Why SFF imprints are surfing the self-publishing wave
While indie authors moving to a traditional set-up is not new, the trend has been supercharged by the fantasy market.
‘The world is changed,” intones Galadriel in the opening scene of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring. Galadriel may have been referring to Middle-earth, but the line is a fitting epithet for the changes occurring in publishing.
It is no secret that publishers are mining the independent author, aka self-publishing spaces, and nowhere is this more evident than in Science Fiction & Fantasy (SFF), particularly in the final “F” – fantasy and its saucy subgenre, romantasy. It is a direct response to reader demand. “Readers,” says Bella Pagan, publisher at Tor, “are becoming the new gatekeepers”.
The reason why fantasy and romantasy are proving fertile ground for indie authors moving to traditional publishing lies in the fanbase. “The readership for romantasy and romance is absolutely thriving, with readers wanting more books in more formats and territories than ever before,” says Molly Powell, publishing director at Hodderscape. “Voracious” is the adjective used by both HarperVoyager and HarperMagpie’s editorial director, Charlotte Trumble, and Arcadia’s publisher, Anne Perry, to describe the reading habits of this fanbase. The latter continues: “Think 50, 100, 200 books read a year. The fact is, traditional publishing can’t always keep up with the appetite of this audience in these areas, so they turn to self-publishing.”
Crucially, the readers will follow indie authors into traditional publishing. Trumble explains: “Readers in this area are much more willing to come along with an author for a full series… If they discover something they love self-published on Kindle Unlimited, which then becomes available as a pretty special edition hardback, they’re likely to buy across multiple formats.”
Successful independent authors possess solid literary and business acumen. “[They] are able to find their readers directly, engage with them through social and digital media and write exactly the books that they want to read,” says Powell. “They seem to know the readers and what they want so well,” adds Ciara Finan, literary agent at Curtis Brown. Finan represents a number of authors in this traditional/self-published crossover space including RM Gray and AT Emerald. Finan adds that BookTok also gives indie authors the opportunity to “actively engage with people with the same interest”.
Social media, particularly BookTok and its Meta cousin Bookstagram, allows the fan communities that are deeply embedded in SFF to share recommendations instantaneously. Perry says: “If someone finds a book that is self-published on Amazon and falls in love with it, they can share that love immediately with however many people follow them and it can balloon from there.” Indie authors do not rely on traditional review spaces or critics, but instead the passion from their readers. What the videos, starred ratings and written reviews on Goodreads and Amazon amount to is proof of concept, says Perry, a point echoed by Alexa Allen-Batifoulier, senior commissioning editor at Del Rey.
“The only difference between an indie author and [an unpublished submission] is that the book has already been put on Amazon and has proven to sell well,” says Matt Holland, founder of The Broken Binding, an online, independent SFF bookshop and subscription box company. “That’s why it’s been picked by an agent and then it’s been sold to a publisher.”
For Finan, an indie author’s track record helps enormously. When scouting for talent, the agent used to consult Amazon’s – now removed – “movers-and-shakers list where you could quite easily see if an author had gone from say 5,000th in the Kindle charts to the top 200. That would indicate quite a healthy view to growth”. Now, she cross-references Amazon’s star-ratings with the review website, Goodreads. “The numbers, I think, are very indicative of what’s going to make it through an acquisitions meeting,” she says.
Where once [an editor] couldn’t convince the acquisitions meeting that there’s a market for minotaur romances, now they can point to a viral video with a million views – Anne Perry
Recent hits show traditional publishers are tracking these numbers. Sarah A Parker’s debut When the Moon Hatched was a “viral sensation” before being signed by HarperVoyager, according to The Bookseller’s rights announcement. Meanwhile, Alexandria Warwick’s The Four Winds series, now published by Simon & Schuster, was spotted after the quartet “gained considerable momentum on TikTok”. It is a savvy method of acquisition. The stories have been tried and tested before moving to the traditional market, therefore minimising financial risk. Trumble says: “It makes the process a bit more democratic; instead of just looking for what we think the fantasy audience wants, we can actively publish things we know they like and are currently engaging with… If readers are going feral for something, it’s likely we [as fans] will too.”
