Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

You know vampires were the biggest thing awhile ago? What's the current popular thing in fantasy?
I'm curious

I've seen a lot of dragons. Other than that, other authors and myself included have made up their own flora and fauna.

I've been seeing shifters a lot in the ARCs up at Netgalley. Mostly bears and felines (not wolves, though).

Talked to the family literary agent - she said in the YA category, historical is a very hard sell, anything with a good fantasy element in YA or MG is a plus. Memoirs are a very tough sell right now.

Fairy-tales are doing well. Beauty and the Beast retellings did great after the live redo from Disney, for example.
You'll notice a consistent trend for dystopian. But so help me, if this is your route, please don't use current stuff. (I just read a dystopian where a girl wears skinny jeans and I thought, how awful that in the future we all have to keep wearing those. Now yoga pants. I can see that working well in the future.)
I find movies tend to tell you what's working. For example, superheroes...thank you Marvel...

Strict, definitive lines once clearly segregated various genres into easily detected segments. Public libraries easily created separate, designated sections for each.

For some time now, those strict, definitive lines have been gradually blended and redefined so that many avid readers now choose books, not by traditional genre labels, but by the author's narrative, story line development, plotting, and sub-plotting writing skills. For most, it is the entertainment value, not setting or time period that determines their reading choices.

I agree young adult and middle grade seems to be the popular genres now. But Jim I do agree, the boundaries blur, particularly with these genres where a young adult could be a romance, a thriller, a horror etc

Zombies, Young Adult, and Fantasy.

Zombies have become big ever since The Walking Dead and people are either reading, tuning in or writing their own works of zombie fiction.

Young Adult novels are another big genre right now. It's not so much a demand for them but simply that authors know there's an audience. People these days tend to eat up YA novels.

Fantasy novels have also picked up quite a bit. Game of Thrones has made authors think they can write the next big fantasy novel and readers can't seem to get enough so fantasy has seen a spike in being the latest "it" genre.