Romantasy Authors like Rebecca Yarros And Sarah J. Maas Are Destroying The Modern Fantasy Book Genre
2024 and 2025 have seen an incredible uptick in science fiction and fantasy sales, according to recent BookScan reports, but the vast majority of it is chick-lit Romantasy, with a couple of exceptions.
The biggest name authors in Fantasy Fiction may not be ones you recognize if you’re a male reader. According to an article from Bookseller, Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros are dominating the mainstream book charts, as female readers increasingly appear to be turning to fantasy for their book time. Fantasy escapism is trending upward.
According to the article, six of the top ten bestselling fantasy books of 2024 were covered by Maas and Yarros, though the year also saw a huge increase in back catalog sales of Lord of the Rings, up 21.3% from the previous year.
Brandon Sanderson was an outlier in the male-author category, cracking the top fifty of all fiction book authors for the first time in his career of BookScan sales. He had the proverbial wind at his back with his Stormlight Archive finale, Wind and Truth, which skyrocketed in the sales charts despite the LGBTQ controversy associated with the book once readers got wind of it.
These authors are selling hundreds of thousands of copies of their books, and Yarros has already racked up more than $600,000 in sales this year, leading many to wonder what the next big thing will be in fantasy.
Callie Hart and Sarah A. Parker are being thrown around for contention, again names that many fantasy readers wouldn’t necessarily recognize as such.
It’s been noted that so much of the genre has turned to a subgenre called Romantasy, a romance novel in a fantasy setting. Female readers are increasingly turning over to the genre, which is not true fantasy fiction as one thinks of it. The shelves are getting cluttered with more and more of this work, which is edging out traditional fantasy authors in the mainstream market.
As of this writing, Rebecca Yarros currently holds seven of the top ten slots of the Amazon charts for bestselling Fantasy, with her print, ebooks, and audio all selling at incredible numbers.
The only male author currently sitting in the top ten is Matt Dinniman, with a seventh audiobook in his LitRPG progression fantasy series This Inevitable Ruin: Dungeon Crawler Carl, another subgenre that doesn’t quite fit with the traditional fantasy mold.
Delving into the top twenty doesn’t get much better as it’s also dominated by Romantasy with the exception of one other LitRPG audiobook.
Male readership has completely dropped off a cliff in science fiction and fantasy as the romance novel readership has moved into a general fantasy realm. A lot of this is likely because of the aging up of the YA Fantasy readership, who were typically female with an interest in romantic-style stories. Now, they are looking for more adult-themed romantasy, and so it’s been thrown into the fantasy genre overall.
It begs the question as ever—how do booksellers recapture a male readership in science fiction and fantasy? Are they gone for good, or is it an untapped market waiting to be found?
What do you think of Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J. Maas dominating fantasy book sales with their romantasy novels? Leave a comment and let us know.
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Rebecca Yarros got popular with booktok. Apparently the influencers on booktok only want the shallowest, raunchiest books they can find, and their viewers buy them by the thousands. Men need to start some booktok channels and recommend books they like. That's where the discoverability is.
Fucking dumb cunts ruining fantasy with their degenerate sex smut disguised as literature.
Shit makes me so livid.