Smut Sales are Booming

[YmaOHyd]

I wonder if younger people are more concerned with the potential ethical issues of sex scenes, because you need actors to perform them, which can be exploitative. We have become more aware of impact surrounding the way scenes are filmed and the pressure people have felt to do more than they want to.

Note that in no way am I saying that porn is inherently exploitation. Just that the potential is there and some of it is

I think some of it has to do with movies being an inherently social experience, so you're seeing sex with other people. I dunno. When UCLA studied this, they said "teens 14-24 love authenticity," and sex scenes didn't feel authentic. When asked to name the most authentic entertainer, a majority said the Youtuber MrBeast. So maybe the answer is that we're all just doomed.

 

[Theatreslut]

I think some of it has to do with movies being an inherently social experience, so you're seeing sex with other people. I dunno. When UCLA studied this, they said "teens 14-24 love authenticity," and sex scenes didn't feel authentic. When asked to name the most authentic entertainer, a majority said the Youtuber MrBeast. So maybe the answer is that we're all just doomed.

Ouch. We are doomed

 

[StillStunned]

I don't think you were looking hard enough. Women have been contributing to the fantasy genre for years with more than just tropey (and mopey) romances. Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Diana Wynne Jones, Octavia E. Butler had all written books well before 2005 and they were full of "adventure" and "excitement". There are several newer authors today still writing amazing fantasy like Rebecca Roanhorse, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, R.F. Kuang, Naomi Novik, Tamsin Muir, V.E. Schwab and many, many more.

Good (mopey girl-free) fantasy is out there. You just have to be willing to do a little research.

For the record, I was talking about *new* (at the time) fantasy. I grew up with Pern and Earthsea and DWJ's books, which is why I didn't hesitate to try new female authors, and also why it took me so long to figure out what the problem was.

 

[MajorRewrite]

Data at Statista shows total book publishing revenue has grown steadily over time.

And BookRiot says print versions of romance novels have boomed recently. But they’re still only 5% of total book sales.

In 2020, romance accounted for 18 million print book sales; by the end of 2023, that had more than doubled to 39 million copies. That means that more than 5% of all print books sold last year were romances. Not too shabby for a genre that “independent booksellers largely ignored” until very (very) recently.

 

[forgotmyantidepressants]

T. Kingfisher is a good "new" fantasy author. Her protagonists are typically older and loner types. The male love interests are humble and kind. I also find her writing to be an example of simple prose done well.

 

[Areala-chan]

Data at Statista shows total book publishing revenue has grown steadily over time.

And BookRiot says print versions of romance novels have boomed recently. But they’re still only 5% of total book sales.

Bookseller with more than twenty years' experience here. Romance in general has been propping up the fiction book market for decades, but that's generally been among adult readers. The Harry Potter series was, at one point in the early 2010s, propping up the book industry so well that the New York Times bestseller list had to asterisk itself as being, "The Ten Best-Selling Novels (Not Counting Harry Potter)", because Rowling's sales skewed the data so ferociously.

All those young readers who got into reading with Harry Potter? A metric fuck-ton of them turned to places like FF.net and AO3 to continue feeding their desire for more HP material, and encountered sexual themes in their stories for the first time. Those people grew into adults who now have some disposable income, and like some music fans have adopted the Vinyl Addict persona, these readers have become Romantasy Addicts and Smut Connoisseurs. They want books that turn them on, they want books that entertain, and they especially want editions of those books that look beautiful on their shelves. When my store gets subscription box copies of titles sold to us (Owlcrate, Fairyloot, etc...), they fly off the shelf within days of us putting them out, even though the price for one is considerably higher than the commonly-issued publisher's edition.

Bookstores in general are enjoying a renaissance of shoppers who are making 'books' their personality the way others make sports or other hobbies theirs. Romantasy and Erotica have been significantly larger contributors to that growth in recent years. So have Manga and Light Novels. We can't keep LitRPG books in stock.

You know what isn't selling in the quantities it used to any longer? Epic fantasy. Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, Patrick Rothfuss, Terry Brooks? They linger like they never used to. Neil Gaiman, in particular, is kryptonite, which isn't surprising. Brandon Sanderson is the exception which proves the rule, and Tolkien and Terry Pratchett are evergreen, but otherwise? It's a wasteland for tradpub epic fantasy. Self-pub is where the market appears to be for that now.

TL;DR: Romantasy is killing it, and bookstores are enjoying the surge.

 

[YmaOHyd]

TL;DR: Romantasy is killing it, and bookstores are enjoying the surge.

How does this compare to the surge of dystopian YA pseudo-sci-fi/urban fantasy in the late 2000s, early-mid 2010s? I'm thinking of, like, Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner -- all that stuff.

