There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with writing in a niche that barely has a reader base. I’m not talking about a quiet corner that simply needs time to grow, but a space where each release feels like standing on a rooftop screaming or anyone to hear you, and no one ever does.
This is not merely my own observation. I have spoken with, listened to, and learned from authors far larger than I could ever reasonably hope to be, authors who have also written the same types of books that have been my primary focus, but no longer to, not because they stopped loving those stories, but because at some point, loving them was no longer enough to justify the cost of trying to build their career on them. The choice was passion or future as authors.
That is the choice many of us are being forced to make. Do we continue writing the stories that live in our bones, like for me, the dark mafia romances that are not contemporary, the figure skating and hockey romances grounded in reality rather than fantasy wish fulfillment but that aren’t AU, and romantasy that exists outside academies, royalty, or political intrigue. Or do we write what the market rewards, regardless of whether it excites us or drains us?
Indie publishing used to be the refuge for the stories that are different that the trad industry wouldn’t touch. It was the place for work that crossed genres, took risks, and didn’t fit neatly into existing molds. Readers came to indie specifically because they were looking for something they couldn’t get elsewhere.
But that version of indie publishing has largely disappeared, even as people continue to repeat comforting phrases like “there is a reader for every book” and “every voice deserves to be heard.” Those ideas sound good. They feel kind. They really are often well-intentioned.
But they are also increasingly untrue, and the numbers simply do not support them. Twenty to thirty percent of published books will never sell a single copy. More than half will sell fewer than a dozen, often those to family and friends. It’s painted as a failure of talent or effort when it is a reflection of saturation, visibility algorithms, and a marketplace and creator space that no longer rewards discovery.
The idea that every book has a waiting reader might have been closer to true in a slower ecosystem. It is far less true in a content economy, where conformity is what pays and deviation is punished with silence or content no longer being pushed. Unfortunately we live in a content economy now, and content thrives on sameness.
Creators receive the most clicks, the most engagement, and the most visibility when they talk about what is already popular. That reinforcement loop rewards trends and solidifies them as the norm for which anything that deviates comes with fewer clicks. At this point, it is difficult to even call them trends. Many of the tropes and subgenres dominating romance have been selling steadily for ten to fifteen years. We are now watching authors re-cover books they released a decade ago, change nothing substantive, and re-release them as if they are new, and they sell as if they are brand new. That is how little the landscape has shifted. It’s stagnant.
At the same time, there are scads of videos and articles documenting the decline in overall quality. Editing standards have fallen sharply because the expected pace has become impossible, and readers don’t care. When the expectation is six, eight, ten books a year, there is simply no time to write carefully, revise deeply, send a manuscript to a developmental editor, revise again, line edit, revise again, proofread, format, and release.
Concerns about this are often dismissed by pointing to authors releasing books every 2 to 3 weeks, back to back without break, ever, with any skepticism met by accusations of jealousy and claims that “some writers are just fast” (I suspect the people defencing this pace are using AI to some degree themselves). On a very good day, I can write 15,000, or more if I decide to talk-to-text it and edit for grammar later. That does not change the reality of what it takes to produce a finished book, and good days are not everyday.
I’ll be frank about something that has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Many of the authors currently releasing books every 2, 3, or 4 weeks have only begun doing so within the past 2 to 3 years. It aligns perfectly with the release and rapid normalization of consumer AI. Is it possible that this is a coincidence? No, not at the rate we’re seeing it.
Even the most prolific traditionally published authors, writers whose speed is legendary, do not operate at this pace without substantial support. Nora Roberts, often cited as the gold standard of productivity, takes roughly six weeks to write a novel from beginning to end, and she has a dedicated editorial team working exclusively on her books. Most indie authors do not have that.
Writing a complete novel in 2 to 3 weeks produces a first draft, at best, often one that has not even been proofread. Even 6 to 10 books a year pushes the limits of what can reasonably be edited well unless someone is working at an extraordinary pace with extreme discipline. I can believe 6 to 10 is possible if someone truly busts their ass and does nothing else. I can bust out a first draft in 2 to 3 weeks if I ignore the reality that is burn-out and the adverse impact this takes on the body, even when following a formula.
