Cross-genre takeover
A new report points to 2025 being the biggest year for speculative fiction ever, thanks to the ongoing boom in romantasy fiction
Last week, The Bookseller's Alex Call released an article about the state of book sales in 2025 with the following conclusion: speculative fiction as a sales category had its best year ever, thanks to the ongoing boom of romantasy fiction.
Call examined a report from NielsenIQ BookData, which tracks book sales. It found that sales have been increasing dramatically. In 2023, the genre pulled in £59.4 million, and jumped 41% to £84 million in 2024. The year isn't over yet, but revenue has reached £79 million and is projected to hit £100 million by year's end.
That's a dramatic increase: the last best year for the category was 2007, with nearly £50 million in sales, £12 million of which came from the release of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
In the article, Call notes that we've seen a dramatic shift in the speculative fiction landscape: where authors like Rowling, George R.R. Martin, Terry Pratchett, and J.R.R. Tolkien dominated sales between 2001 and 2019, 2025 paints a dramatically different picture: "the top slots are taken by the new darlings of the category: romantasy stars Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, and Stephanie Garber, and fantasy author R.F. Kuang."
The article includes a chart that spells out the top 50 books by sales from 2025: Yarros, Maas, and SenLinYu, took up the top ten slots for the year, selling 11,361,216,834 copies between them.
The report notes that those stalwarts – Martin, Pratchett, Rowling, and Tolkien – are still selling well, with Nielsen's Total Consumer Market report putting Tolkien's sales at £2.1 million (with The Hobbit at #90), "Pratchett is 13th on the author list, Martin 28th and, with no new SFF publications since a reissue of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2018, Rowling is 157th." (This graphic isn't drawn from the TCM list, and I'm guessing that they're pulling data in from two different sets of data – take that as you will.)
Nielsen Book Data published a report earlier this summer that digs into the field: "sales of romantasy books have more than quadrupled in the last five years," that the biggest drivers of this trend are platforms like TikTok, and that most buyers are women under 35. In 2024, 78% of buyers were women, while they make up 54% of all book buyers.
Those buyers are also frequent readers, and in a companion blog post, Nielsen pointed out that while a good chunk of titles are being discovered in stores, "a third of romantasy purchases in 2023-24 were entirely planned for that book at that time." Buyers are discovering the books and making the time and energy to purchase them: "romantasy readers often know what they want when going into the shop."
It's worth noting that this report is fairly limited in scope: it's only tracking UK consumers, and without data about the larger US market, I'm guessing that you'd see other authors on this list if you zoom out to include that, such as Matt Dinniman, Brandon Sanderson, and John Scalzi. I'd also imagine that there's some wiggle room with how they're classifying genres: Ian McEwan's What We Can Know came out in September and has hit bestseller lists, but his books aren't generally classified as speculative fiction, and I have to wonder how it might figure in if it was included in that particular set of data.
Those caveats aside,
However you cut it, fantasy – particularly romantic fantasy – has crushed science fiction sales: it's not until you get to the 28th entry on the list that science fiction shows up with Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, and the only other SF novel comes in at #48, Frank Herbert's Dune.
Call comes to a conclusion: science fiction "is now by far SFF's junior partner."
I've seen some angst about what this means for the larger SFF world: some despair that science fiction is being neglected and that it's dying, while others have complained about how genre shelves are taken over by legions of brightly colored, romantasy tomes.
This report tracks with what I've been seeing as a reviewer and writer who gets dozens of press releases for new books each week. Romantasy and adjacent books are the ones that publicists are pitching me by far. The harder science fiction stories haven't gone away, but there are certainly fewer titles coming to market and there isn't as much of a PR efforts behind when they do come my way.
On an industrial level, it doesn't feel like there's as much of a push for it, and while there are still plenty of authors working in the field (writing everything from shorter fiction to big, long series), it doesn't feel like there's quite as much demand from readers.
Nielsen points to one reason for that: female readers. They make up more than half of book buyers, and they predominantly prefer fantasy. Nielsen doesn't figure science fiction into its figures, and Call only mentions science fiction's diminished role in the category, but I think it's safe to make the assumption that as a genre, science fiction isn't as appealing to the readers who're driving those sales.
Andrew Liptak
Why that's the case is a harder thing to assume: but I think there are numerous and interlocking factors at play.
First, we've seen enormous, big-budget shows like Game of Thrones and Outlander that that have not only earned considerable acclaim and viewership numbers (and there were a lot of think pieces that challenged the assumption that GOT only appealed to men), but which have also played out complicated, character-driven stories that aren't just male power fantasies.
