Is the epic fantasy market flooded at the moment?

The market works in mysterious ways. Don't worry about it, some crappy books become bestsellers, some awesome books go undiscovered, regardless of how many books there are in the genre. I mean, look at romance and crime books, there are so many more of those published than there are any kind of Fantasy but people still make it in those genres...

Just write what makes you happy, you're lucky enough that you know for sure you're publishable so focus on that and let the market to its weirdness.

I wouldn't make a generalization about the market based on just your own sales, especially since it sounds like you've self-published, and the self-publishing market is far from certain (probably even more so than trade publishing).

Every agent I stalk, er.... follow.... is actively seeking epic fantasy submissions. (Read: GOOD epic fantasy.)

It's the genre that keeps on giving.

Maybe you have a look around some publishers' websites to see how many epic fantasy books they having coming out in the next couple of months. I'm guessing it's just reader preference when it comes to choosing book, though.

One way to try and increase your sales is publicity or contests, so why not start there. Your marketing okay for this book?

There is a huge amount of luck in this business. Or maybe it's not so much luck as a massively complicated and fluid equation that no-one fully understands.

All other things being equal, you would expect that a well-written book in a popular genre with a good cover would sell better than a not so well-written book in a less popular genre and with a not-so-good cover.

But sometimes it doesn't work that way. The public are fickle and hard to predict. Sometimes they will choose a book for a reason we don't understand. I am sure we can all name a best seller that baffles us. How on Earth did that become successful?

I was chatting to one author recently who was totally bemused that what she considered her "best" work did not sell as well as earlier writing when she was less experienced.

Similarly, as an experiment I've been blogging every day for the past fortnight (ish). And it's fascinating to see which subjects excite people and which leave them cold. And it's certainly not the way I expected it to go.

I don't know what the answer is. I guess all we can do is to make the best product that we can and then market it. Include it in your signature and mention it in posts, that sort of thing ;-)

Some markets do seem to be flooded from time to time. We all know about zombies. The advice for the F and SF submissions was that they receive a lot of fantasy but never enough sci fi or humour. But that doesn't mean that we can't carve out a bit of that market for ourselves.

I honestly think the epic fantasy market is flooded. That's why I'm very choosy about the genre - many of the ones out now seem like poor imitations of Tolkien. I personally find the fantasy genre overrated, but the fact of the matter is that fantasy IS easy to market because of the broad appeal.

Alidor said:

I honestly think the epic fantasy market is flooded. That's why I'm very choosy about the genre - many of the ones out now seem like poor imitations of Tolkien. I personally find the fantasy genre overrated, but the fact of the matter is that fantasy IS easy to market because of the broad appeal.

Click to expand...

You might consider where you are when you state such negative opinions about a very broad genre that most of the participants in this particular subforum read, write or both. Also, do you have data to back up your claim that fantasy IS easy to market? because this contradicts what I've been told by a couple of agents who absolutely love epic fantasy but sometimes have trouble finding buyers for it in a market where there are only a handful of imprints that regularly purchase "big, fat epics."

I honestly don't think any genre is easy to market, though some are more popular than others. Romance is the most popular genre, as far as I know, but that doesn't mean it's easy to write a romance novel that will sell well (or at all). In any case, if fantasy is easy to market, you can't say the market is flooded Flooded happens when supply outstrips demand, and that makes it harder to market that genre.

And I really think it's been at least 20 years since it's been fashionable to write fantasy that imitates Tolkien. There have actually been a number of threads in this very forum asking where all the elves, dwarves and quest-oriented "high" fantasies have gone.

Grimdark, gunpowder, noire, fantasy of manners, urban, wainscot, steampunk, "hard" fantasy etc. These are all subgenres have become increasingly popular in recent years.

Now whether any or all of these are spawning cheap imitations is another subject. But I honestly think fantasy has become more diverse in the past 20 years or so, and if it has broad appeal, this is probably why. Lots of different styles to choose from.

Alidor said:

I honestly think the epic fantasy market is flooded. That's why I'm very choosy about the genre - many of the ones out now seem like poor imitations of Tolkien. I personally find the fantasy genre overrated, but the fact of the matter is that fantasy IS easy to market because of the broad appeal.

