For Week Ending July 10, 2026

This week, Amazon just expanded KDP’s 70% royalty all the way to $12.99, and what that means for box sets. The book piracy war exploded across social media and indie authors threw down hard. An author found an AI-narrated version of her book on Spotify, and she didn’t put it there. The EU passed private message surveillance despite a majority voting against it. Xbox cut 3,200 jobs because of terrible storytelling. And the Summer K-lytics report reveals Fantasy pulling $4.5 million a month while 179,000 new titles flood the genre. It’s all here, let’s update.

Jonathan: Thomas and his wife welcomed a new baby this past week, born on the morning of July 5th, so he is taking time off to be with his family. Bryan Canter is filling in for him. Bryan is a retired Army officer, book and audiobook publishing consultant, Amazon ads account manager, and historical fiction author, who lives full-time in a motorhome with his beautiful bride, Dawn.

I’m an enlisted Marine and Bryan is a retired Army officer, so we’re going to take some shots at each other. It’s all friendly. Kind of.

Bryan: I thought I was going to get to be the grumpy guy today, but they put me in for the wise sage, and I am definitely not the wise sage guy. You’re going to miss Thomas.

Publishing News

The Pirates Have Struck Again!

The short version is that the fight exploded after a major piracy site experienced downtime (or appeared to be under legal pressure), causing a wave of readers on X, Threads, Instagram, and other social media to openly defend book piracy. Authors, especially indie authors, pushed back hard, turning it into one of the biggest publishing arguments of the past week. (Instagram)

Phase 1: “Piracy isn’t hurting anyone”

The pro-piracy crowd argued that books are too expensive, that libraries have long waitlists, that some books aren’t available in certain countries, that large publishers make plenty of money, that piracy helps readers discover authors they’ll later support, and that information and art should be freely accessible. Many also framed piracy as a response to economic hardship rather than a moral issue. (Threads)

Phase 2: Authors joined the conversation

Then authors, particularly independent authors, started responding. Their main points were that most authors are not wealthy, that the average novelist earns very little, that pirated copies generate zero royalties, that piracy disproportionately hurts indie authors because every sale matters, that discovery doesn’t reliably convert into purchases, and that readers who truly can’t afford books already have legitimate options such as libraries, Kindle Unlimited, sales, giveaways, ARC programs, and free promotions.

A recurring sentiment was: “You’re not stealing from Penguin Random House. You’re stealing from someone trying to pay their mortgage.” That message gained significant traction. (Threads)

Phase 3: The moral argument

The discussion shifted away from legality toward ethics. The anti-piracy side generally argued that copyright is what allows authors to keep writing, that piracy removes the author’s choice, and that if you truly cannot afford a book, that’s understandable, but it doesn’t create a right to copy it without permission.

Meanwhile, many pro-piracy advocates argued that digital copies aren’t “real theft” because nothing physical disappears, that copyright law favors corporations, and that access to culture should outweigh ownership rights. The debate quickly became philosophical rather than practical. (Threads)

Phase 4: Indie authors changed the tone

One notable aspect was how many self-published authors entered the discussion. Unlike debates centered on major publishers, indie authors could point directly to their finances. “I am the publisher.” “I am the marketing department.” “I am customer support.” “I only get paid when someone buys my book.” That made the “you’re only hurting corporations” argument much harder to sustain for many observers. (Threads)

What made this different?

Unlike older piracy debates, this one wasn’t really about DRM or copyright law. It became a culture war over whether creators deserve control over how their work is distributed. One side viewed books primarily as cultural goods that should be widely accessible. The other viewed books as the livelihood of individual creators whose ability to keep producing depends on voluntary payment.

Bryan: These arguments are essentially just whining, and you don’t need to care too much about what the whiners are saying. It is interesting to see the author pushback, because we’re part of the author community and we want to know what authors are thinking about the debates raging around them.

Bottom line, it’s illegal. If you want it to be different, fight it out in the courts and get them to change the laws. You can have your opinions about what should be in the public domain and what should not, but it’s still illegal.

Jonathan: One thing I saw is that people just didn’t understand licensing. When you purchase a book, you’re purchasing a license to read the book. You can give the book away, or give it to a thrift store where it gets resold. What you can’t do is copy it. You can’t run it through a Xerox, and for the other generations, a Xerox is what we used to use to copy things. You can’t take all the pages out, copy them, and start selling and redistributing it. That’s not what your license allows you to do.

Owning is a weird concept legally, and that’s where a lot of this argument at least claims to live. Really, they just want to not pay for it. They want to take something for free and then justify it afterward so no one yells at them.

Bryan: Intellectual property law was basically written by Disney and companies like that, to protect the big ones. The bottom line for authors is that even if you found somebody who pirated your stuff, you couldn’t afford to prosecute them. If they’re doing this through back channels overseas, locating the actual human being would be extremely difficult, and even if you did, you’d never be able to recover the compensation.

I’ll give you a slightly different perspective as an author and a publishing consultant. A few weeks ago I did an episode of the Novel Marketing podcast with Thomas about promo stacks, where you set your book to free in KDP and then pay email distribution services like BookBub to tell hundreds of thousands of people your book is free. Granted, that’s you choosing to do it, and somebody isn’t stealing it from you without your permission. But in most cases, if somebody pirated one of my books, I’d be really happy that I was getting more eyeballs on my story and that somebody might tell somebody else about it who ends up buying a copy.

