Okay that's dramatic, but for real what is the point of giving everything I have at trying to craft excellent prose, when it is books like November 9 and milk and honey that get picked up and sell millions?
What I want to write is unrelenting introspectives, but obviously what sells is steamy, problematic romances. (I'm not saying I'm a great writer capable of that, but it's what I'll keep trying to write regardless)
I never would, but I'm very aware that it would be much more marketable to just turn off my brain and write a 200 page werewolf f*ck-fiction book and cash in, and the thought weighs heavy on me.
anyways ima move on and keep writing my messy historical, need anything from the store while I'm gone?
This sounds like a skill issue to me... or maybe a selection bias. If you look around at the series that are lauded and which actually make it big, well... yeah, they are a little less deep than stuff that was written in the 80s, but they are still incredibly good books on a technical level.
The most recently written of such incredible quality books would be Ascendance of a Bookworm in 2019. Before that, we had the golden age of Isekai in 2011-2012 when we had the "big 5" released in Japan. (Overlord, Shield Hero, Re:Zero, Kono-Suba, and Mushoku Tensei). At around the same time, we had Mother of Learning and WORM releasing for Western audiences.
This is strictly looking at webnovel and litenovel spaces. I believe The Hunger Games also came out somewhere around this period as well, and there are a good few others.
So, yeah. I just think this is a bad take here all around. It is still works that are written at a very high technical level that achieve the most success, it is just that achieving that level requires a LOT of skill. Like, you have to be the writing equivalent of a professional in a sports league. Like, the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1% good, and you also need luck on top of that. But, if the freaking stars align, it is still technical writing skill that wins over steamy romance every single time.
EDIT: Steamy romance is just a cheap tool by which a sub-par writer can see some mild success if they don't want to put in the insane effort to write one of these gems and then cross their fingers the dice turn up in their favor.
EDIT 2: And, if you will look at the time-line, we see an influx of super high-quality gems in the writing world about once every 5 years, and they come in clusters. Right now, we are 5 years out from Ascendance of a Bookworm. We are due in for the next big one. In fact, it's probably already been released somewhere. It's just a matter of an audience finding it now.
