From the ebook coal-face, “Through a Glass Darkly: The Trends of 2018 and 2019” among commercial fantasy and science-fiction writers. Trends that interest me…

* “publishing a million words and more a year … is becoming standard practice [for fiction] … some will publish a fantasy pentalogy on a weekly basis.”

So… presumably they’ve got some kind of flash-card system that runs off a coded script that semi-randomises a canned-plot formula, and then the author does an improvised speech-to-text riff to each flash card?

* indie “audiobooks are now the fastest growing segment of the book market” and moving toward “full cast recording”, music etc.

Great! The gold-standard for that is free, Phil Dragash’s magnificent full-cast unabridged reading of LOTR, with FX and the movie music expertly woven in.

* illustrated episodic “Web novels”.

Cool, I’ve not seen any… but apparently they’re huge in China and I’ll keep a look out for English ones. Although anything episodic (other than podcasts) is a huge turn off these days. Give me a complete finished story.

* apparently there’s a growing “American market for giant robot battlefields and taut political manoeuvrings”.

Good old fashioned knights-in-armour, as mecha-tech, by the sound of it. Not my thing, and del Toro got to the ‘giant mechas vs. Lovecraftian-looking monsters’ thing several years ago, and possibly there’s something similar going on in current Mythos fiction that I don’t know about. But… interesting for being yet another way to twist the stock medieval warfare adventure into a future-tech setting. Presumably there must be public domain novels from the 1920s, where the plots and descriptions can be re-purposed to become that type of science-fiction?