Writing Fiction in 2025
January 3, 2025 | Sean Morrissey Carroll
The modern writer faces a host of promising opportunities and daunting challenges in the New Year. This century has proven to be full of upheaval, with war (or the threat of war) across the globe, jobs disappearing, political polarization, and housing being a perpetual problem for over a decade. In the midst of all this, writers have persevered, weathering the rise of self-publishing, the collapse of journalism, diminishing creative education, and new technologies. From continuing trends to emerging problems, here are ten things that will affect emerging and seasoned writers in 2025.
Emerging AI Uses
The promise of AI is that it will make our lives easier, but the reality thus far has been sorely lacking. This isn’t about the failure of AI to deliver on creative promises (see #2 for that), but instead about how AI technology is changing everyday life. Writers search Google for all sorts of weird answers and in 2024 have increasingly encountered an AI summary above any specific answers on the site. Do we trust the proffered explanation? Do we scroll past it and do our own research? I have found myself doing both, depending on how involved I want my fictional explanation to be. Sometimes the AI summary has proven to be false or otherwise lacking but for simple explanations sometimes that’s all I need to move on and keep writing. To all those out there fighting the same battle about the ethics of AI, its ubiquitous nature is becoming harder to ignore.
Other cognitive shortcuts offered by AI have proven more fruitful. Some writers are using it to create schedules, suggest email copy, fill in forms, apply for grants, and fight back against an increasingly bureaucratic world that demands mental energy for menial tasks. These uses are a gray area for creatives who have sworn off AI use due to its problematic nature regarding stealing creative work from writers and artists, but in the meantime, the rest of the first world has had no qualms in using AI like ChatGPT as a chatbot and companion, to work through life problems, to suggest solutions to personal and professional issues, and to perform repetitive job duties. The amount of work that AI is doing for the non-creative population is staggering. ChatGPT conversations were started 3.6 billion times in November 2024. That’s a lot, and to dismiss it outright may soon become counterproductive.
The Creative Failure of AI
Meanwhile, back on the ranch… AI has been a disaster for creatives. From the flooding of Amazon with ripoffs to the attempted replacement of writers, editors, and cover artists with generative AI every avenue to shortcut human production has resulted in subpar or outright terrible results. KDP publishing through Amazon has become toxic, with clickbait get-rich-quick schemes recruiting unwitting participants in a massive scheme to fill the platform with AI-generated regurgitations on non-fiction topics from history to wellness as well as outright theft of a fiction book’s entire text lifted from a digital copy and uploaded with an AI generated cover. These have proven difficult or impossible for the author to remove from the site by going through official channels. Ghostwriting and vanity publishing scammers now use AI at every step of the way to write, edit, format, and publish—producing an even more inferior product than they used to manually.
Scammers are now pushing courses to writers on how to use AI to write, preying on aspiring authors with promises of success and failing them at every step along the way. For legitimate authors who decide to dabble in generative AI to brainstorm or write, the legal gray area of copyright has proven to be another hurdle to overcome, as the trademark-ability of work created with AI has been called into question and potentially opening them up to losing the rights to their book if it was ever discovered. Lawsuits rage across the country regarding AI, with the potential for all AI-aided creative works to become demonetized and free use.
Publisher Consolidation
The Big Six publishers are now the Big Four and, true to form, they are closing redundant or underperforming imprints. Senior editors are being squeezed out of roles they held for decades, and the junior editors remaining are shouldering heavier and heavier workloads with fewer resources. Agents have been quitting as their support from colleagues and publishing houses wanes.
Blaming their failures on the market, major publishers have been increasingly pessimistic about midlist authors in 2024, cutting funding and support for the majority of their clientele. In response to slumping sales and rising costs, prices have risen dramatically. Gone are the days of twenty dollar new hardcovers, and welcome to the $36 new release. Kindle and other digital media sales have flatlined, with a bit of a regression to physical media in the sales mix. This has meant record profits for big publishing houses, even with lower total sales. The Christmas 2024 top-seller was the Guinness Book of World Records—even though it only sold 1,900 copies.