Jonathan: I’m a hardliner when it comes to this. Theft is wrong. I’m not okay with theft.

I understand the practical implications. Sure, they weren’t going to buy it anyway, and that’s true. Pirates were never going to buy your book. As a matter of fact, most of the time pirates are stealing your book to sell it to other people.

I don’t buy the argument at all that it’s because I can’t afford it. If you can’t afford a $12 Kindle Unlimited subscription, then you need to go outside and start putting fries in the bag. You need less reading time and more putting-fries-in-the-bag time. Claiming you can just take something because you wouldn’t otherwise get to have it doesn’t work. If we applied that logic to everything, you could go steal a woman because you were never going to get one anyway. You see how that doesn’t work.

Bryan: The other thing I have in my favor is that I write biblical fiction. Maybe if somebody steals one of my books and reads it, they’ll get something out of it about not stealing.

Jonathan: When I went to church in Monterey while I was at DLI, the pastor had his Bible stolen out of his car. They broke into his car and stole his Bible. We were all sitting there in church going, “Who steals a Bible?” And he said, “I’m not sure what to feel about this, because on the one hand, I hope they read it, but on the other hand, what are you doing?”

I don’t usually like to talk about authors yelling at each other, but in this case it was a conflict between authors and readers over how books are acquired, so it felt important that we talked about it.

AI Pirates Hijack Indie Author’s Book on Spotify

According to a post on Author Media’s social platform, Zoe Nauman discovered an unauthorized AI-generated audio version of her YA portal fantasy novel The Dawning: The Amaris Prophecies Book 1 uploaded to Spotify as a podcast by the account YukimiSkondo2. Nauman, who is in the process of creating her own legitimate audio version, called it flattering yet highly annoying.

The fake episode mimics the full book description, including battles between light, darkness, dragons, mythical creatures, and heroic sacrifice. It appeared under the title “Read The Dawning: A YA portal fantasy adventure quest…” and lists Jun 11 as the date with a 17-second runtime indicator in the screenshot.

This is not an isolated case. The Publishers Association reports a surge in unauthorized AI-generated audiobook narrations on Spotify, often disguised as podcasts. Similar piracy plagues YouTube, where AI “slop” versions of bestsellers like John Grisham’s The Widow rack up tens of thousands of views.

Why This Matters for Authors

Spotify’s partnership with ElevenLabs makes AI narration accessible and free for legitimate self-publishers via Findaway Voices, but it also lowers the barrier for bad actors to scrape text, generate audio, and upload without permission. Indie authors like Nauman lose control over their work’s presentation, voice, and quality while potential listeners consume inferior or stolen versions.

Broader industry impact includes eroded sales, listener fatigue from poor AI output, and pressure on platforms to improve detection and takedowns. The Authors Guild and Publishers Association actively push for stronger enforcement. Authors should monitor platforms, report infringements promptly via Spotify’s tools or legal channels, and consider watermarking or registering copyrights early.

This incident highlights the double-edged sword of AI tools in publishing. While they democratize production, they accelerate theft in an already vulnerable digital ecosystem. Nauman’s experience serves as a timely alert for every author navigating audio rights.

Sources:

Author Media Social: AI version of my book on Spotify

The Bookseller: PA calls for tighter AI detection on pirated audiobooks

NYT: Publishing’s Latest Piracy Problem on YouTube

Zoe Nauman Author Site

Midia Research: Spotify’s embrace of AI-generated audio

Jonathan: We’ve already talked about YouTube’s response to this, where they’re going to cut content that isn’t originally created. That affects a lot of tactics. If you’re going to read your audiobook over Red Dead Redemption 2 footage, you could be demonetized for it.

Thomas is in the chat, and he says he saw an interesting argument recently that said, “If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t theft.” I’ve heard that, and it doesn’t seem nuanced enough once you look at licensing and the purpose of distributing a book. I’m distributing my book to paying customers so that I can be paid and continue to write more books. If the person who takes it thinks they own it completely, that all these words are theirs now and they can do whatever they want with them, that’s not how it works. That’s not the point of licensing it. Owning means using responsibly, in the spirit the product was created to be used in.

It’s like when I tell my children they don’t own anything. Your clothes are actually my clothes, and you will take care of them.

Bryan: There have always been people who want to profit off somebody else’s work. The real problem here is platforms that are ungated. YouTube acknowledges the issue and has policies against it, and you can get deplatformed, but there’s no way to enforce it and there are too many ways around the enforcement mechanisms. Spotify did the same thing. They came out and said they have policies against it and they’re going to try to restrict access a little more. The technology to catch this is not keeping up with the ability to create the problem.

Compare that to a gated platform. I happen to be an audiobook project manager for ACX, so I help authors navigate ACX if they’ve never done an audiobook before. ACX doesn’t allow any automated voices. You still get people who sign up with profiles and submit auditions with AI voices, but if it makes it through the process and you submit it for publication, ACX catches it. KDP has a 72-hour window. ACX has a two-week quality assurance process, because they manually go in and check those things.

So I blame the ungated platforms like Spotify and YouTube for not having a mechanism in place to filter this and prevent it, rather than letting it propagate.

Jonathan: Both companies are growing and trying to compete with Audible. Independent publishing is back in its heyday. This is the golden age, because of how many tools we have available to us. That comes with downsides, because now it’s really easy for someone to take your stuff and publish it under another name, and enforcement is hard.

