By Epic Fantasy Novels
There’s a quiet civil war happening in fantasy, and most people haven’t noticed. Walk into any bookstore and look at the shelves labeled “Fantasy.” What you’ll find — overwhelmingly — is romantic fantasy. Beautifully designed covers featuring embracing couples, flowing gowns, and smoldering gazes. Sarah J. Maas. Rebecca Yarros. A Court of Thorns and Roses. Fourth Wing.
Romantasy hit $610 million in sales in 2024. One in four hardcover fiction bestsellers on the New York Times list was romantasy. That’s staggering commercial success, and nobody should begrudge the readers who love these books. They found something that speaks to them, and the market responded.
But here’s the question nobody’s asking: Where did the other half of fantasy go?
The Numbers Tell a Story
In the golden age of science fiction magazines — the 1940s through the 1970s — the readership was 65-95% male. Fantasy grew out of those same pulp roots, and for decades, the core audience was predominantly men and boys who wanted adventure, danger, and worlds to explore.
By 2018, a SAGE Open academic study found that 55% of SFF survey respondents were female. The audience had essentially inverted.
Was this because women discovered fantasy? Partly. Was it because men stopped reading? Also partly. The National Endowment for the Arts reports that men’s fiction-reading rate dropped from 35.1% in 2012 to 27.7% in 2022 — the lowest rate since they started measuring. Only about 1 in 4 American men read a novel or short story that year.
Women now make up approximately 80% of worldwide fiction purchases. And the publishing industry — 74% female overall, 84% female in editorial departments, 92% female in publicity — naturally produces and promotes books that resonate with its workforce.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a feedback loop. Female editors acquire books that appeal to female readers. Female marketing teams promote them to female audiences on female-dominated platforms like BookTok (which drove 59 million book sales in 2024). Male readers see less of what they want, buy fewer books, and the industry concludes there’s no male market. So they publish even less for men.
The cycle continues.
What Male Readers Want
Research from reader surveys, Reddit communities (r/Fantasy, r/ProgressionFantasy), and Goodreads data paints a consistent picture of what male fantasy readers gravitate toward:
Adventure and action. Battles, quests, heists, exploration. Stories that move because characters do things — fight, scheme, explore, risk everything.
Competence-based heroes. Characters who earn their power through skill, training, grit, and intelligence. The “zero to hero” arc where strength is built, not bestowed. This is why progression fantasy exploded — readers want to see the work.
Immersive worldbuilding. Intricate magic systems, detailed lore, fully realized secondary worlds with their own histories and cultures. Not worlds that exist to service a romance plot, but worlds that feel real enough to get lost in.
Plot over processing. Complex, unpredictable stories that prioritize narrative momentum. Not stories where the hero pauses the quest for three chapters of emotional introspection.
Stakes and danger. Real consequences. Characters who can fail, get hurt, or die. Victories that cost something.
Humor and irreverence. The massive success of Dungeon Crawler Carl — over 6 million copies sold — shows the appetite for dark humor mixed with adventure.
What Female Readers Want
The romantasy boom tells its own story. What’s driving those $610 million in sales?
Emotional depth and romantic tension. Complex relationships, slow burns, the push-pull of attraction. Fantasy as a backdrop for intense emotional and romantic storytelling.
Character interiority. Deep access to characters’ inner lives, feelings, and emotional processing. Understanding why characters feel what they feel.
Found family and relationship dynamics. Chosen bonds, loyalty tested, groups of characters whose relationships are as important as the plot.
Fantasy settings that heighten emotional stakes. Magic, fated mates, immortal lovers, political intrigue that intersects with romance — the fantasy elements amplify the emotional experience.
Empowered female protagonists. Characters who are powerful, complex, and central to the story — not love interests or rewards for male heroes.
Neither Is Wrong. Both Deserve Space.
Here’s the thing: neither of these is “real fantasy” and the other fake. They’re different traditions within an enormous genre, and they appeal to different readers for different reasons.
Tolkien and Howard didn’t write romance. Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser weren’t processing their feelings about each other. Moorcock’s Elric wasn’t looking for his soulmate — he was trying to survive a cursed sword that ate everyone he loved. That tradition — adventure, danger, worlds that feel real and stakes that matter — was the backbone of fantasy for decades.
But romance has been part of fantasy for just as long. Marion Zimmer Bradley was writing romantic fantasy in the 1960s. Tanith Lee wove eroticism into dark fantasy in the 1970s. Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels had strong romantic elements alongside their dragon-riding adventure. The romance tradition in fantasy is not new — it just became commercially dominant.
The problem isn’t that romantasy exists. The problem is that it’s eating the shelf space that adventure fantasy used to occupy. When publishers chase the next Sarah J. Maas, they stop acquiring the next David Gemmell. When BookTok drives 59 million book sales and BookTok is overwhelmingly female, the books that get visibility are the books that appeal to female readers.
Male readers didn’t stop wanting stories. They went somewhere else.
Where the Men Went
The male fantasy reader didn’t vanish. He migrated.
Royal Road — a web fiction platform with 50 million monthly visits — is 70% male. It’s the mirror image of BookTok. The most popular genres? LitRPG, progression fantasy, and adventure fantasy with hard magic systems.
Manga — the U.S. manga market hit $1.06 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $3.7 billion by 2030. Males account for the largest revenue share, drawn by action-oriented narratives and male protagonists earning power through effort.
Video games — men spend 239% more time gaming than reading. Fantasy RPGs like Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, and The Witcher deliver exactly what male readers want: immersive worlds, combat, progression, and agency.
Audiobooks — men make up 55-57% of audiobook listeners. For LitRPG specifically, 80% of revenue comes from audiobooks. Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl hit #2 on the New York Times Audio Fiction list.
Self-published fantasy on Kindle — over 50% of Kindle’s Top 400 books in 2023 were by indie authors, up 53% from the previous year. The indie market is serving readers that traditional publishing abandoned.
The audience exists. It spends money. It just doesn’t shop where traditional publishers are selling.
The Author’s Gender Doesn’t Matter. The Story Does.
Here’s where we need to be crystal clear: this has nothing to do with who writes the books.
C.L. Moore created sword and sorcery’s first female protagonist — Jirel of Joiry — in 1934 and wrote adventure fiction that thrilled male readers for decades. Leigh Brackett’s adventure tales were so gripping that Howard Hawks hired “this guy Brackett” to help write The Big Sleep, not realizing she was a woman. She later drafted The Empire Strikes Back. Margaret Weis co-created Dragonlance — one of the most beloved fantasy series among male readers in history. Andre Norton was named Grand Master by the SFWA. Lois McMaster Bujold published adventure sci-fi through Baen Books.
These women wrote stories that happened to appeal powerfully to male readers — because they wrote adventure, danger, wit, and wonder. They didn’t write “for men” or “for women.” They wrote great stories, and the audience found them.
The reverse is equally true. Male authors can and do write romance-heavy fantasy. The question is never “who wrote this?” It’s “what kind of story is this?”
What We Need
We don’t need less romantasy. The readers who love it should have exactly as much of it as they want.
What we need is for adventure-driven fantasy — the kind built by Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, Vance, Weis, Brackett, Gemmell, Jordan, Salvatore, and Abercrombie — to have its own space. Its own shelf. Its own community. Its own visibility.
Because right now, if you’re a reader who wants swords and sorcery, epic quests, morally grey heroes, dangerous worlds, and stories that grab you by the throat — you have to work harder than ever to find them. The books exist. The indie authors are writing them. The small presses are publishing them. The tradition is alive.
It just needs someone to point you toward it.
That’s what we’re here for.
