sarahlin
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2025 in Review
🕑 Added 2025-12-27 18:00:09 +0000 UTCMost of this post will be my analysis of the year as well as extensive thoughts on the publishing industry, but first we have a lovely little uncomplicated section. The above is another imaginary scenario fanart commissioned by Argo the Ratfolk, which I hope you will all enjoy! It's not canon, but he did consult with me about what a felidae might look like. ^-^
On top of that, a nice piece of holiday-themed fanfiction was posted on my subreddit, if that interests you:
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheBrightestShadow/comments/1pv3wm5/fanfic_christmas_on_the_9/
Okay, on to the review!
Too often in these yearly posts, I express negativity and feel like I'm baiting people to be encouraging. This year I'm going to try to avoid that pattern by talking about how I see the industry and my potential place(s) in it.
Genre Definitions
Let's start away from indie or Amazon, with the tradpub industry, the Big Five publishers that dominate physical sales. Several industry insiders said that this year in traditional publishing, the genres were "romantasy" and "non-romantasy". Now, I don't intend to be insulting to genres I don't enjoy; I don't think that's productive. But I'd say it's fairly clear that it would be futile for me to try to write romantasy because it just doesn't align with my interests.
The one time I tried to think about a romantasy idea I began imagining a series where the protagonist starts timid and becomes increasingly assertive until she becomes the villain. Now, this entertains me but it's so far from the fundamental appeal of the subgenre that it would be silly to try to write something like that; readers would consider it mediocre romantasy at best. There's no one gatekeeping me out of romantasy, I just don't think it would be productive for me to spend a lot of effort trying to break in.
You all see where this is going: the romantasy case is a real element of the industry, but it's also a parallel to how I feel about progression fantasy. No one is keeping me out of the genre, and of course I always try to express gratitude for all who have tried my work. But I think it's relatively clear that working in the genre will mean that a significant portion of my readership views my work as only a pale imitation of things that I don't want to write.
Of course I'm going to fulfill my promises, because there are various progression fantasy ideas that interest me (and some percentage of the audience). That means I'll be going the distance with The Weirkey Chronicles, no matter how attention declines, and finishing the five book arc of Depthless Hunger. Beyond that, I'm not sure.
Other Books
I'm passionate about a wide variety of different things, so I've actually finished a number of other novels, including three that I hope to do something with eventually:
The Final Testament of a Fallen Thief: This is the "heist progression" novel I've discussed in the past, though it isn't close enough to the center of the progression fantasy genre. The premise of this and the series is watching a group of young thieves go from running street cons up to Ocean's Eleven heists.
Nematic Souls: Straight first contact science fiction, my take on trying to write truly alien aliens and explore a variety of topics in a thoughtful way.
Necrosurgeon: A tighter standalone fantasy set in a world where necromancy won centuries ago, following the eponymous necrosurgeon as she's embroiled in a broader plot entangling her city.
I love all three of these books and think they're good, but there's zero correlation between the things I care about and success. So these three continue to languish without a proper home. There are broadly two paths that could be taken with them...
Indie and Tradpub
In theory you can publish anything you want on the internet, but in practice only certain sorts of books find any success. My impression so far is that none of my novels mentioned above would be successful on Amazon or similar platforms... but I would love to be wrong. There are over 10,000 books published every single day, so obviously there are huge parts of publishing I'm not familiar with.
Those of you who read self-published books, would you say there's traditional idea-focused science fiction being self-published on Amazon? My experience is that almost all the big books are military SF (not my thing) or engineering porn (which I enjoy reading sometimes but don't write). On the fantasy end, I feel like most Amazon readers are looking for Eragon-type books.
Based on this impression, I have long believed that these novels would be likely to find more success with the big traditional publishers - not certain, they'd just have a chance. Unfortunately, up to this point I have gotten "interest" but not actually closed any deals, which counts for nothing. Publishers don't really have slush piles anymore and querying literary agents is a tough process when I doubt many would be interested. Of course, an entirely valid critique is that I'm self-selecting out of submitting to many agents, but it's not without reason: if an agent says she is looking for romantasy-styled books, is it really very probable that she would enjoy my work?
