Circana, the analytics firm formerly known as NPD BookScan, reports that romantasy sales reached $610 million in 2024, up from $454 million in 2023, a rise of roughly 34% in a single year. Unit sales in the category nearly doubled in the first five months of 2024 compared to the same period the year before, at a time when print book sales overall were close to flat.
Cozy fantasy has followed a smaller version of the same curve, built less by publisher marketing plans than by readers finding books on BookTok well before most houses built a category around them. Both subgenres share a lineage worth noticing for anyone positioning a fantasy project right now: neither broke out because a major publisher identified white space and moved to fill it. Both scaled because readers found something they wanted and kept talking about it until the sales data made the trend impossible to ignore.
That sequence, readers first, industry recognition second, is the actual playbook indie epic fantasy is working from, too, whether or not it gets framed that way. Word of mouth has always worked this way. What has changed is visibility: the numbers are now large enough to make trade press, which means a subgenre, or a single book, can go from niche to real money in a year without a major publisher ever calling it first.
The strategic question this raises for epic fantasy specifically: the genre has spent recent years hearing that its appetite for scale, multi-book commitments, and slow-building cosmology is a liability against faster, shorter trends like romantasy and cozy fantasy. The Circana data does not support treating that as a fixed disadvantage. It supports treating discovery mechanics as the actual variable. Romantasy and cozy fantasy did not win because they were smaller. They won because readers who wanted something specific kept finding it through channels no publisher controlled, and kept telling other readers.
None of this guarantees any individual book's outcome, and Circana itself has flagged that romantasy may be approaching a saturation point. But the mechanism that built these categories, readers doing the discovery and the vouching before an industry decides something is real, is available to any indie epic fantasy project willing to build for it directly rather than waiting for a marketing calendar to catch up.
Map's Edge Media is building The Hearthlight Cycle's audience on that same mechanism: readers first, before anyone else decides the market is ready.