, in SF those elements are typically only used to complicate. For example, a fantasy story might feature a medieval setting, where the tech is stripped down and simple, and where magic explains or replaces any number of more complex infrastructures. And while fantasy can absolutely go the other way (hello, Erikson and Wolfe!) SF almost always leans towards more intricate settings. Readers trying to find their way into the genre for the first time have a lot to grapple with, especially if they are used to picking up general fiction.
When SF does ‘break out’, it tends to do so in a big way, though. The Expanse is a recent example of the kind of thing I mean, and like most SF breakouts seems heavily tied to having secured a screen/tv adaptation. In that sense, SF often feels like an all-or-nothing genre, at least for trade publishing.
It’s been a while since we’ve had some serious breakout SF debuts, but SF has definitely been popular before, and will be again. I’m hoping the current difficult landscape means the fickle winds of popular readership are about to turn. Looking to the future, I’d be very surprised if we didn’t start seeing SF pick up again, not just the occasional phenomenon like The Expanse but more uniformly, across the board. Time will tell!
The rise of transparency
Twenty-odd years ago, there were no online writer networks, and very few writer resources. If you wanted to become an author, there was a ton of guesswork involved, and probably a heavy degree of reliance on in-person conventions and other forms of networking.
Happily, publishing has become increasingly accessible with the explosion of online spaces for writers to congregate, share stories, and teach each other tricks of the trade. I learned to query through the brutal initial ritual that is the Query Hell forums on the Absolute Write website, along with many thousands of others. What on earth we’d have done without such places, I can’t fathom.
In recent years, I feel like we’ve finally begun to break that down even further. More and more authors are beginning to talk about the realities and intricacies of their careers. If you recognise my name at all, for example, it’s probably due to the Publishing Rodeo podcast that I run with fellow author, Scott Drakeford, where we try to be honest and upfront about our differing experiences as a lead debut and midlist debut.
But we were far from the first group of people to have such conversations, and I very much hope we will not be the last. I do think there is a bit of a wave building among career authors, with access to information allowing more and more folks to take informed decisions about their options. Whether that will eventually result in any significant long-term changes is hard to say; I suspect that depends on our ability to form official guilds at some point in the future, a goal which currently faces many legal barriers.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for some solid industry online, I highly recommend the Author’s Guild “Business Bootcamp” series, which is free on Youtube and packed with great information from a wide range of industry folks!
Conclusion
And that’s a wrap! If you have any thoughts, questions, or intriguing disagreements, do feel free to let me know; I’m always interested in corrections and new information. As always with these things, my perspective is one among many, and no doubt skewed by my particular set of experiences.
Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season, and a productive new year!
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Sunyi Dean (sun-yee deen) is a multi-award losing author who was born in rural Texas, grew up in Hong Kong, and now resides in North England. Her high school was built next to Kowloon Walled City, which has long since been replaced by a public park.
Sunyi writes cross-genre speculative fiction with a weird slant, and her debut novel, The Book Eaters was an instant #2 Sunday Times Bestseller. She has forthcoming novels slated for 2025 and 2026. Some of her short fiction has appeared in places like Interzone, Grimdark Magazine, BBC Radio Leeds, and Tor Dot Com.
In her spare time, she likes buying whisky, collecting dumbbells, and dying in jiu-jitsu. Outside of actual writing, she is perhaps best known for founding and cohosting the Publishing Rodeo Podcast with fellow Tor author, Scott Drakeford, in which they talk frankly about the trad pub industry.
Find out more at Sunyi’s website.
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Huge, huge thanks to Sunyi for writing this great post, and for sharing her thoughts on SFF publishing with us! It’s certainly going to be interesting to see what happens over the next year or two, and these suggestions have really got me thinking about what to expect!
I’d like to reiterate Sunyi’s final comment there – if you would like to join the conversation on this topic, please feel free to leave a comment below, or chat on social media.
The Book Eaters is out now from Harper Voyager (UK) and Tor (US) – check out the links below to order* your copy:
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