First off, Happy New Year.

Second, it's becoming apparent to me that SFF has hit a crossroads. I've said for years there's no money in genre fiction anymore and if you want coin you're better off going into screenwriting, but I think it's becoming more and more apparent. The disconnect between what is popular and what is pushed is huge. It seems to me that publishers in SFF don't push what they think will be huge, but what they want to be huge. It isn't working.

Go on the Fantasy subreddit and the same names come up time and time again: Martin, Hobb, LeGuin, Pratchett, Sanderson, Tolkien and a few others. These aren't the people currently winning Hugos and Nebulas. Someone like NK Jemisin only ever gets namechecked for Hugo noms or some article she's written in the NY Times. In other words, Tor and Orbit are trying to construct an idea of who is big in Fantasyland, but a cursory glance shows that people at large aren't buying it.

It's like there's (suitingly) two worlds in SFF: fantasy and reality. The Fantasy being constructed by Tor through rigging the Hugos so the people they want to be stars win it, and the Reality of the authors that people are actually buying and reading. It can't - and won't - last.