Acquiring material that is essentially ready to go means the acquiring publisher “doesn’t have to wait for someone to write it, they can just publish it quickly”, says Holland. Indie authors have “forced publishing to try and speed up its processes”, agrees Finan. By moving quickly, the publisher can capitalise on what is in vogue. Dire Bound, the first in a trilogy acquired from indie author Sable Sorensen by the Transworld and FairyLoot partnership, Wayward TxF, was published three months after the deal was announced “due to reader demand”.
Proof of concept – although proof of sales might be a better descriptor – has changed the SFF landscape. “I think traditional publishing was slower to embrace the breadth of representation and emotional intensity readers were clearly craving,” notes Allen-Batifoulier. “Indie authors stepped into that space and built passionate, highly engaged communities around stories that felt fresh and unapologetically romantic.”
Holland echoes the point: “We’ve always supported indies because there’s definitely an appetite for stuff that’s not being published in the traditional realm.” Now, reams of digital data mean there are fewer barriers to signing books that publishing houses would have balked at historically. Prudishness has been sacrificed at the altar of fandom. Perry says: “Where once [an editor] couldn’t convince the acquisitions meeting that there’s a market for minotaur romances, now they can point to a viral video with a million views, watch the book tick up through Kindle rankings day after day and watch ratings and reviews amass on Amazon and Goodreads, and be able to show that yes, there is an audience for this book.”
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Swirling debates around anti-intellectualism and the decline of literary fluency arise when considering the new indie-trad cohort. There seems to be a lingering stigma targeting not only the idea of self-publication, but also one of its most fruitful genres, romantasy. In The Bookseller’s interview with Carissa Broadbent for this very same focus last year, she said: “When you’re in self-publishing there is a huge proportion of people who are so comfortable being rude to your face because they see you as not a ‘real’ author… Now I get it for being a romantasy author.”
The origins of this critique, for Powell, are because some “have perhaps previously held doubts because there was an assumed idea that for someone to independently publish, it meant they weren’t good enough for traditional publishing. But this is not the case at all”.
Trumble adds: “I think it comes partly from the classic snobbery around the types of genres that do particularly well in this space: commercial romantasy and romance, which appeal to a younger, female audience. However, there is more to it than that: things like the success of [literary role-playing] show that it’s anything that could be considered more ‘niche’ that traditionally publishers haven’t historically provided.”
For Pagan, “any snobbery against self-published works is evaporating – certainly in the fantasy and romantasy arenas. Today’s publishing professionals recognise authors might choose indie first as a business strategy, not as a last resort.”
Many indie authors such as Broadbent and epic fantasy author Ryan Cahill, who signed with The Broken Binding Press, retain their e-book rights. Similarly, romantasy author Elise Kova kept the e-book rights when her self-published Married to Magic series sold to Orion Fiction. The “conversation is no longer indie versus traditional publishing”, says Allen-Batifoulier, “but how to combine the strengths of each to scale a career globally”. Publishing is now “friendly to a hybrid model”, adds Pagan. “An author can maintain an indie spirit while utilising traditional publishing tools to amplify their voice.”
SFF indie-to-traditional stars
Olivie Blake (pictured)
The American published The Atlas Six via Kindle Direct Publishing in 2020, with the fantasy novel
becoming an almost instant viral hit. The book was
won in a seven-publisher auction by Tor two
years later, and Pan Mac has now published 11 of her books.
TCM value: £3.9m
SenLinYu
The biggest debut of 2025, SenLinYu’s Alchemised (PMJ), was a reimagined version of Manacled, the “Dramione” (Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger fan-fiction) story that has been downloaded more than 20 million times from the Archive of Our Own website.
TCM value: £2.2m
Sarah A Parker
The Kiwi’s first self-published romantasy, To Bleed a Crystal Bloom, was an instant Kindle sensation in 2021; she hit huge mainstream success with When the Moon Hatched (HarperVoyager).
TCM value: £2.2m
TJ Klune
The Oregon-born author self-published much of his early work under his own BOATK Books imprint. His UK breakout was in 2021 with The House in the Cerulean Sea (Tor).
TCM value: £1.9m