Additionally, we've seen the entry of a ton of great female authors and creators writing and upending a lot of the genre's longstanding tropes, from R.F. Kuang to N.K. Jemisin to Mary Robinette Kowal to Alix E. Harrow to Katherine Arden to Tilly Walden to an ever-lengthening list.
There's nothing intrinsic to fantasy that appeals to female readers, anymore than there's something in science fiction that makes it more appealing to men. When I worked as a bookseller at Walden Books back in the day, we had one male customer who came in like clockwork to buy romance novels by the armload, and I know there are plenty of women who love digging into science fiction stories. Cultural assumptions only work until they don't, but I do see where they can have an undue influence, providing just enough fiction to nudge people in one direction or another. It's a genre-wide challenge that can't be undertaken passively, but needs to be consciously and actively addressed.
If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say that as a genre, romance has been as widely appealing as it has been because it actually (broadly speaking) treats women like the complicated people they are. I asked a friend and romance author Amber Roberts about this, and she pointed out that the genre "helps remove stigma and shame around topics that were considered taboo (or still are) and focuses on women's desire and sense of worth, self and perceived."
I have a feeling that as a genre, science fiction still has a lingering perception as being a male-dominated thing (especially if the authors that are reflexively recommended go by the names of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Herbert) and where women are often relegated to characters that are secondary to their male counterparts. Or maybe there's still the social stigma of being labeled a nerd if you've got a science fiction novel, or something in how the genre is broadly marketed. Or maybe it's the fact that we're living in a world where Elon Musk is the closest thing we have to a character from one of those stories and we don't like what we see.
That SF is a boys-only thing not accurate: there are legions of outstanding authors who've specifically worked against that image, and science fiction has never been exclusively a boy's club: women have been part of it since the start. But perceptions can be hard to change once they're embedded in our cultural consciousness.
From a publishing perspective, being the smallest part of the whole strikes me as a good starting point: you know there's a wide body of readers who're willing to propel the genre to these heights. If you can find the right authors and stories (easier said than done), you have the start to a path. There's no shortage of inspiration on that front: rocket launches are routine at this point, NASA's getting ready to land on the Moon at some point in the next decade (maybe?), we've got cool space missions headed to Mars and Europa, not to mention a lot of exciting work in climate science, medicine, technology, and so forth.
But I suspect that there's a lot of cultural and social baggage that still needs to be overcome: the specific cultural infrastructure and community that produces science fiction isn't telling the stories that these readers are looking for, which harkens back to what Roberts mentioned: not centering, depicting, or including the characters, situations, and stories that are supportive of women's interests. There's nothing in science fiction that's inherently hostile to this: look no further than Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronauts series, which did a fine job telling a story rooted in actual science, but which also centered the concerns her female characters – concerns that are absolutely present in the real world.
The boom in romantasy fiction is a good thing for publishers: a quadrupling in sales is always a good thing. But it also means that there are a lot of readers out there: more people reading and consuming books is good, not just for a publisher's bottom line, but as a beneficial thing for society as a whole.
With that in mind, it's worth remembering that the publishing industry notoriously follows trends, and has a history of overloading the market to the bursting point. When one book or author breaks out from the pack (like say, the ones from Sarah J. Maas or Rebecca Yarros) publishers and editors take notice and comb through their back lists and submission piles for similar titles. New social tools like TikTok and Instagram are great for this sort of thing and have continued to direct attention to it, leading to all of this success.
Romantasy has lead the SFF world to some incredible gains, and it's filled a lot of shelves in bookstores. It's a story that we've seen repeat itself and at some point, the genre will hit a breaking point. Readers will get their fill and move on or work their way through a saturated market. The bigger names will continue to sell well, but publishers will pull back on publishing newer titles, especially as other trends emerge and to replace it.
I don't think that this will happen in the near-term: there's still a lot of momentum from publishers, booksellers, and readers for romantasy. Romance is also is the largest genre in the publishing industry, and it's a genre that can endlessly be carried over into other genres. Plus, sex sells.
The books themselves are just a first step: Romantasy didn't blow up just because of the books: it's been so successful because it's attracted a huge audience of readers, and the connective tissue to bring them together and reinforce that interest. Some of that is luck and timing, but there's also some work that can go in to take advantage of that environment: it's up to publishers to continue to find ways to reach and market to that audience, and to continue to produce high-quality books for them to read.