 

[Nynah]

You know what isn't selling in the quantities it used to any longer? Epic fantasy. Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, Patrick Rothfuss, Terry Brooks? They linger like they never used to. Neil Gaiman, in particular, is kryptonite, which isn't surprising. Brandon Sanderson is the exception which proves the rule, and Tolkien and Terry Pratchett are evergreen, but otherwise? It's a wasteland for tradpub epic fantasy. Self-pub is where the market appears to be for that now.

Good. Tastes are evolving and we have the old white men who have dominated the genre make space for people who aren't old white men. Rothfuss is a nice person and a good writer, I met him at a convention years ago, so we can keep him and Pratchett for being the best eggs in a pretty rancid bucket. Goodkind's always been trash and Gaiman had such good things going for him then had to end up being a sexual abuser, which is incredibly disappointing but not all that surprising. Martin's oversaturated and won't ever finish ASOIAF so we'll have to wait for him to die and for Sanderson (who is also quite oversaturated) to wrap it up.

Really excited for the newer crop of fantasy authors to tell more interesting stories than just the same white colonizer/savior slop that has propped up the genre for years.

 

[Arcanyx]

"Smut," generally referred to as romance or "romantasy" fiction, is a booming segment of the publishing industry, with annual sales of the overall genre reaching approximately $1.44 billion. This genre, primarily read by women, has seen massive growth in recent years, largely driven by social media platforms like TikTok.

I feel like the not so good smut is getting all the attention. I have read smut books with mind blowing plot lines, however, the bookstagram community is pushing the ones that have lowly plots. Moreover, some of my favorite authors that had strong and amazing plots have downgraded to ticking boxes on smut stereotypes. Some recent examples are Rina Kent, Ashley Zavarelli. They used to have some amazing plots and gripping stories with relevant smut, but they too have fallen trap to these book-tok madness ....(JUST AN OPNINION. NO HATE ON ANYONE)

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Hah. It didn't take long before this became an activism topic. This isn't about who was old or white or whatever, but what GENRE they were writing. I don't give a fuck whether the author is white or black or green or purple, or whether they are young or old. This is about Romantasy being pushed forward as Fantasy and taking the spotlight, yet it has so little in common with the genre.

 

[Nynah]

Hah. It didn't take long before this became an activism topic. This isn't about who was old or white or whatever, but what GENRE they were writing. I don't give a fuck whether the author is white or black or green or purple, or whether they are young or old. This is about Romantasy being pushed forward as Fantasy and taking the spotlight, yet it has so little in common with the genre.

There's this magical thing called the internet where you can use a search engine to find the kind of books you want to read and have them delivered to you! That way you won't have to go out into the world and be exposed to all the scary new books mostly written by women in the bookstores trying to keep up with what's popular and evolve towards what their largest demographics want to read.

 

[crookedletter]

There is always backlash to new trends, and it's always overblown. There is plenty of content. There are more books out there than you could ever hope to read in your lifetime, and more being published constantly, in every genre.

It's really very simple: don't read the stuff you're not interested in. Its existence is not a threat to you or your interests.

 

[TheLobster]

This is about Romantasy being pushed forward as Fantasy and taking the spotlight, yet it has so little in common with the genre.

The Second Story channel on YT goes into this, and other worrying trends in publishing and their causes. These two videos seem particularly relevant:

They are pretty long and sometimes ranty, but she’s delivering her rambles in smooth, velvety, almost ASMR voice

 

[AwkwardlySet]

The Second Story channel on YT goes into this, and other worrying trends in publishing and their causes. These two videos seem particularly relevant:

They are pretty long and sometimes ranty, but she’s delivering her rambles in smooth, velvety, almost ASMR voice

Interesting videos. Thanks for the links.

A few people here are constantly pushing strawman arguments that I'm somehow against the very existence of Romantasy. I'd just like books to be classified accordingly. Even LitRPG books, which are overwhelmingly oriented towards the male audience, but also have way more fantasy elements than Romantasy books, should have their own small genre.
I'm all for freedom of writing and reading. I just don't think that such separate types of books should be lumped together.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Its existence is not a threat to you or your interests.

I mean, it's not a threat to me, because it's not a missile or a crazy person with a gun or whatever, but yeah it does have the potential to affect my interests. Publishers have limited bandwidth, and they'll cancel stuff, not pick projects up or pressure authors to conform to trends. Peter McLean's War for the Rose Throne was cancelled in the US two books into a five-book series despite earning its advance. His post-Rose Throne novel had a publisher-imposed hard cap of 100,000 words. L. R. Lam's Dragonfall sequel also had a word count cap. Ten, twenty years ago that wasn't something that happened to established authors. I think even Brandon Sanderson said that he was getting fewer editing passes and resources from his publisher than he was used to (which may account for some of the response to Wind and Truth).