Overall the system is good. We can get our books out there and people can read them. There are even benefits to people pirating your books. It does mean more people are reading them, and if your books are ministry-focused, then your ministry is reaching farther. None of that removes the fact that it is theft, and you are stealing from somebody who probably doesn’t have money. If somebody is pirating my books, I actually feel that hit. I love giving my book away, but at this stage of my career, I can’t absorb all the freebies I would love to give out.

Bryan: If people were doing it for their own consumption, stealing your book so they could read it, the volume would be so low it wouldn’t make any difference. But people are stealing it to sell it to somebody else, posting it on Spotify and getting paid for people listening to your book.

Jonathan: They’re stealing content to feed an audience they already developed.

KDP Boosts Ebook Royalties: 70% Rate Now Extends to $12.99

According to Jane Friedman, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing extended the 70% royalty rate for ebooks from a $2.99 to $9.99 band all the way to $12.99. The change took effect July 7, 2026. Books priced above that previously earned only 35%.

The update applies across major KDP marketplaces with equivalent local pricing. Authors can now switch eligible titles priced between $2.99 and $12.99 to the 70% option if they meet other requirements like file size and distribution rules. Delivery fees still apply under the 70% tier, averaging around $0.06 per unit. No action is required for existing books, but many authors have already repriced titles, especially box sets and longer works.

Why This Matters for Authors

This gives indies fresh pricing power on premium titles without the old 35% penalty. A $11.99 or $12.99 ebook now delivers roughly double the royalty compared to before. Box set creators stand to gain the most as they test higher price points that better reflect combined value. It narrows the gap with competitors like Kobo, Apple, and Barnes & Noble, which already offered 70% at higher thresholds. Expect more experimentation with premium pricing strategies in the second half of 2026.

Amazon made this move after nearly two decades of the same $9.99 ceiling, responding to author feedback and market realities. Some writers still want the band pushed to $14.99 or higher, but this shift marks a clear victory for better earnings potential on mid-tier prices.

Sources:

Jane Friedman: Kindle Direct Publishing extends 70 percent royalty on ebooks from $9.99 price point to $12.99

KDP Help: eBook List Price Requirements (Official Update)

KDP Community Announcement: 70% Royalty Option Price Band Expanded

Jonathan: The old $9.99 ceiling hurt box set people in particular. If you wanted the full 70% rate, you almost had to devalue a box set of 15 books just to stay under the ceiling and avoid any throttling from the platform. If your strategy currently includes box sets or anthologies, this is a big deal for you.

Bryan: This is a pretty clear win, particularly for indie authors. Trad publishers will price outside that band anyway. They’re putting ebooks up at $16.99 even though the royalties the authors earn on that are lower than they would be at $9.99. It’s probably also a win for Amazon. Amazon and Kindle dominate the ebook market, so it helps them make more too.

Jonathan: Keep in mind that trad pub hates ebooks. They’ve always hated ebooks. They make their money off the margins they get on print runs. When it only costs them $0.75 to $1 to print a book and they sell it at a 50% discount to bookstores, they’re still making $10 off that book. That’s where they want to hit their margins.

Ebooks just don’t work in their model, because ebooks steal paperback sales. So they’ll price the ebook at $16.99 or $19.99 precisely because they don’t want to make money off the ebook. They want to make money off the paperback or the hardcover.

Bryan: Most indie authors are using a print-on-demand service, so printing costs are naturally higher than if you’re using an offset press and running 10, 20, or 50,000 copy print runs. Trad publishers are leveraging the place where they still have some power in the industry. Amazon is kicking back, Amazon dominates the ebook market, and it’s all good for indie authors.

Jonathan: They also have different goals. If you order a print run of 30,000 books, you need to sell those books, and if ebooks are robbing sales from that, you have a problem.

I’ve done really small print runs for Kickstarters, but I only order the number of books I need, because I don’t want to store them. If I’m going to an event, I have to know in advance how many books I think I’ll sell, so I don’t wind up storing a whole bunch of books in my house waiting for the next one.

Bryan: If you think that’s hard in a house, try doing it in an RV. We have books stashed underneath our dining room table.

Technology News

Xbox Hits Reset: Massive Restructuring Cuts 3,200 Jobs and Spins Out Studios

According to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, the company launched the most significant restructure in its history. In an internal email shared publicly on X, Sharma detailed plans to slash approximately 3,200 roles throughout FY27, with 1,600 eliminations hitting immediately, plus four studios transitioning to new management.

Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to independent status with their IP and catalog. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs move to new ownership with funding to finish Senua and State of Decay 3. Arkane in France faces Works Council consultations for potential strategic shifts.

Cuts hit across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios, but no publicly announced first-party games face cancellation. Mojang and King now report directly to Sharma due to their massive player bases. Platform teams shrink as management layers drop to 5 or fewer, with 50% vendor spend reduction and a focus on flatter structure built around makers and directly responsible individuals. Helen Chiang was promoted to Chief Operating Officer with end-to-end P&L responsibility.

Why This Happened

Xbox entered this generation with a smaller install base and higher costs. Bets on Game Pass, multi-platform releases, and portfolio expansion delivered value but fell short of growth targets. The core business weakened while headcount ballooned. Sharma called out operating margins 3 to 10x lower than peers and highlighted an industry-wide hardware crisis, including severe memory chip shortages driving up console costs.

Reactions

Industry voices described the moves as painful but necessary. Many developers expressed shock on social platforms, with some praising the transparency while others mourned lost roles at beloved studios. X erupted with debates, including unverified claims tying layoffs to H-1B visa hiring. Microsoft sponsors thousands company-wide annually, but direct replacement links remain unconfirmed in primary reports.