I am frugal by nature, so even my modest success publishing has put me in a stable financial position. There is nothing stopping me from saying "Screw the algorithm" and throwing up whatever books I want. But, frankly, it sucks to pour months of work into something and then see it disappear with barely a trace. Having people actually care about my work, while fraught at times, has also been very rewarding as an author.
Could I try to put up one of these works on a site like Royal Road, which is one of the few that still offers some real visibility? Yes, but it's again the Amazon problem: I don't see anything like that gaining any traction there. Likewise, if I serialized any of these on Patreon, a few people might read and enjoy, but it would lead to confusion and upset people who only want TWC.
Anyway, that's me trying to articulate my view of the industry instead of reporting on my emotional state. If anyone has insights, that'd be great, but I hope at minimum it gives some idea of where I'm coming from.
So what will happen is I'll keep steadily writing the series I've promised, I'll make desultory attempts at trad publishing, and maybe I'll try one or two new things. It's still a privilege to be able to have a career like this, but I'm not sure what direction it will go in the long term. In the short term...
Looking forward to 2026
TWC11: Deadgold will be completed during this year, then I'm going to do my best to promote the release with a big sale, an AMA on r/fantasy, and whatever else I can figure out.
TWC12: One of my main writing objectives will be completing this. It will be a little tricky, as this book is the culmination of a great many ongoing arcs. I hope that means it will be satisfying for all the readers who have followed the series this far. This one is likely to go long.
Depthless Hunger: The second ebook/audiobook will be coming out in March, and the others based on Audible's schedule. More about this when I have more financial reports.
Audiobooks: The DH audiobooks will continue to come out, as per my contract with Audible. No idea whether or not Travis Baldree will narrate any TWC.
Side Projects: Right now I am feeling kind of tapped. If my schedule ever clears up, I have two more progression fantasy ideas I might explore at some point.
Thanks to everyone for supporting me.
Comments
Sarah Lin
Thanks for the vote of confidence. Breaking in seems like it requires an agent, which is an ongoing struggle (and it's much harder to find agents representing hard SF than fantasy). Short fiction seems completely impenetrable to me, and it's not a straightforward route anymore, so I haven't seriously considered it.
Dylan
Nematic Souls is a neat concept and sounds quite in line with some of whats currently popular in the hard SF space. I think traditional publishing is the route for this. There’s a large and aligned audience but that audience isn’t in the self published or royal road sphere. Those routes would likely backfire as that sphere is quite fixated on military style science fiction slop. Breaking in to traditional publishing, especially in SF, is hard and i sympathize with your struggles. I think your best bets would be sharing your idea/desire to break in with an existing name in the traditionally published hard SF space and asking for advice or alternatively to start with short stories in the genre to facilitate breaking in (barrier of entry is lower here and there is a larger breadth of readers). It’s not easy to break in but would likely be worthwhile if you want to branch into this space and move somewhat out of one that you seem to feel like an outsider in (which is unfortunate but understandable given everything about the space). I enjoy your style and feel your approach to writing and structure fit quite well with hard science fiction, so I am wishing the best.
DocSmitty
No special publishing knowledge here, just wanted to say that I typically find new authors through KU (as I did you) but also the indie publishing houses like Mango Media, where authors will give a shout out to other authors they enjoy reading, and I often find that there are multiple series published by the same indie label that I enjoy. So, if you haven’t looked into the indie label as an option between Amazon and tradpub, that could be a path to look at? I think a lot of it is actually still Amazon publishing, but with shared marketing efforts? Just an outsider’s guess :)
Sarah Lin
I'm not familiar with her work at all, I'm afraid! You can never say for sure, but new connections don't hurt.