Meanwhile, publishers are actively seeking out short light fantasy, cozy fantasy and romantasy manuscripts that can be packed onto shelves and don't cost as much to produce. They're easier to edit and quicker to turn around. That does push other projects that are more to my tastes out of the market, simply because there's limited resource to go around.

Of course, if Dungeons and Lattes or whatever that thing was is what keeps the lights on at publishing houses and in independent booksellers, great! Bring on the cozy slop! The cream of the crop in every genre will make it because it's too good not to.

 

[Areala-chan]

How does this compare to the surge of dystopian YA pseudo-sci-fi/urban fantasy in the late 2000s, early-mid 2010s? I'm thinking of, like, Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner -- all that stuff.

Similar, but the scales are different by an order of magnitude. The YA/Teen dystopian fantasy boom was big, but it burned out relatively quickly.

The biggest problem that genre faced was the number of film adaptations which failed to perform. The Hunger Games did banger numbers with its four films. Divergent, Maze Runner, and Mortal Instruments though? Not so much. Divergent's viewership declined so spectacularly over subsequent films that they axed the adaptation of the fourth novel, and City of Bones bombed so hard the public assumed it had been dropped by the Enola Gay. There's a reason Suzanne Collins could have ten years go by between the release of Mockingjay and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and still move over three million units with a film option, but nobody on Booktok or Booktube makes videos about Veronica Roth or James Dashner.

A second issue is that dystopian fiction tends to look very similar after a while. Fantasy can too, but there are a million ways it can re-invent itself and the worlds. Dystopias, on the other hand, all tend to be functionally identical: a centralized government or governmental entity controlling everything that a handful of rebels are attempting to overthrow (or at least break away from). That's literally everything from The Hunger Games to Star Wars.

The third major issue is that there's not a lot of popular adult dystopian works for those teen readers to move on to afterwards. Kids who read Harry Potter as young adults and teens had a plethora of other fantasy titans to explore once they wanted to read something more grown up. Teens who read The Hunger Games and Divergent though? Sure, you can point them at Brave New World or 1984, but those were written decades ago and end with evil (or at least The System) triumphing over the protagonists. There's really no modern equivalent--maybe Takami's Battle Royale, but even that's about teens killing each other and was originally written in the '90s. Teen Dystopia readers didn't upscale into adult Fantasy or Sci-Fi so much as adult Horror, which is a much, much smaller market than adult Romance and adult Romantasy.

Additionally, indie and self-publishing was nowhere as big back then as it is today. It took a while for ebooks to catch on, especially for young people who were used to having all the stories they wanted, for free, courtesy of AO3 and FF.net, without needing to ask mom or dad for their credit card to buy something on the Kindle or Nook stores.

Want to know what the big trend is right now? Pickleball romance. I kid you not, there have been four different books written by four different authors all released around the subject in 2025.

 

[Bramblethorn]

There's this magical thing called the internet where you can use a search engine to find the kind of books you want to read and have them delivered to you! That way you won't have to go out into the world and be exposed to all the scary new books mostly written by women in the bookstores trying to keep up with what's popular and evolve towards what their largest demographics want to read.

Or ask a librarian or a bookseller to help find something to your tastes. They absolutely love hooking people up with their poison of choice.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Want to know what the big trend is right now? Pickleball romance. I kid you not, there have been four different books written by four different authors all released around the subject in 2025.

I'm not surprised at all, since I'm not surprised by trends being bolted together.

I guess I never thought the expected pathway for teen-dystopia novels would be adult horror or adult dystopia. I always figured it'd be romance or into other YA genres. The draw for Hunger Games always seemed to me to be the Katniss/Peta romance rather than any sort of social commentary or critique. So I view those as basically the origination point of the current wave of romantasy, which is serving the market for women in their late teens and early 20s who read Hunger Games and didn't have anywhere to go from there.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Of course, if Dungeons and Lattes or whatever that thing was is what keeps the lights on at publishing houses and in independent booksellers, great! Bring on the cozy slop! The cream of the crop in every genre will make it because it's too good not to.

Speculative fiction has always had a ton of "cozy slop", it's just about who it's cozy for.

Somewhere around 20 years ago, I encountered the term "extruded fantasy product". Today we'd probably call it "Temu LotR" or some such. You all know who I'm talking about. David Eddings, Terry Brooks, a bunch of Warhammer and D&D tie-in novels (or things that are clearly somebody's D&D game with the serial numbers filed off), a bunch of unlikely heroes each with a different specialty quests for the magical doodad to defeat the Ancient Evil, one of them is probably descended from King I Can't Believe It's Not Isildur, bonus points for an ancient prophecy, and on no account will the story be completed in fewer than three volumes, yada yada. I have read a lot of them in my time, they were a fun way to occupy a few hours, but they weren't exactly challenging or original. My parents didn't use the words "cozy slop" but that would've been an accurate summary of their opinions on my childhood reading, and it pains me to admit that they weren't entirely wrong.