More than one book a month, consistently?
And readers do 👏 not 👏 care 👏c. More, more, more, more of the same, same, same.
A useful comparison is the film industry. Hollywood is endlessly rehashes existing franchises, rebooting them, doing live-action versions of animated films, adding yet more sequels… The independent film space now does much the same. Risk is punished. Familiarity is rewarded. Audiences want to know exactly what they are getting before they commit, claiming it is too expensive to take chances on anything new. The logic is identical to readers insisting that an $11.99 Kindle Unlimited subscription makes reading anything different too costly. Consumers want more of the same and we are seeing creativity die a slow, painful death.
Writers are often told to write for themselves first. The story itself is for the writer. But the shaping of that story into something immersive and coherent, aka the book, is for the reader. That work is a translation of what lives in your heart that we hope lands in someone else’s the same way.
So why spend hundreds or thousands of hours doing that when it is increasingly invisible? Why, when algos penalize even hinting at something different? Why, when deviation quietly removes you from the feed?
Those questions upset me.
I am genuinely uncertain whether I will continue releasing my 1920s and 1930s dark mafia romances. Each of those books demands immense time, research, and care, and they are functionally doomed on release simply for not being contemporary. I have been advised to release them anyway, to build a backlog and to let them sit. But how much does a backlog matter if it contains books readers are no longer seeking?
This problem extends beyond writing and into research. This is work that most readers will never see, but which fundamentally shapes a story’s intergrity.
For a mafia book that involved aviation, I did not simply research flight. Oh, no. I learned to fly airplanes for real, including aircraft from the era. I put those scenes in front of pilots and instructors with experience flying now-antique planes, then before non-pilot readers, to find the balance between accuracy and accessibility. For figure skating stories, I took up figure skating myself. I have a coach. I skate in custom boots on custom blades. I work with an Olympic coach. For hockey, I attend games, speak with players and fans, and ask uncomfortable questions about crossover, culture, and rivalry.
This kind of research takes years, but readers do not want it. What they want is rapid-fire wish fulfillment. They want to believe someone can start skating and become world-class in three months as other books have led them to believe normal. I have been explicitly told that accuracy can backfire and that realism can violate reader expectations so deeply that it becomes a liability. This belief has been entrenched by so many years of the same, and is still reinforced by more of the same.
Readers want more off the same. Content creators will only talk about more of the same.
So I am making another difficult choice. For the my next book, I will not be doing that level of research. I won’t immerse myself just to get it right. I’m outlining a book about a mafia hockey player and a ballerina-turned-figure-skater-turned-bakery-owner, packed with tropes. I won’t be putting it through my usual editorial gauntlet. I typically have a minimum of three sets of editing eyes on every manuscript. That will not be happening this time. There isn’t time for it anymore.
If readers want books every 6 to 8 weeks, then something has to be sacrificed. Apparently, that something is depth, polish, and care. That reality is heartbreaking, but this is where we are, and it’s where we’re likely to stay for a few more decades.
I miss when reading itself was a niche activity. I actually miss when I was bullied for reading since only nerds read. Some measure of quality was the base expectation, and there was actually more variety than we have now. No, it wasn’t so great that the traditional industry was still largely gatekeeper and no, not every book ended up high-quality, but there were expectations of editing, at the least. We saw publishers with money on the line taking more risks than content creators who have no money at risk. I never thought that I would see a time that the traditional industry is literally the place where you’re more likely to find some risks being taken, considering they have a long-standing, well-deserved reputation of wanting more of the same.
I don’t yet know which direction I will ultimately choose. I do know that other writers like me are standing at the same crossroads, staring down a market that no longer rewards patience, research, or a refusal to suffocate in a box.
And I do not think it is wrong to grieve what we are losing, even if we keep writing anyway. At the end of the day, creative industries are part of the humanities. We are literally losing a part of humanity by wanting nothing but more of the exact same and ignore anything that isn’t willing to fall into lockstep.