I came across a Publishing Weekly article about book sales recently. It appears that the types of books doing well, and keeping the sales numbers more respectable, are the so-called "Romantasy" books, a neologism that compresses "Romance" and "Fantasy". The cliché would be: romance books with magic included. I also see that Amazon have Romantasy colouring books but I hesitate to draw any conclusions from this.

Authors Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros are mentioned as being the current big sellers. I think I first heard the term "romantasy" from Stephen E Andrews on his YouTube channel Outlaw Bookseller and now can't help but see these books. His point was that the "Science Fiction" genre is shrinking and the "Fantasy" one grows, and it is all a matter of basic economics. Publishers go where the money is and their budgets are spent there. It's a shame that "science fiction" and "fantasy" are both dumped into the same bucket.

Maas certainly has a lot of momentum behind her, as you can see on the huge list of "midnight release parties" planned for her next book.

On the right: a photograph from her Instagram page of one of her book signings.

According to the article Boys Need Books by Myke Bartlett in The Critic, the publishing industry is majority female now: readers, authors, agents, editors, marketers. No doubt there are many factors at play here: possibly some over-correction of the previous male domination in years gone by. It's not a bad thing per se except how it might result in a different allocation of resources to the detriment of some market segments. A lot of the marketing is social media now of course: we have things like BookTube and BookTok (and I admit to liking a few YouTube "BookTube" channels). Maas has two million Instagram followers. Whatever she and other "Romantasy" authors are doing, it's working. But looking at the photo from her meetup above: where are the boys?

If boys don't read when young it might be difficult to start later. Maybe video games and screen time are an aspect of this but it's also possible that fewer books appeal to a boy nowadays. I'm sure publishers can do better.

On the left: Rebekah Greenway ("Booknuts") shows off her Midjourney and Photoshop skills in the service of Romantasy book characters. This is a picture from her Instagram page.

Midjouney? From their docs page :

Midjourney is an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species. We are a small self-funded team focused on design, human infrastructure, and AI.

So, there you are. You prompt the computer on what sort of picture you want and the "AI" will generate it and you then iterate on this (I assume). This is called generative AI. I wonder how many of these books are also written by an AI now? That seems a bit of a scary thought to me.