The one book by Maberry I started I didn't like and dropped it shortly after I started, something about zombies in Colorado.
Beyond that, the only Howard Jones I know is the '80s pop star, beyond what I've read in this thread. I'll have to look up Howard Andrew Jones. Sad he is deceased.
Since you can typically only get in the door at the Big 4 and a half if you have an agent and the agent is the one who negotiates with them...I guess this is in theory possible but pretty unlikely given it means they would have to defer their 25%-ish cut. Plus, most books don't come close to earning out their advance, from what I understand. So maybe they never get it. Especially if you're pushing airplane fetish bean flicking or something similar (see above).
Literary agents are like home inspectors of new construction. They're supposed to put you first, but you're typically no higher than third on their priority list: (1) Themselves, (2) Publishers/Builders and (3) author/home buyer. Probably agents have some sort of DEI checklist in front of (3) at this point, dropping the author to (4), even for those who check most of the boxes, but not all of them. e.g. a black female who is a devout Christian, etc.
For no reason I can fathom (a) YouTube started suggesting this guy's videos to me and (b) watching them is weirdly addictive. (He's been dragged before his state professional board at least once and threatened with lawsuits multiple times. Pity I doubt you'd ever see a literary agent equivalent. Would be funny if it happened.)
So, what I'm hearing, is that Amazon's bullshit's kinda fed this pigeon-holing of fantasy into gooner/coomer-slop.
Better coverage and more attention to the classics and works faithful to them is one critical one. There's a reason I hype up GOOD authors as much as shit on bad ones.
How many people here took part in hate reading Manhunt, or crapping on Pat Tomlinson, as opposed to reading Christopher Ruocchio or Howard Andrew Jones, who wrote the best works of fantasy and science fiction I read last year?
Is Baen shitting itself? If so, then I better get vol 2-3 of Hanuvar in HC before the prices spike.
But yeah, I do try to hype up good stuff. I'll try to chit chat about tastes and try to recommend stuff based on it. I'm consistently surprised at all the fine and entertaining genre fic that's been seemingly overlooked and forgotten. James White, Charles Sheffield, and Ben Bova are just some names I got introduced to and now I'm mildly curious as to what their work's like. They don't seem to be A or even B listers in the mid-late 20th century SF writer list.
Ruocchio seems to be everywhere on lists of "rising star" SF writers, along with the guy who wrote the Red Rising books. I've been told that John C. Wright is another name? I've not been into modern SF much. I just know that Neal Stephenson/Cixin Liu/Adrian Tchaikovsky/Alastair Reynolds/JackMcDevitt keep getting brought up as modern SF writers that could be worthwhile.
I like crapping on bad writing but it's so easy to find examples now. I'd rather just try to sperg about how fun L. Sprague de Camp or Robert Sheckley are. It sucks, but there's a lot of vintage genre fiction that's barely getting attention. NESFA has pumped out so many attempts at preserving stuff, but there's a limit. Same with Gollancz's SF Masterworks line (I hear the main mover behind that has left the company).
Who do we have left for preserving classic genre fiction that's not PD? Tor, Daw, and Baen seem to not be doing amazingly. Open Road Media's kept shit in print on Amazon's store, but they're barebones. Then you have the fuckton of smaller presses like Haffner, Phoenix Pick, Caezik, Hippocampus Press, Armchair Fiction, Steeger Books, and Night Shade Press that do things in very limited numbers or via PoD. I mean, hell, print on demand may as well be the big new thing for physical editions.
I mean, the big time names will find a way. Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Dick, Herbert, Vonnegut, le Guin, Tolkein, etc. They'll all wind up being sorta evergreen.
Another is a publishing industry that actually bothers selling to boys again. Both these imitator genres, and to a lesson extent, manga, bank on filling that void.
The thing is, boys fiction gets tossed to the side nowadays because of all the genderspecial nonsense. I've heard that some schools have gotten rid of Treasure Island and Call of the Wild, for various wokescold reasons. Other classic boys fiction's also being tossed. Then you have manga existing, but there's going to come a point where the bad actors have taken over and we wind up with kids getting access to inappropriately adult material.
Trad publishers will drag thier feet on that, so that's up to mid majors and independents. Which comes to the BIGGEST problem.
Amazon.
Not only have the imitators genres built themselves on hacking the Amazon algorithm in a way most publishers and authors only dream of, but Amazon's own rankings and searches are a mess.
Take a firm subgenre like sword & sorcery. Wanna take a guess what books fill the rankings of the subgenre?
Dragonporn Romantasy. You don't actually get a non Romantasy book until #20, with The Two Towers. AKA The Lord of the Rings, godfather of epic fantasy.
In fact, in the top 100, aside from MAYBE John Gwyne, there isn't a single work of what one could recognize as sword-and-sorcery. Romatasy, epic fantasy, Tolkien, Sanderson, LitRPG and Progression Fantasy... but not one work of Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, or even modern authors like Jonathan Maberry, Larry Correia, or Howard Andrew Jones.
And why would Amazon bother fixing it? What are people going to do, buy books elsewhere?
You gotta do word of mouth and all that. God, I try. But it's just sad. The good stuff will always be there, but I've met quite a few intelligent adults that want to get into reading more and don't even know where to go with their interests. They only know that they don't really gel with Amazon's algorithm because it's so fucking centered on romantasy slop.
and, I get it, reading ain't a big hobby any more, which is sad.
It sucks even harder because there's so much garbage being published just because some shitlib wants to push an agenda, and that then turns off younger readers. Surprise! A kid doesn't want to read about weird degenerate stuff. Traditional demographics existed for a reason.
Also, like, there are so fucking many used books that it's staggering. The general reading as a hobby population seems to be growing older and older. I see thrift stores and used bookstores load up fairly often. We don't even have enough resellers running through these because there's just a ton. You can pirate a copy of something like The Book of Earthsea, or rummage through enough used bookstores/thrift stores to find a used copy. The issue is that people just aren't reading as much as they used to.
That being said, maybe a modern non-woke version of the Stratemeyer Syndicate could work. Get ghostwriters to pump out YA mysteries/adventures/etc. by the dozens. For those who don't know, the Syndicate was the group that pumped out all those Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books for decades (along with Tom Swift, Rick Brant, Bobbesy Twins, etc.)
Maybe we just need a bunch of average writers to pump out entertaining stuff for kids. Captain Underpants and etc. Hell, give us Harry Potter but in a sci-fi setting. Just give the kids something that'd kick off.
I swear, normal YA shit nowadays seems to be attuned for millennial women. I'm guilty of being another dude who just doesn't buy new copies of anything. Maybe this mindset's way more common than I think. I don't necessarily like Libraries because I'll be reading and rotating through stuff based on mood.
