2025 Writing Predictions

A Book Coach Forecast

Welcome to 2025! The year is new, the pages are unwritten, and if there’s anything we know writers are hungry for, it’s a crystal ball, one that tells them, yes, they’ll eventually hit the NYT Bestseller list.

The crystal ball is still in the works, but what we have for you now is a list of writing and publishing predictions for 2025 based on our years as book coaches. We pay careful attention to market trends and note current themes in client projects.

What’s to come in 2025?

1. The rise of published authors who got their start in fan fiction.

   EL James and Meg Cabot wrote fan fiction before getting published, but we’re going to see an even bigger wave of published books by writers who honed their craft on Wattpad and Archive of Our Own. What’s different is we’re seeing published versions of the internet sensations. Manacled by SenLinYu is releasing as Alchemised from Del Rey Books and Julie Soto’s Rose in Chains from Grand Central Publishing is based off her fanfic The Auction.

   What to do about it: If you’re trying to make the leap from fan fiction to your own original novels, focus on building craft skills around character description and development. Readers bring canon details about characters to fan fiction, so many fan fiction writers under develop that skill.

2. Books will continue to shorten.

   Word count is dropping as audio books, ebooks, and novellas grow more popular. Paper prices have increased over recent years, and a long book may not be worth the financial trade off. However, the standard word count for a novel is 80,000, and fantasy and science fiction runs high. Fans of the genre want deep worldbuilding and well crafted characters. It’s a jumble of opposing tracks.

   What to do about it: Nothing. Write what you like. The reader will feel it.