Rise and Decline of Independent Publications
The Independent Alliance, a collection of eighteen indie publishers, surged in 2024 to quadruple their revenues, becoming a defacto ‘Fifth’ Big Publisher. These publishers focus on niches neglected by the larger publishers and have found success by picking up the slack created when the Big Four eliminate imprints. With their lower overhead, indie publishers have always been able to print books with lower expectations, but their role has grown as the Big Four eliminates avenues for wide distribution.
In April 2024, the indie publishing world was shook by the closure of Small Press Distribution, a warehouse holdings print copies of over 350 small presses. It was a disaster of consolidation, a single location insisted upon by online distributors. When SPD went bankrupt, they forced presses to buy and ship their books to wherever they were across the country, under threat of having their books destroyed otherwise. Many presses couldn’t come up with the cash on short notice and lost hundreds or thousands of copies. The lucky ones shelled out what they could afford and had their offices stuffed with books and no system to distribute them. Several small presses folded outright.
As Deena Prichep of Byline was quoted: “Small presses are dealing with the finances and logistics, coming together for emergency meetings, selling books from their own websites. But the biggest problem is—what happens next? There are other distributors, but they won’t be able to take on everyone, or they have minimum orders that the smaller presses just aren’t able to meet.”
Villains are All the Rage
Horror, fantasy, and romance have all been infected by the same interesting plot twist—the villain is hot. Influenced by Enemies to Lovers and Forbidden Love tropes from romance, the expectation-defying trend has made a major impact in 2024 and is projected to grow in the next year.
Heroes are out, hunks are getting dumped, and the weird kid with their eye on world domination is the new heartthrob.
Will Monster Loving make it to Hollywood films? Is the science fiction world ready for evil empires triumphing over good? 2024 was the year that Elphaba from Wicked became a ubiquitous icon, that Labyrinth came back to theaters with David Bowie’s delicious Goblin King, that Sarah J. Maas and her Court of Thorns and Roses series was on every bookworm’s lips.
Antiheroes have been popular for decades but this shift has been quick and dramatic. The psychology of the change indicates a fatigue with hero worship that began long ago, but it remains to be seen if Villain-loving is merely a fad or if it has real legs.
Attention Spans Diminishing
Forty-six percent of American didn’t finish a single book last year, and the amount of books read by the most voracious readers is diminishing too. The attention of adults in the first world is increasingly being taken by social media with shorter and shorter runtimes. Youtube essays have given way to TikTok shorts, watching films has become doing other tasks while leaving an inane Netflix movie on in the background, and the time spent without a screen has diminished every year since the release of Friendster.
The publishing industry is responding with more fluff reading and shorter books. Novellas are getting their time in the sun. For the first time in decades, they’re a viable publishing pitch after years of books lengthening again and again. This is not to say that less books are being bought—book sales grew by seven percent annually in 2024—but more and more are going unread.
For America’s youth the shift has been dramatic. Houston Independent School District, led by the much reviled state-appointed overseer Mike Miles, has introduced an English curriculum based on modules and excerpts, with not a single full book to be read by middle school students. The drop-off from childhood to teenage reading is staggering; over twenty percent of rising freshmen in high school face a ‘decoding threshold’ where they struggle to understand texts with unfamiliar words.
Authors facing a world of less readers need to be aware of the headwinds they face, but the way forward is unclear. Some governments are making it illegal for children to be on social media, but any growth in readers will require long and sustained attention to the problem. The trends are not in readers’ favor.
Freelance Market Shrinks Again
For a long time journalism has been the crucible in which writers were created, providing the discipline to write consistently over a long period that can result in the ability to create a novel-length work. But as news organizations have been consolidated, local journalism has suffered immensely. The decline of newspapers created freelance jobs for writers to split their attention among many publications, and a stasis of sorts was achieved as websites, news outlets, and marketing organizations clamored for content. Now this world is crumbling.
AI content is becoming the norm, removing ever-more opportunities for freelance writers to first earn a living and second to even get jobs at all. The reddit communities r/writers and r/freelancewriters are full of stories of writers seeing clients reduce their pay, reduce their output, and sometimes outright cancel contracts in favor of automated content creation of admittedly inferior and reductive quality. In the face of tech mavens’ push for AI use in emails, articles, summaries, business plans, and even texts, corporate pencil-pushers have made cost-cutting decisions that will have long lasting implications.