Broader gaming community reactions mix frustration with cautious optimism. Some see it as the end of unchecked expansion post-Activision deal; others view it as an overdue correction after years of over-investment.

Implications for the Gaming Industry

Studio independence gains momentum. Spinning out teams like Double Fine signals big publishers may no longer serve as ideal homes for every creative outfit. Indies could thrive with better tools and audiences.

Efficiency over empire-building. Flatter structures and sharper focus may pressure rivals to streamline. Expect more accountability on ROI, especially after Xbox lost 64 cents per dollar invested in some years.

Game Pass and multi-platform scrutiny. Slower growth in subscriptions forces tighter bets. This could accelerate shifts toward live-service hits, platform exclusives, or hybrid models.

Hardware and supply chain warnings. The acknowledged “most severe hardware crisis” highlights vulnerabilities in chips and components that affect Sony, Nintendo, and PC makers too. Prices may rise; innovation timelines could stretch.

Talent market shifts. 3,200 experienced developers enter a job market already strained by prior waves of industry layoffs since 2022. Smaller teams and indies may absorb talent, but morale and project delays loom at remaining Xbox studios.

Sharma framed the changes as preparation for a bigger future, with heavy investment continuing in 2026 but under greater discipline. She aims for Xbox to entertain over a billion people daily and return to growth in 2027. This reset underscores a turning point. Over-expansion met economic reality, and Xbox chose painful surgery to avoid deeper decline.

Sources:

Xbox Official: Resetting Xbox

IGN: Full Email and Details

Fortune: Exclusive Interview with Asha Sharma

GamesIndustry.biz: Industry Reactions

NDTV and Others on Broader Context

Jonathan: I’m not jumping into all the details on which studios are doing what. If you’re a gamer, you can go look that up on your own. The point of this story is that it is totally due to Xbox’s mishandling of storytelling.

When you relegate storytelling to a committee, and that committee is defined by particular guardrails like include a queer character or race swap this character, and nobody even thinks it will bring in revenue, it’s just something they feel should be done, you are tanking your games. We’ve seen it for the past 10 years. They’re losing their audience because we aren’t getting new stories anymore. If they release one more Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, I swear. Anymore they’re just re-releasing the same game and calling it the same number.

The death of storytelling in the AAA gaming industry is what is killing them. Now they’ll sink $300 million into a game and have to give refunds to everyone, as in the case of Concord. Dragon Age did terrible. It’s sinking entire studios with the hundreds of millions they’re dumping into it, because they can’t write a good story anymore.

The storytellers they’re getting are coming out of schools where it’s a bunch of blue hairs talking about weird therapy sessions and forced drama. This is a shooting zombie game. Can we just shoot some zombies? I’m a dad. I work all day, I put my kids to bed, and I finally get to play my gross bloody game that my wife looks at and asks, “Why do you like this?” That’s all I have time for, and you’re going to make me swim through this stuff? I’m not going to buy your game if it’s going to preach at me. I just want to shoot stuff.

Bryan: A lot of people will see the headline and think this is another AI story, that tech is putting people out of jobs. You nailed it. This is a storytelling issue, and games are storytelling. The whole context of the gaming environment is storytelling. We probably have authors watching right now who write scripts for video games.

Jonathan: I’ve done it for a couple of indie game publishers in town. They’ll ask me to write dialogue, quests, whatever, because they like the way I approach things. I love writing for games, because it allows the player to have agency in the way the story plays out. That’s what I love about being a Dungeons & Dragons DM. I get to create a setting and a problem, and then I get to let them come up with the solution. As long as you don’t drive it too hard for them, they have a blast and they make the best stories in the world.

Giving players agency in the storytelling is fun. Getting railroaded is not, and a train has to run along tracks to get to the end of the story. When your story is bad, people get off the train. They don’t pay for it anymore, and we have a whole industry based on selling skins, microtransactions, DLC, and expansions for a game nobody wants anymore, because they didn’t like the story.

Authors, are going to win here. A lot of people are turning away from video games because they’re bad, and they’ll go to your book if you’re telling the story they want. If you have a cool concept and you know how to express it clearly, they’ll say, “That sounds cool. I’ll give that a try.”

Bryan: You’re going to see the data on this in a story a little later, because LitRPG is exploding. Those are people who want a good story and still want that gaming environment. They get the feel by experiencing it through a LitRPG rather than the actual online game.

Jonathan: These are the consequences for the slop people are putting out.

EU Parliament Greenlights Chat Control 1.0 Despite Majority Opposition

According to Patrick Breyer and multiple reports from the European Parliament vote on July 9, 2026, the EU revived Chat Control 1.0. This temporary extension allows platforms to resume voluntary scanning of private messages for child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

What Is Chat Control 1.0?

Chat Control 1.0 is a 2021 derogation from the EU’s ePrivacy Directive (Regulation (EU) 2021/1232). It permits, but does not mandate, online platforms to scan unencrypted private communications, such as direct messages on Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, Xbox, and emails via Gmail or iCloud.

Scanning primarily uses perceptual hashing (like PhotoDNA) to match known CSAM images and videos against databases from groups such as NCMEC. It does not break end-to-end encryption. Services like Signal or encrypted WhatsApp remain exempt. Reports go to authorities if matches occur, but critics note high false positive rates and limited impact on new abuse.