Click to expand...

Really? It's been ages since I've seen a newly published Tolkien imitator. Sure, you have your authors from the 70s and 80s who are still publishing those kinds of books, but they are a small part of the epic fantasy market.

Most of the newer authors in the genre have moved far away from Tolkien.

writer_mccall said:

The thing is my first books had zero marketing. None whatsoever, and yet the sales boomed n the first few months with no effort on part whatsoever.

Click to expand...

Hmm. Maybe you should go back to doing nothing to promote your book.

Seriously, did you release it via a different market?

As to "flooded", you can never have too many books of the type you wish to read, and there's a reader for everything. A given publisher might be "flooded" with epic fantasy at the moment, but I doubt the market is. And it's such a broad term in itself.

Alidor said:

I honestly think the epic fantasy market is flooded. That's why I'm very choosy about the genre - many of the ones out now seem like poor imitations of Tolkien. I personally find the fantasy genre overrated, but the fact of the matter is that fantasy IS easy to market because of the broad appeal.

Click to expand...

It's not an easy sell, no. Epic fantasy tends to run long. This can turn off publishers and agents.

Furthermore, this whole "poor imitations of Tolkien" are from where? Self-published works, I imagine? I can't think of a single new fantasy/epic-fantasy writer (successful, traditionally published writer) who writes like Tolkien. As a matter of fact, I'm going to go out on a ledge and say that most agents would laugh a manuscript right out the door if it was "imitation Tolkien." Joe Abercrombie? I can't think of a more anti-Tolkien-esque writer.

So, yeah, you lost me. Sorry.

If the market is flooded, where's all this great epic fantasy I'm not seeing?

writer_mccall said:

Oh well, my book's out there now anyway. Sales can only go up not down. Thanks for the advice . I just need to focus on the next book

Click to expand...

Sales are sluggish all the way around right now, I have four how-to ebooks I've self published and sales were great up until the third week of May and poof, I've had a dozen sales if that all summer long!

I have friends that have reported that their book sales (fiction and how-to genres) be it self published or with a large publishing house have plummeted as well. From the sounds of things those second quarter royalty checks were painfully small!

Ditto this on friends who do art festivals and craft shows, the reports I'm getting is the sales are as bad if not worse than 2008 when the markets crashed.

I can't tell you what's going on specifically except don't give up, keep writing, keep posting to your blog, FB, twitter, etc.,

writer_mccall said:

Aha, so it sounds like its the absolute entire market then. Thanks for the tip, its good to hear how are others are doing sale wise and from the sounds of what you say the market for books truly has taken a dip.
I only got my kindle last month, wonder if its a good time to get some books at discounted prices then?

Click to expand...

Anecdotes are anecdotal.

The market for books hasn't taken a dip, at least by any real measure I can find.

July was the best month ever for comics.

Bookscan (chart at the bottom), doesn't show any drop y-o-y, and I believe a number of the big houses, including Penguin, S&S, and HC, posted growth in the most recent quarter.

cornflake said:

Anecdotes are anecdotal.

The market for books hasn't taken a dip, at least by any real measure I can find.

July was the best month ever for comics.

Bookscan (chart at the bottom), doesn't show any drop y-o-y, and I believe a number of the big houses, including Penguin, S&S, and HC, posted growth in the most recent quarter.

Click to expand...

But those numbers are by dollars, not copies sold. Raise the price and the total dollars may go up even if copies sold drops. I think we need to see both numbers to have the right clues. It might also behoove one to consider numbers sold vs total population -- the same number sold when there are more people amounts to a popularity drop.

Reziac said:

But those numbers are by dollars, not copies sold. Raise the price and the total dollars may go up even if copies sold drops. I think we need to see both numbers to have the right clues. It might also behoove one to consider numbers sold vs total population -- the same number sold when there are more people amounts to a popularity drop.

Click to expand...

Bookscan does units, not dollars.

I don't think it's possible all books suddenly got more expensive in the past few months or this year, but regardless, as above, Bookscan is units.

