Renowned Sci-Fi And Fantasy Editor Warns That The Fiction Market Has Reached A Tipping Point With More Content Than Readers

Cirsova Magazine has been raising the standard of short fiction in science fiction and fantasy for years in the genre, and their editor has taken to X to warn of a critical mass of content on the market, making the value of basic fiction diminish over time.

It’s been more and more difficult for authors to get seen in recent years. When Amazon self-publishing was the wild west, it seemed anything could hit the algorithm and sell. Then, it became something where an author had to be careful with keywords and marketing. Now, Amazon appears to be saturated with so many Kindle Unlimited reads that it’s becoming very difficult for authors to stand out.

Cirsova Magazine has been a beacon of light in a dwindling readership of short fiction in science fiction and fantasy, publishing some of the best in the business over the last decade. Their editor noticed an alarming trend and posted to X his thoughts on the matter.

So, something I've talked about in the past is the continual downward pressure on the market value of written fiction and the limited things we've done to do our part in combating it...

There is a TON of written fiction out there, and the body of written fiction is growing at an unfathomable rate as new authors continue to add to it. The actual readership probably does not grow at any remotely corresponding rate to the body of written fiction, and even avid readers have limited budgets and limited bandwidth.

We've always staunchly advocated paying for written fiction rather than accepting and publishing works for free; in part because we believe that the written word has value and by controlling the growth of the corpus of publicly available work insofar as we can, we ensure that there's a curated level of quality that readers will find and have come to expect when spending their limited money and limited reading time on Cirsova-published works. We also do so to maintain some upward pressure on the monetary value of published fiction.

The current crisis facing publishing and reading audience is the coming deluge of AI-written fiction. The growth of the corpus of written fiction will explode like no one could possibly conceive as one of the biggest hurdles to creating it [actually f***ing writing it] is removed.

The average reader is also not a person of extremely discerning tastes [else Dan Brown would not have been one of the biggest authors of the 00s], and most people merely want to be entertained. If AI is able to create written fiction that is "good enough" for the average reader, we will reach a crisis point. Even moderately savvy editors will find such stories "good enough" because they will recognize the entertainment value it would have to their readership whether they know it's AI or not. And the barrier of having a writer actually spend time to complete a book is an annoyance for a publisher looking to make a buck off their clientele. Don't you think that if the publisher of ASOFAI would push a "Finish the last two books" button if they could, George's lazy ass be damned?

We are unfortunately reaching that point. AI-generated fiction has already become "almost good enough", to where the generative text authors can pull the wool over the eyes of not only readers but acquisitions editors if they clean things up just enough.

Anyone who actually cares about the commercial value of written fiction created by actual authors is staring down an existential crisis as authors seek to fool editors and readers or merely earnestly create slop that they know "their" audience will consume and enjoy.

There definitely is a flip in the amount of content to readers out there occurring in the market, and with AI making it so much faster to write books, that should only increase exponentially. However, just because it is AI-assisted or produced, doesn’t mean the work is slop. In fact, it’s already getting to a point where it’s very difficult to distinguish between AI or something written by a professional writer.

What will it do to the value of fiction? Only time will tell.

For now, one can read great SF/F in Cirsova Magazine’s summer issue, out now.

NEXT: Hiromi Kawakami: A Little-Known Japanese Literary Treasure