The fix is to get people reading fiction again. The market’s tiny because very little time is spent reading fiction now.
There used to be a market for writing that could supply some kind of a decent-ish living to quite a few authors, not just a handful of super-stars. That world is gone and it’s not coming back. TV killed it, and smartphones carved up the body and buried it in several unmarked graves at crossroads. Not even the dark arts can bring it back now. It’s over.
The shrinking market is also why YA and YA-like books have taken over, even for adults. You can’t afford to exclude much of the market, so the “reading level” on mass market fiction for adults has been slipping downward fast for the last couple decades. Readers willing to put in effort are too small a market for commercial success. Rarely, maybe, but not like things used to be.
It's a terrifying and observable phenomena in the American Market in particular, but I still hold out some hope from the parasitic nature of premium-streaming services ultimately needing decent narrative foundations.
Hilary Mantel's historical fiction being picked up is a good example of this in recent times in Western Europe. Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation, was a surprise hit given its somewhat dry subject matter as a fictionalised biography documenting the life of Thomas Cromwell.
There used to be a market for writing that could supply some kind of a decent-ish living to quite a few authors, not just a handful of super-stars. That world is gone and it’s not coming back. TV killed it, and smartphones carved up the body and buried it in several unmarked graves at crossroads. Not even the dark arts can bring it back now. It’s over.
The shrinking market is also why YA and YA-like books have taken over, even for adults. You can’t afford to exclude much of the market, so the “reading level” on mass market fiction for adults has been slipping downward fast for the last couple decades. Readers willing to put in effort are too small a market for commercial success. Rarely, maybe, but not like things used to be.