If the same number is sold when there are more people (how long would that take?), it wouldn't be noticeable as a drop in sales to individual salespeople, certainly. It also wouldn't show up as a drop to anyone unless they were measuring per cap.

I went to a writer's workshop a while back, and there was a talk by an editor who works for a big SFF imprint. This person said that that trade publishing is doing well overall, but that the days of being able to succeed with a "pretty good" book are over (though they didn't get into the definition of pretty good versus very good, and they admitted that editors are pretty poor at anticipating which of a stack of equally well-written books will go on to become a bestseller) and that it's pretty much impossible for a mid list writer to make a living off their writing alone anymore.

This is my take on some of what this person said: take it for what it's worth, the opinion of one person in the industry, filtered through my own interpretation of the situation with books and publishing.


Serious readers read as much as they ever did, possibly even more. There are still a number of folks who eagerly log onto Amazon or wherever and hunt down new books by their favorite authors and when they run out of things to read will use the "if you liked this, you might like that" feature. They also frequent book and author blogs, talk to their reading friends to get recommendations and so on.

But most people (and historically most readers) are not of this type. Most people are casual readers who may read just a few books a year. And these people are reading fewer books, and some are lapsing into becoming non readers.

Visual browsing of books, that thing where you scan a row of paperbacks and grab the ones that look interesting, peruse the back of the book, read a page or two, and decide to give this new author you've never heard of before a chance? That's disappearing with brick and mortar stores (and as far as the publishing industry and authors are concerned, used books stores don't count, because they get no money from those books, though they may be good for exposure).

This makes it much harder for new authors to get discovered by the people who might like them. Especially by readers who are more on the casual end of the spectrum, but even by more serious readers sometimes. People are more stratified by genre and favorite authors than they once were.

But the biggest area of loss has been the casual reader--that is, the person who's hanging out in the mall waiting for a movie or for their partner to buy something, and they wander over to the bookstore and see a book and think, "Hey, I don't have anything interesting going on for the next few days, so maybe I'll buy this and read it."

I'm sure we can all think of several reasons why this is--people don't hang out in malls much anymore, malls don't always even have bookshops, and of course, people have lots of other forms of home entertainment to keep them occupied over the weekend than they once did.

Online advertising just doesn't seem to do the same thing re getting new books across the awareness of people who aren't already looking for them.

Maybe we're all so deluged by advertising these days that we're better at filtering it out than we used to be?

So the gap between the serious reader and the person who barely ever reads has widened. If someone can find a way to get books into the awareness of people who are only occasional readers again, to convince them to read a book this weekend instead of playing a video game or renting a bunch of movies from netflix, well, that would be incredible.

Flooded?

*puts on hip waders*

*re-reads thread title*

Oh.

*pulls out cattle prod, watches out for floating elves*

AceTachyon said:

Flooded?

*puts on hip waders*

*re-reads thread title*

Oh.

*pulls out cattle prod, watches out for floating elves*

Click to expand...

Nicely said. Even if it is flooded, if that's what I want to write, I'm going to write it. Because any hot fad you chase now will be out of fashion by the time a book you start today hits the shelves anyway, and it's impossible to anticipate exactly what people will be loving in 3-5 years.

But a flat, formulaic, bland book you wrote only because you thought it was marketable will be unlikely to get any love.

I have heard from agents and editors that it can be easier to sell foreign rights to fantasy. There is less need to worry about how the culture will translate than with, say, a contemporary novel. This is because the author never assumes the reader already knows anything about the culture.

cornflake said:

Anecdotes are anecdotal.

The market for books hasn't taken a dip, at least by any real measure I can find.

July was the best month ever for comics.

Bookscan (chart at the bottom), doesn't show any drop y-o-y, and I believe a number of the big houses, including Penguin, S&S, and HC, posted growth in the most recent quarter.

Click to expand...

There are some books/magazines for which it matters not what the markets do, comics are a prime example of the nature of things, Playboy and Penthouse would be another example. They are typically low enough in price that many will sacrifice a big mac or whatever to possess one.

ETA that aren't comics magazines, not books?