/lit/ - Literature

>>20271511
Depends on the country, but I feel it is becoming more mainstream. There are quite a lot of people listening to audiobooks of sff you wouldn't expect, Sanderson has quite a bit of mainstream reach.
Access to books has become easier because of this, pretty much every hole in the ground with 10.000 population has a bookstore that even has a fantasy/sci-fi shelf. And sometimes they even carry a few books you havn't seen before. Add to that the ability to buy books on amazon and how many forums, booktubers, whatever there are for recommendations it is very hard to run out of books at the moment.
That is not all positive tho, with the increase of mainstream viability some real cancer has snuck into the bookstores. Netflix book adaptions, or YA series picked up by Netflix. Those are always advertised front and center, make up like half of the stock, and are usually godawfull.
Also what can't be understated is how much more prominent female writers are now. It used to be that 80-90% of books on the shelves were written by men, and maybe 10-20% by women. Those books by women were usually pretty good, as they were the Robin Hobb's, K Le Guin's etc. so to prevail against the bias they had to show some real skill. The books by men varied more in quality, there was some real great stuff there, but also amateur author writes down his DnD campaign and tries to sell that shite.
Now it is in reverse. 80% of the books are written by women, and if a man ends on the bookshelf he is either already an established name or really talented. That is why I consider it fairly safe to just buy every book written by a man at the moment, chances are if he made it past the publishing bias he is at least decent.
What is interesting is that while most of the women are trash, they write a different kind of trash. It is hard to put into words, but it is definitly not inspired by DnD and vidya games as the shitty fantasy books by men, more by soap operas and in turn Netflix shows.
Not that there aren#t any great books written by women at the moment, there are probably even a few more than there used to be. The Goblin Emperor, The Priory of the Orange Tree, The Bear and the Nightingale, Piranesi, and they are an interesting breath of fresh air because great writing by a man and a woman is still somwhat different. The genders do not think alike. But it is disproportionally harder to find the good books by women, because they are drowned out in a sea of trash due to the current publishing market.

How the future is looking? Who knows. I hope sex boas dissapears from the publishing market, and we go closer to a 50/50 split in books written by men and women. Maybe not completely 50/50 as I think men will always write more and better sff due to more autism, but maybe 75/25 so that less trash ends up on the bookshelves.

Pic related is the kind of female written Netflix boosted trash that floods the book stores, also hilariously the author is also a jew.