This version contrasts with the stalled Chat Control 2.0, which would impose broader, potentially mandatory client-side scanning including AI analysis of text and unknown content.

The Controversial Vote

314 MEPs voted to reject the extension. 276 voted in favor of it. 17 abstained. A majority of those present opposed the measure, yet it passed. Under second-reading rules, rejection required an absolute majority of 361 out of 720 total MEPs. The vote fell 47 short.

It was pushed via urgent procedure on the last day before summer recess, when absences peak. Amendments for stricter limits (e.g., only judicially suspected users) also failed the absolute majority threshold. The extension runs until April 3, 2028, or until a permanent framework replaces it.

Why This Matters for Authors

Private communications on major platforms now face renewed blanket surveillance without warrants or suspicion. Authors researching sensitive topics, collaborating on drafts, or discussing industry controversies via email or DMs risk automated flagging. False positives could lead to account bans or reports, chilling free expression and research.

Indie authors reliant on US platforms for marketing, beta reads, or fan outreach face heightened privacy erosion while E2EE tools offer a workaround. This normalizes mass scanning and sets precedent for broader controls that could impact creative freedom and source protection.

Critics call it a democratic foul play that overrides the will of a present majority. Supporters frame it as essential for child protection, though data shows declining reports from encryption and questionable efficacy of indiscriminate scans. Authors should switch sensitive discussions to encrypted apps like Signal, review platform privacy policies, and monitor negotiations resuming in September.

Sources:

Patrick Breyer: EU Parliament Greenlights Chat Control 1.0

TechTimes: EU Parliament Passes Chat Control by Default

Heise: Procedural Trick Before Summer Break

Wikipedia & Related Analyses on Chat Control

Jonathan: I don’t understand how you can be trying to pass something, and it passes because not enough people said no.

Bryan: Presumed passed unless voted down.

Jonathan: There were also a couple of shenanigans here. Pushing it through by urgent procedure on the last day before summer recess is when absences peak, because everybody leaves early. I don’t know if you know anything about government employees, but on Friday everyone leaves at noon.

Think about what authors research. How do I poison this guy? What kind of poison should I use? That’s the kind of thing that now risks automated flagging, along with collaborating on drafts and discussing industry controversies over email and DMs. And everyone follows Europe. There’s been some kickback lately since Elon Musk acquired X and he’s been pretty forceful about keeping that kind of thing from happening. But when people justify a policy by saying they’re trying to find child abusers, who’s going to say no to that? Everyone wants to stop child abusers. We’re going to see policies like this continue.

Bryan: One significant thing about a lot of these laws, and I haven’t dug into this one specifically, is how far they reach. The EU sanctioned Russia again over certain news media outlets, shutting them down so Russian propaganda couldn’t make it into Western news media. As EU policy, they made it illegal for you to even quote them. Say you’re arguing against their position, or you’re trying to expose a Russian hoax. If you quote them, that’s illegal, and it doesn’t matter where the platform originates.

You don’t have to be an EU member or a person living in the EU to be charged with these things. The EU will approach the platform you use, either the cloud service provider or one of the regulated platforms, and they’re all international platforms, and have you deplatformed or shut down. It can affect you even if you don’t happen to live in the EU.

Jonathan: Something happened recently in the UK where a group of migrants attacked a UK citizen and were beating on him. The police showed up and arrested the UK citizen. Then they had the audacity to go on social media and tell people to stop sharing the footage, because it clearly showed that the police were in the wrong.

Be on the lookout for this kind of thing. Online activity is all trackable. I worked in intel tracking people by their online activity. It’s all logged and recorded somewhere. The guardrails that protect you from major powers, like governments or corporations, are being loosened in the name of saving the children. You really need to keep in mind the battlefield you’re in.

Bryan: I recently had to go over to the UK. My brother lives in Scotland, and he ruptured his Achilles, so I went to help him out. We were on Facebook Messenger coordinating where to connect and how to get from the airport, and he said something about, “Oh, you got stuck in Londonistan?” A couple of minutes later he pulled it down, because he said he could get in serious trouble for saying something like that.

Zeitgeist

The Complete State of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Record Sales, a Rebounding Genre, and a Flood of 179,000 New Titles

Every 6 months, K-lytics publishes the closest thing indie publishing has to a census of science fiction and fantasy. The Summer 2026 edition is actually 3 reports: a genre-wide map of all 183 SF&F sub-categories, plus Top 100 Market Snapshots for both the Sci-Fi and Fantasy bestseller lists. We read all of it, roughly 180 pages of charts, so you don’t have to.

Quick methodology note, because Thomas will ask. K-lytics monitors the Top 100 and Top 20 bestsellers across more than 8,000 Amazon categories, observed over several days each month to smooth out rank spikes. The royalty figures are estimates modeled from sales rank, not pulled from anyone’s KDP dashboard, so treat the dollar amounts as directionally solid rather than gospel. The trends, however, come from 18 months to 7 years of continuous tracking.

Here is the state of the genre in 3 sentences. Fantasy just posted the strongest average sales rank K-lytics has ever recorded. Science fiction is 18 months into a genuine, broad-based rebound. And underneath both, the supply of competing titles grew 18% in a single year, which quietly rewrites the strategy for everyone.

Jonathan: If you’re not following K-lytics, and if you don’t purchase the reports that pertain to your genre and subgenre, you absolutely should. The sheer amount of data available to help you with your advertising, your promotion, your marketing strategy, and your content production strategy, whether that’s writing new books or making videos, is off the charts. You’re really doing yourself a disservice if you’re not spending $15 on the report that pertains to you.

