Is this just fantasy?

Placing your book in the right genre is getting harder and harder. More of that mighty algorithm, in which everything from YouTube recommendations on up is trying desperately to narrow down what specific niche it is that you like best so it can feed you nothing but that.

Being outside of popular genres harms your exposure and thus your sales. Falling outside of recognized genres...is the kiss of death.

Oh, guess what's leading right now? Fantasy. Romantasy may or may not be peaking. Cozy Fantasy might have managed to murder itself through over-tailoring. Urban Fantasy is heading in the direction of Steampunk, which still has life every now and then but the chatter on BookTok et al will only consider it if approached with ironic intent.

SF is not doing well at all. Nor is historical (outside of historical romance, which despite surging and ebbing through trends, seems likely to survive forever).

And YA dystopia? The punchline (my personal theory is that audience went off into k-drama to get the hit they were after). In any case, any publishing boom there could be fueled for decades on the backlog of manuscripts they've already seen.

There are readers hungering for something new, or at least something they aren't being offered enough of. There are strong fans of historical fiction. The problem is, this market is small enough in comparison to the big movers it can't really survive in isolation. It needs to be shared with the larger audience to gain enough additional sales in the "I don't usually read this sort of thing but..." that it makes back investment.

And that's not something the algorithm supports. Commodification of this sort leads to homogenization. Nobody wants to make the one cereal without sugar, the one orange juice with pulp. They want to be the same burger, the same hammer, but a few bucks cheaper than the other guy.

Anyhow. Writing is potentially less of a career than it has ever been. The boom of self-publishing is largely over as there is a glut of product and a buyer's market. (Most of the big successes were aggressive self-marketers, but even that has narrowed down to a very specific and rare set of skills -- not a route open to everyone.)

Oh, yeah. None of the projects on my table are fantasy. And one of them is arguably steampunk.