Since you mention Legends and Lattes: roughly the first page of that book is the band of Heroic Adventurers defeating the Big Bad, with the rest of the story being what one of them does after she retires from adventuring. The tropes have been so solidly established over decades that the author doesn't need to stop to explain what orcs or dwarves or gnomes are, what the economics of a fantasy city look like, how a rag-tag bunch of heroes happen to come together, any of that; he can take all that as assumed knowledge and go straight on to his own story.

In the case of L&L, that story is approximately "what does retirement look like for an adventurer who's used to solving problems by hitting them with an axe?" It might not be everybody's cup of latte, I'm not arguing it's great literature, but at least it's a bit more creative than yet another LotR clone. And if the LotR clones didn't kill fantasy, why would romantasy?

Piers Anthony is still publishing Xanth books, for god's sake.

But the cozy stuff was never the whole of the genre, and it isn't now either.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Speculative fiction has always had a ton of "cozy slop", it's just about who it's cozy for.

Don't disagree with the main body of the post -- God knows there was a ton of D&D slop. A lot of it was module tie-ins. The serial numbers weren't even filed off.

"Cozy," though, is a new trend that's pretty big in fantasy and also in gaming. In the gaming world, it's descended from Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. They're basically defined as games about nurturing and relaxing. None of the old fantasy-slop novels were cozy in the modern sense; it's not really seen prior to 2020 and the pandemic lockdowns, except in Japan, where the manga equivalent really takes off after the 1995 Kanto earthquake.

 

[Bramblethorn]

You know what isn't selling in the quantities it used to any longer? Epic fantasy. Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, Patrick Rothfuss, Terry Brooks? They linger like they never used to. Neil Gaiman, in particular, is kryptonite, which isn't surprising. Brandon Sanderson is the exception which proves the rule, and Tolkien and Terry Pratchett are evergreen, but otherwise? It's a wasteland for tradpub epic fantasy. Self-pub is where the market appears to be for that now.

Hm, does Pratchett count as epic fantasy? He riffs heavily on epic fantasy tropes, especially in the earlier books, but once he got into his stride the epic-fantasy elements became less of the main event, more like protective camouflage for stories about people.

One of his most-quoted passages is a chunk of real-world economic theory with a light coating of fantasy to make it taste better.

fucking Gaiman, eh

 

[YmaOHyd]

One of his most-quoted passages is a chunk of real-world economic theory with a light coating of fantasy to make it taste better.

Sam Vimes Boots Theory, I assume?

 

[Bramblethorn]

Don't disagree with the main body of the post -- God knows there was a ton of D&D slop. A lot of it was module tie-ins. The serial numbers weren't even filed off.

"Cozy," though, is a new trend that's pretty big in fantasy and also in gaming. In the gaming world, it's descended from Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. They're basically defined as games about nurturing and relaxing. None of the old fantasy-slop novels were cozy in the modern sense; it's not really seen prior to 2020 and the pandemic lockdowns, except in Japan, where the manga equivalent really takes off after the 1995 Kanto earthquake.

In the context of books I'm used to "cozy" describing the reader experience, not necessarily the character experience. Agatha Christie's murder mysteries are often described as "cozies", even though living within one would be a terrifying experience, because for a lot of people they're comfort reading.

(I don't think it's a 100% correct description of Christie, but it is a very common description of her.)

 

[Bramblethorn]

Sam Vimes Boots Theory, I assume?

Yup.

 

[YmaOHyd]

In the context of books I'm used to "cozy" describing the reader experience, not necessarily the character experience. Agatha Christie's murder mysteries are often described as "cozies", even though living within one would be a terrifying experience, because for a lot of people they're comfort reading.

(I don't think it's a 100% correct description of Christie, but it is a very common description of her.)

Fair enough. It's a new enough label that I don't know that it's 100% broken through yet. If you were going to define a cozy fantasy, it'd be something like "a low-stakes, low-stress slice-of-life story with a happy ending." Lots of strange but welcoming communities, lots of quirky but nonthreatening people, almost no violence ever, usually no risk to life or limb. It's fantasy for people using books as therapy for anxiety.

There's a whole sub-subgenre -- which is a combination of Instagram/Tiktok wish fulfillment and Legends and Lattes derivatives -- that basically goes: "what if this incredibly powerful person had a hobby?" World's most powerful mage makes jam. Evil queen's personal bodyguard runs away to open a tea shop. Demon-princess sells spices. Witch who can see the future invents the fortune cookie. Robot sells matcha to woodland creatures. Librarian and her faerie prince write a book. There's a slightly tongue in cheek cozy-fantasy Madlib in this article:

I would like to run an orphanage that's in a tree and is filled to the brim with chocolate for the benefit of goblins who have been marginalized but thanks to this place have all found friends.

That was my randomly-generated result.