We’re tracking trends here, not exact numbers.

The Big Picture: A Genre at Its Peak

Science Fiction & Fantasy is the number 4 genre in the entire Kindle store, behind only Romance, Literature & Fiction, and Mystery, Thriller & Suspense. The top 100 SF&F bestsellers average an estimated 277 sales per day per title.

The long-term chart shows the category at its highest-ever performance level, surpassing even the pandemic reading boom. But the 2 halves of the genre are living very different lives:

• The top 20 Fantasy titles average a sales rank of 40 in the entire Kindle store, moving an estimated 931 copies per day per title.
• The top 20 Science Fiction titles average a rank of 331 and roughly 237 copies per day.

That is nearly a 4 to 1 sales advantage for Fantasy, powered by Romantasy and, more recently, by LitRPG. K-lytics’ own trend chart annotation says it plainly: after 3 years of “Romantasy as a main driver,” the newest label reads “Dungeon Crawler adding to mix.”

Jonathan: I guarantee you those top 20 fantasy titles are romantasy.

Sci-Fi’s Comeback Is Real, and It’s Not Riding Hollywood

The genre report shows science fiction improving its relative rank position for 18 straight months, with the top 20 climbing from the 500 to 600 rank range in late 2024 to around 300 by June 2026. Alex Newton’s announcement highlights 2 underlying drivers:

• The 3-category upload limit is working. Since Amazon restricted books to 3 categories, “category pollution” (books miscategorized to farm bestseller flags) has steadily declined, so the sci-fi list increasingly reflects actual sci-fi demand.
• The upswing is broad-based. Unlike previous bumps driven by a single trend like Alien Romance, this recovery spans multiple sub-genres at once.

Add the demand-side evidence from the snapshot: Google search interest for “science fiction books” spiked in late 2025 to its highest indexed level in a decade, hitting 100 on Google Trends after bottoming near 20 in 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile searches for “science fiction movies” kept declining. The same crossover shows up on the fantasy side, where “fantasy books” overtook “fantasy movies” around 2022 and the gap keeps widening. Readers are going straight to the source, and the demand is book-native, which matters for ad targeting.

What the Lists Actually Pay

The 2 Top 100 snapshots put real dollar figures on the gap between the genres:

• Fantasy Top 100: an estimated 42,026 copies per day and roughly $4.47 million in author royalties per month. The #1 book moves about 2,375 copies daily, #20 moves 690, and even #100 sells around 131. Top 20 books average an estimated $113,066 per month. The worst performer on the entire list still clears about $3,221 per month.
• Sci-Fi Top 100: an estimated 12,554 copies per day and about $1.14 million in monthly royalties. The #1 book moves 1,034 copies daily, #20 moves 152, and #100 still sells 45. Top 20 books average $31,766 per month, and the floor of the list earns around $613.

Read those floors carefully. The bottom of the Fantasy list pays a mortgage. The bottom of the Sci-Fi list pays a car note. Both are achievable targets for a well-packaged indie series launch, and both beat what most traditionally published midlist authors see in a year.

The Playbook the Winners Are Running

Across both snapshots, the winning formula is remarkably consistent, with the dials set differently per genre.

• Kindle Unlimited: 78 of the top 100 Fantasy titles are in KU, capturing 83% of the list’s royalties, a share that grew in just 6 months. Sci-Fi splits 59/41, KU-leaning but not KU-mandatory. The wide minority in both genres is dominated by traditional publishers who can trade KU page reads for bookstore shelf space.
• Series: 89% of Fantasy bestsellers and 74% of Sci-Fi bestsellers belong to series, capturing 93% and 79% of royalties respectively. Standalones are swimming upstream in both genres.
• Length: the average Fantasy bestseller runs 537 pages; Sci-Fi averages 428. Readers buy immersion by the pound, and KU pays by the page. And quality floors are high: across the Fantasy list, 1-star and 2-star reviews average just 1.1% of ratings. Rapid release only works when the craft holds at 500 pages.
• Pricing, the two economies: Fantasy has split into 2 businesses sharing 1 list. The indie lane runs $4.99 to $6.99 in KU. The tradpub lane runs $11 to $17 backed by brand names and screen deals. Almost nothing wins at $7.99 to $8.99. The middle is dead. On the sci-fi side, $5.99 is the statistical sweet spot: 13% of list slots but 21% of royalties, with $6.99 punching even harder at 3% of slots and 12% of royalties. The bargain bin underperforms badly in both genres; $0.99 belongs to series starters with sequels ready, not flagships.
• Turnover: 77% of the Sci-Fi Top 100 and 51% of the Fantasy Top 100 was NOT on the list 6 months ago. Books published in March through June 2026 occupy 8 of Fantasy’s top 26 spots. These are not fortress lists defended by immortal backlist. New books break in constantly.

The Dinniman Story: A Self-Publisher Just Beat Sarah J. Maas

The single most remarkable data point across all 3 reports: the top-earning publisher on the June Fantasy list is not Bloomsbury or Entangled’s Red Tower. It is Dandy House, the personal imprint of Matt Dinniman, the LitRPG author behind Dungeon Crawler Carl.

