Rebecca Yarros's dragon-rider fantasy romance Empyrean series has now sold over 12 million copies across its three books. Its third instalment, Onyx Storm, sold 2.7 million copies in a single week on release in January 2025, making it the fastest-selling adult novel in two decades. The series now has an Amazon TV adaptation greenlit and fans are super excited. By any measure, Fourth Wing is one of the great publishing phenomena of recent memory. Brandon Sanderson, one of the most prolific and well-known authors in the field, recently explained exactly why it happened and why, maddeningly, he should have seen it coming.
During a conversation with fellow fantasy author Joe Abercrombie at a recent Waterstones event in London, Sanderson mentioned the popularity of recent works in fantasy including Fourth Wing. Speaking about the timing and the publishing industry's collective blind spots, he laid out his theory. He calls it the 20-year nostalgia cycle, the idea that the readers who grew up obsessing over something as children eventually age into the market for a more grown-up version of that same thing.
In the early 2000s, dragons were everywhere. Tolkien's eagles and battle sequences thundered across cinema screens in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and How to Train Your Dragon captured a generation of younger viewers not long after. Those readers are now adults, and they were, it turns out, ready for dragons again (just with considerably more heat).
"Fourth Wing hit right at the 20-year nostalgia cycle for those millennials that had grown up with those," Sanderson told Abercrombie. "Now, here's a mature book about fantasy dragon riders for them."
Sanderson also shared that he had spotted some of these trends before the market caught up. For instance, he credited himself in the same conversation with being early to the fantasy-heist mashup saying, "I feel like I was the first one to get on the hey, what if we take fantasy and mash it with a heist," as well as presaging the cozy fantasy wave with his own Tress of the Emerald Sea.
Fourth Wing, though, completely passed him by. He grouped it alongside the other great trends he missed including the mashing of YA fiction with dystopia that produced The Hunger Games.Â
"Growing up reading those 60s and 70s dystopian, adding a love triangle to that, really felt like oh that's the most obvious thing in the world, it's a head smacker right, like we all should have seen that," Sanderson said.
The broader point Sanderson made was about predicting these trends and how it has become very difficult getting those right even for absolute professionals. He recalled a panel of editors at the World Fantasy Convention in 2001 or 2002, all of them confident authorities on where the genre was heading. One of them, he remembered, told the room: "I'm not 100% sure, but I can tell you where it won't go. Please stop sending me vampire books." Twilight, of course, arrived right after.
What Sanderson was less sanguine about was the industry's ability to keep producing the next wave of voices to catch those cycles. That's where the conversation turned to the harsher reality of getting published in the current market.
"I'm not worried about us," he said. "I'm worried about the next generation…. Like the biggest breakout we've had recently in fantasy was Matt Dinniman with Dungeon Crawler Carl. He started publishing in like...2002, right? Like yeah, he broke out after publishing for 30 years. Fourth Wing broke out big, but [Rebecca Yarros] was already established as a writer, too. We are not seeing the new young kids break out quite as often as we used to. And that worries me."
The scattering of monoculture, as he put it, and readers' retreat to familiar names alongside lack of publisher appetite for nurturing debuts are things he sees as a threat to the genre's future. In that context, he shared the story of how a former student whose debut sold 20,000 copies was still dropped by her publisher. Sanderson recalled he had sold 10,000 copies on his own first book and been signed for two more. The bar, he noted, has risen dramatically, and not in a good way.
Add us as a preferred source on Google