The State Of Sci-Fi And Fantasy Publishing Is Dismal And Looking To Get Worse

Publishing is an oversaturated market, and there may be no more dismal market than that of short fiction in science fiction and fantasy when one looks at what the future holds in store. The market is putting increasing pressure upon writers, and the competition level is greater than ever, but at the same time, fiction, especially short fiction, has been devalued to a point where people aren’t willing to pay for it.

It's beyond difficult to be a professional author in 2025. Most of the market online is in a “fake it until you make it” mode, where they act like they know what they’re talking about and yet sell books in the hundreds or fewer. This isn’t an indication of the quality of someone’s work at all, but is the reality of how it’s nearly impossible to stand out against hundreds of thousands of other authors doing the same.

Author Ryan Williamson from Wargate Books, with a bestseller from the Doomsday Recon series, put a lot in perspective in a post on X, even showing getting to the point where one has a finished novel sets a person in the top 3% of writers, which explains why there’s so much online posturing. It gets crazier when one looks at sales numbers.

He talks about how difficult it is to truly sell: “Out of 10K authors, only 300 finish a novel, 60 end up getting published (including self-publishing), and one or maybe two eventually have a single title that sells over 5K copies (lifetime).”

For perspective, that puts an aspiring author at a 0.02% chance of ever selling 5,000 or more copies of a book. When one talks about the haves and have-nots being a disparity, there is nothing more true in that regard than the book publishing industry.

It’s not just self-published authors who struggle with this, either, but mainstream authors do as well.