Okay, let’s make some completely unfounded predictions for 2023 relating to books and publishing! Some of these are grounded in actual trends and some of them are just thoughts that crossed my mind.

1. Dark academia is going to become less popular. The traditional publishers will milk the genre for everything it’s worth, but Booktube/TikTok will move on. I think that this is going to follow the other genre crazes like vampires and dystopian. There’s going to be an insane crush of sub-par books capitalizing on the (old) hype and the fans that are trying to maintain the glory days, but I think we got our pinnacle pieces already, specifically Babel by RF Kuang.

2. Cozy fantasy will be the new “it” genre. It’s been rising for the last two years, but I think it’s officially broken through to mainstream. I do, however, think that this year will the peak of the genre and next year it’s going to phase out the way. I’ll be interested to see what comes out this year, though, and if it spawns any related genre spin-offs.

3. There will be a rising new genre to replace cozy fantasy in the next two years. I also predict it’s going to come from TikTok, because of course it is. I’m leaning towards it being a light, fluffy genre as contrast to the modern economic and political situation. Taking a complete guess, I am going to predict that it’ll also be travel or international related, sort of aspirational for all of us post-pandemic people who are either traveling for the first time in years or too poor to travel, even when everything opens back up.
   
   I could also see it related to school struggles, since so many people had to drop out of school during lockdown, are graduating virtually, etc. All of the new collective experiences of studying through the pandemic are experiences ripe for writing about.

4. Special edition books will become less sought after. I think this will be in response to a few things—partially because it’s so oversaturated in the market, in part as people remember the over-consumerism of it, and in part because the publishers have already escalated it to such an insane degree.
   
   In response, I’m guessing we’ll get one (or all) of three reactions: 1. Super stripped back cover art/one-color covers will be the new aesthetic. 2. BookTubers (and BookTokers, not that I’d know) will go completely in the opposite direction and embrace a “no book” aesthetics/not showing the books they own in the backgrounds. And/or 3. Customized books will replace special editions as the next craze, because special editions will be too “easily obtained”/common and individual customizations will be the new way to stand out,

6. There will finally be a significant update to Goodreads and it will not be good. I have no basis for this, since Goodreads has not had a significant website update in… ever, as far as I know… but something in my bones is telling me that Amazon will remember that they own that weird little social media/book cataloguing site and a bunch of people who don’t read will invest some time and effort into “making it even better” and we will hate it.

7. AI art and AI audiobooks will continue to be a hot, angry topic without any nuance and in aggressive opposition to the idea of product and industry obsolescence. It’s not a moral discussion, it’s an economic one—if the service can be done faster and cheaper, then why would it not be? See now-obsolete technologies like the VHS.
   
   Is that a brutal and unpleasant truth? Yes. I will be interested to see how the market responds—there’s an argument to be made for very loud TikTokers smearing books that lack credited cover artists—but we’ll see. To be honest, I’m not even sure TikTok has caught wind of this drama yet, this might still only exist amongst the older- to middle-Millennials on YouTube.