Self-discipline is the only route left for a writer building discipline to write daily or weekly. Blogs, fan fiction, and other personal projects may soon be the only outlets left to build a writing practice. In a race to the bottom, authors may be the only defenders of the written word left in 2025.
DIY or Die
With education standards falling, student debt rising, publishing and media opportunities diminishing, and the internet rife with scams aimed at authors and readers alike, it may seem like all hope is lost for aspiring and even established authors. But don’t let hope die! As the wheels of progress falter, there have never been more opportunities for authors to meet online, share their work, and grow their craft. As the twitterverse dies, writers have taken their communities private on discord. As universities cut English department budgets, free and low cost DIY education has proliferated online and in person. Youtube and other free content sites have a track record of over a decade of authors, readers, and educators teaching thousands of hours of writing craft, analysis, and professional advice for navigating the publishing process.
From life changing ambition to side hustle, the economic ambitions of a writer have changed dramatically in the past quarter century even further. As the 21st century dawned, the future looked bright for both self-published and traditionally published authors, especially of historically marginalized groups that have long been underrepresented in the writing world, but now the tide feels like it is turning away from growth and diversity. Emerging writers will need to tread their own path, and it won’t be easy.
Escapism and Political Trends
With the reelection of Donald Trump come more challenges for authors, and a lot of uncertainty. Universities are closing cultural studies departments. Corporations are shuttering diversity initiatives. And publishing imprints are trying to adjust to the changing electorate with short-sighted and counter-productive measures that will likely dull the diversity of authors published and promoted in the next decade.
With this new reality comes a hint of the artistry of deflection, of lessons about the world we live in couched in fantasy and science fiction. Some of the best work of the 20th century was written under official or unofficial censure that drove metaphor and allusion to the fore of authors’ toolboxes.
Whether tackling political polarization or the cultural conservatism of our present world, authors will have to explore their imaginations to find ways to thread the needle of being legible to readers and obscured to the individuals who would ban books or spark online witch hunts. The challenge is daunting, but it has been climbed before.
Free Time on the Wane
COVID brought the paradox of work-life balance into focus for many Americans, who have long struggled to make time to live their personal lives in the shadow of hustle culture and economic pressure. Work From Home, Do Not Disturb settings, and Mindfulness became not only buzzwords but ways to fight back against encroaching 24-hour availability to employers. But the inflation crisis of the past two years has made this new focus nigh impossible for millions of Americans who are now fighting to keep jobs, picking up a second or third job to keep the bills paid, or battling debt and depression the best they can.
Output per worker has increased over 300% in the past seventy-five years, yet the forty-hour work week remains the same. At the same time, obligations of home, chores, social media, and maintenance have grown, and the purchasing power of a forty-hour-a-week job has not kept up with life expenses. Other factors limit free time as well: on average, parents get between ten and twenty minutes of free time a week—that’s it! Stress about how to spend free time has overtaken actually spending it in some cases, with optimization bleeding from work into play with disastrous consequences. Optimization of leisure time, or accumulation of unique experiences, has become a goal greater than enjoyment of leisure time for many people.
This optimization of free time does have a silver lining though: people who feel like they have accomplished more with their free time feel more content with how they spent their time. Writers can use this to their advantage by acknowledging that writing is a leisure activity, that they have invested time towards a goal that can have tangible results that benefit their life. Without the expectations of needing to provide a living wage or maximize results with AI or other shortcut tools, aspiring authors can see their writing time as well spent, unique experiences that express the human condition through self-expression.
Editors, book cover artists, visits to conferences and other investments towards their goal of publishing are all steps towards a goal that deserves commitment but demands whimsy, that needs imagination but is strengthened by discipline, and that adapts to the world we live in while subverting it.
In 2025, authorship still survives though it is beset on all sides. It means more to the authors who work hard on their own creations than those who take shortcuts to production or creativity. And the readers out there will continue to enjoy books, no matter how they experience them.