• Dinniman has 8 books on the Fantasy list moving an estimated 8,700 combined copies and borrows per day, ahead of Red Tower at 4,643.
• Sarah J. Maas has 14 books charting, the most of any author, but her high-priced, non-KU Bloomsbury titles move a combined 2,688 copies per day.
• Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 1, published in October 2020, sits at #2 on the entire Fantasy list nearly 6 years later. His May release, A Parade of Horribles, tops the Sci-Fi list and sits at #9 in Fantasy simultaneously.

The business structure matters as much as the sales. Dinniman retains his ebook and audiobook rights and licensed print only, to Ace Books, starting in 2024. The series has reportedly sold well past 6 million copies, a Peacock TV adaptation from Seth MacFarlane is in production, and a tabletop RPG raised nearly $10 million this spring. He is the proof of concept for the hybrid model: keep the high-margin digital rights, rent out the print.

Jonathan: He retains his ebook and audiobook rights while moving 8,700 copies a day. I’m going to say that again, because it’s the whole ballgame. He is raking it in.

There’s another thing about the structure of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. They’re long, which means a lot of KU page reads. Book nine just came out, and you know what that means. You have to go back and read the earlier ones again. Sometimes people want to listen to them too, because the narration is done so well. He’s scoring repeat sales and repeat revenue just based on the way he writes his books.

Bryan: I manage an Amazon Ads account for a LitRPG author. The series of his that sells best has nine books in it. His shortest book in that series is 550 pages and his longest is 850.

When I first took on his account, I thought this guy had to be writing with AI. He missed our first meeting, and when I emailed him, he apologized and said he had just written 17,000 words that day. He types all of it, and he uses a human editor. He says he’ll sometimes use AI for plotting. He’s a machine, and that’s a gift. He’s also a Marine.

I get to see his numbers through his Amazon Ads account. He does 80% of his sales as KU page reads. Long books, long series, page reads, and he is killing it.

The other thing this report gets right is that it’s not good enough to identify the place in the market where all the leaders are. A lot of times that subgenre is already saturated and you need to move on. With LitRPG, it isn’t. You find the demand-to-supply ratio, how many books are being released compared to how much demand there is for them, and LitRPG still sits in one of those sweet spots.

Jonathan: We’re not going to give all the data points away, because we don’t want to steal sales from Alex Newton. That would be a little bit like pirating.

The Overlooked Story: The Great Dilution

Now the number most coverage will miss. Competition in SF&F stands at approximately 1,162,272 English-language Kindle titles, up from 983,093 a year ago. That is 18% growth: roughly 179,000 new titles in 12 months, or about 490 new SF&F books arriving every single day.

Put that against the sales data. Demand at the top of the category is at record levels but trending sideways over the past 18 months. Supply grew 18%. The pie stopped growing while 179,000 more forks landed on the table. The average title’s share of the genre is mathematically shrinking even while the genre itself looks historically healthy.

K-lytics does not say where the surge comes from, but the timing lines up with the explosion of AI-assisted publishing. Whatever the cause, the consequence is the same, and the report states it directly: with this many titles, finding niches with high sales and low competition is no longer optional. It is the job.

The high turnover rates soften the blow. If 51% to 77% of the lists refresh every 6 months, the flood has not frozen the leaderboards. Velocity and positioning still break through. But the era when a decent book in a broad category could find its own audience is over.

Where the Money Is: The Niche Map

The genre report scores all 183 sub-markets by sales-to-competition ratio. Within the main SF&F category, only 12 of 64 sub-markets, about 19%, earn “hot” status:

• Cozy Fantasy is the single best opportunity in the entire report, with a 23.1 sales-to-competition ratio, nearly double the next niche: 60 daily sales per top-20 title against only 2,576 competing books. And the Top 100 snapshot confirms the demand is real and monetizing right now: a dragon-runs-a-diner novel at #36, The Tired Mercenary Just Wants to Farm in Peace at #37, and a cozy slice-of-life LitRPG at #91. On K-lytics’ new keyword scoring, “cozy fantasy” (45.9) now outranks “epic fantasy” (41.4).
• GameLit & LitRPG, filed under Literature & Fiction, posts a 14.8 ratio with top titles averaging a blistering 716 sales rank against just 8,620 competitors. Between the ratio data and Dinniman’s dominance, LitRPG is the most structurally undersupplied success story in the genre.
• Fantasy TV, Movie & Game Adaptations (14.3), Gaslamp (6.2), Androids, Robots & AI (5.1), Greek & Roman Myths (5.1), and Military Fantasy (5.0) round out the main-category hot list, with YA Dark Fantasy (6.1) and YA Epic (4.8) leading the cross-category opportunities at premium $9 to $10 price points.
• In the crowded “Hot Mainstream” tier, Fantasy-Romantic leads at 10.2, followed by Humorous Fantasy (5.3) and New Adult & College (4.6).

Jonathan: If you’re looking for the next opportunity in fantasy, cozy is where it’s at. There are only about 2,500 books competing in that category. If you can write funny, heartwarming stories, that’s where you want to be.

On the LitRPG side, have you ever seen somebody on a bicycle grab onto a truck and let it pull them down the road? You might want to do that with Dungeon Crawler Carl. When I finish a Dungeon Crawler Carl book, I’m looking for another one. If you write something similar, you may be what that reader chooses to continue the high they got from reading DCC. It’s a great strategy, and the best part is that you don’t even have to be that original to do it. It just has to be similar to what that person just read.

