The Romantasy Juggernaut
The sixth A Court of Thorns and Roses book went on sale on 27 October, and a seventh follows on 12 January 2027. For the next ten weeks, much of fantasy's discovery traffic, from bookstore tables to recommendation feeds, will point at one series. No first-week sales figure has been published yet, but the scale is not in doubt: one trade report attributed a 10 percent fall in Bloomsbury's sales for the 2025 to 2026 fiscal year to the simple absence of a new Maas book.
That is the loud half of the market. The quieter half is worth more attention from anyone writing epic fantasy that is not romance-led.
The Quiet Bestsellers: Lore over Romance
Two debuts published this year have held bestseller status on both sides of the Atlantic without leaning on that lane. The Poet Empress by Shen Tao (Tor in the US, Gollancz in the UK) is a standalone about court politics and a magic system built on poetry. Its publishers list it as a USA Today bestseller and an instant Sunday Times bestseller, and it was a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick. The Book of Fallen Leaves by A. S. Tamaki (Orbit) retells the Tale of the Heike, a samurai epic some 900 years old, as the opening of the Autumn Empire series. Orbit markets it as a number-one Sunday Times bestseller, and its paperback arrived in October.
What the two books share is more useful than either one alone. Both are rooted in a specific non-European source tradition rather than a generic medieval map. Both are praised in trade reviews for prose first: Publishers Weekly described Tao's prose as having "poetic precision." Both are political and ensemble-minded rather than built around a single romance arc. None of that is a formula, but it is a pattern a large publisher has now rewarded twice in one year.
Publishers appear to be reading it the same way. Bloomsbury, the house most dependent on Maas, launched a dedicated speculative imprint, Bloomsbury Archer, in 2025 with a stated plan of roughly a dozen books a year across fantasy, science fiction, myth retellings and alternate history. Its announced 2027 acquisitions are new voices rather than romantasy sequels. A publisher hedging against its biggest author's release gaps is a signal about where it expects the next growth to come from.
What This Means for Indie Publishers
For an indie publisher, the practical read is about contrast. In a winter when feeds will be saturated with one series, a quieter, lore-heavy book is not competing for the same reader on the same day. It is being found by the reader who scrolled past.
Map's Edge Media publishes for that reader, and we will keep tracking where they are being found.