Shweta Narayan
Throwing this out here just in case: do you have any line of connection to Andrea Höst? Her writing has flavor overlap with yours that I'm not braining well enough to define right now beyond a sense of scope that expands dramatically in ways I actually gasp at. reason I'm asking is that she self-published work that won major Australian SF/F awards & was able to pivot to read publishing for some but not all of her work I ... think? So she'd know how to find homes for books that don't fall easily into categories. I've got a couple friends I can ask too, if that's useful. They're going to know a lot more about queer speculative fiction than mainstream -- would that be any use to you?
Keid
I just want to say that, as always, I love your work. I don't have any answers as to how to achieve more commercial success going forward, but I will continue to sing your praises to anyone who will listen. Anecdotally, the conversations where I end up recommending your work the most are situations where people were already looking for LitRPG that doesn't have like a certain level of baseline misogyny and actually treats women as fully realized people. (Generally these people say LitRPG, but they aren't actually too fixated on the genre boundaries of it, gamelit, and general progression fantasy). I don't know how much of a real market that is, since the people looking for it also seemed to be nearing a level of frustration that makes them turn away from the category entirely, but it's what I've encountered. Romantasy seems like a hard industry target to chase if you aren't already into it on some level because there are a few levels of tropes and pacing elements that I feel like you would need to hit dead on if you also want people to accept something significantly different and more interesting to you. As like a, "You have to really understand the conventions in order to break them well," kind of deal. That said, as several of your works have sort of felt like they could have been a half-step away from becoming harems in like a Tenchi Muyo kinda way, so you could potentially also just lean into that? It might be a little bit of a side-effect of writing male MCs and then surrounding them with women that have lots of depth to them. You might be able to do okay by just gender swapping your current formula there and adding a tiny bit more tension and angst. For sci-fi, I do feel like the niche for unique concepts by authors that don't have established traditional publishers is pretty narrow and tends to revolve around just selling short stories. Actually making money by selling stories to Analog, Lightspeed, etc. is a pretty different skill set from writing novels though.
Sarah Lin
Not a lot of liches, per se, but there are necromancers integrated into daily life in all kinds of ways, many of which I think people interested in this sort of thing would find fun. ^-^
Michael Proffitt
The fanfiction sounds like something Dave would do for him.
AyashiiDachi
I LOVE the idea of necrosurgeon. The lack of this type of fiction almost compels me to write myself. I hope it has Lich accountants and Liches in other mediocre white colour professions as the settings upper middle class
Bryan Gray
I think TWC is the best progression fantasy series I've read. I desperately want books that don't stick 100% to the tried and true formula, it's what caused me to burn out on litRPG stuff a few years ago, everything felt the same. So I guess what I'm saying is that I hope you keep writing cool genre-boundary pushing stuff, even if it means it won't find as big of an audience. I would love to see a progression fantasy novel with a female protag written by a female author, for example, painfully few of those, if any.
Alison Stoneklifft
Ok I really want to read the villain romantasty... There's some very good royal road series that are villain protagonist pieces. With some flash backs and some baring souls to show how she got twisted / grew to extremes ... Yeah I could dig it. I dearly wish you more success in books that excite you to bring to the world. I am not a creative in any way and just consume. But some folks close to me are and I feel for their frustration in getting screen time in the incredibly crowded world we live in now.
Petrichorus
As an avowed lover of thiefy fiction, I would absolutely devour The Final Testament of a Fallen Thief. But I'm also certain I'd enjoy the other two - your work is consistently excellent.
Josh
I don't know if you'll find a good home for those books; you know far, far more about the industry than I do. But all three of those sound awesome and totally up my street. I'll definitely read all of them, and when time comes to buy books for Christmas and birthdays for family members, I'll be more likely to buy these books for them than traditional progression fantasy stories. So if you do publish them, it's likely I at least will buy multiple copies! Thanks for a great year. Depthless Hunger was an awesome surprise.