The 12-Month Winners and Losers

The trend data shows a clean realignment. Rising:

• Science Fiction-Adventure: up 49%, the biggest gain in the genre.
• LGBTQ+ Science Fiction: up 48%.
• Dystopian Sci-Fi: up 45%. The snapshot shows why: 7 totalitarian-warning classics chart in a single month, including Orwell twice and Atwood twice.
• Space Exploration: up 27%, plus Contemporary Fiction-Fantasy up 53% and Christian Fantasy up 36% in other category trees.

Falling:

• Science Fiction-Colonization: down 96%, the worst performer in the genre.
• Fantasy-Myths & Legends: down 90%, likely the end of the deconstruction-retelling wave.
• Military Sci-Fi-Space Marine: down 84%.
• YA Paranormal Vampires: down 106%, plus Sci-Fi Westerns down 61% and Sci-Fi Romance down 56% despite the latter still ranking high in absolute terms.

One trap worth naming: Norse & Viking Fantasy still scores as a hot niche (6.3 ratio) in the snapshot view, but its trend line has fallen 38% over 12 months. Attractive on paper, deteriorating in motion. Always check which way the line is moving before you commit a trilogy to it.

Jonathan: Dystopian is climbing because there are people who feel like the world is being destroyed. Sci-fi is really good at discussing that kind of thing and working it out, and people are interested in it.

I have a theory on why colonization is down. First of all, it has the wrong word. Colonizer does not have a good vibe in today’s climate. But colonization itself is also a fundamentally hopeful thing. When you go out into space and colonize a new world, that’s based on hope, and people aren’t feeling hope right now. They’re feeling civil war.

Bryan: If we’re in a fourth turning heading toward a first turning, the answer is noble dark. The world stinks, but I’m going to fix it. So why is colonization not a good performer right now?

Jonathan: Because colonization is first turning. And I may disagree with Thomas on this, or maybe we just haven’t fleshed it out in our discussions, but it’s never guaranteed that you get out of a fourth turning. It isn’t automatic that you move to a first turning. Good men must rise in the fourth turning to make the first turning come back. There have been so many attacks on creating good people, whether that’s simply having children or the things we’ll talk about in our next Zeitgeist segment. When you reduce the number of the good, eventually evil just wins, because there aren’t enough good people, barring divine intervention or something that drastically changes the power scales.

Bryan: If a fourth turning isn’t followed by a first turning, everything collapses. Look at Venezuela.

Jonathan: Venezuela fourth turned, and they’re devastated. It’s basically a wasteland. A lot of the damage was done before Maduro, and removing him might make us feel good, but I don’t feel like it solves a whole lot of their problems. They really need good people and good leaders to rebuild their society.

Colonization is based on hope. It’s a first turning concept. It does not surprise me that it’s down 96%.

Military sci-fi space marine down 84% is really surprising to me, because space marines are a fourth turning thing. Who do you want with you when the world is going down? Hey, that guy over there is a Marine. Stay out of his way, he’s crazy.

Bryan: It’s important to distinguish between the lengths of the cycles. Some of this is zeitgeist related, and it’s just cultural attitudes shifting. Those tend to be generational, so they’re 15 to 20 year cycles. Some of it is simply cyclical, because you get reader burnout, or too much supply. In commodities trading they always say the cure for high prices is high prices. When prices are high, producers rush to produce more and they fill the gap. That’s a natural supply and demand cycle, and those cycles are much shorter than the generational ones.

Deconstructionism is one of the aspects of postmodernism, and those eras are typically much longer than generations. The premodern era lasted 500 or 600 years. The modern era also lasted 500 years. Postmodernism was really born in the late 1800s with a bunch of French philosophers, but it didn’t hit pop culture until the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. So maybe it dies off with the boomers.

I’m not convinced postmodernism is on its way out yet. I still think it’s the underlay, and it’s a different underlay than the one beneath the last fourth turning. The last fourth turning was overlaid on a largely modern culture. This fourth turning is overlaid on a postmodern culture, with the rejection of truth and belonging before believing.

Jonathan: The thing being explored lately is the concept of civil war. Before, it was secession. Texas will leave the union. California will leave the union. It depends on who the president is as to who’s leaving the union. It’s not that anymore. Now it’s, we’re going to war, and we’re just going to fight over it.

That’s what happens when you overlay a fourth turning on postmodernism, because there’s no live and let live. That doesn’t exist anymore. It’s now, I’m going to find the ideology I hate and I’m going to destroy it.

Bryan: The last three fourth turnings were the Revolutionary War, then the Civil War 50 years later, then World War II 50 years later. Fourth turnings like to end in war, because they are creative destruction. You have to destroy the bad thing and build around it.

We might have an opportunity to get out of this a different way. We’re having a constitutional crisis right now. There’s an opportunity for constitutional amendments, which we’ve done several times in our history, though not anytime recently. The other option is a constitutional convention to rewrite the Constitution. You have to get a two-thirds majority of the states to call one, and a significant number of states have already signed up. That might be a peaceful resolution to the issue.

Jonathan: I personally don’t think we can generate that kind of unity anymore. These things can be filmed and broadcast, which means a lot of the people there aren’t there to work. They’re there to perform for their constituency, and it doesn’t matter what good they have to give up to do it. There won’t be any good faith effort to get the work done. I could be wrong, but based on my understanding of humans, I don’t think so.

Bryan: I agree the likelihood is very low. But all things originate with ideas, and authors drive ideas. A lot of it is the nonfiction authors writing on political and philosophical themes, and yet that’s not how those ideas get into pop culture. Most human beings don’t read philosophy. Nobody read Foucault. It came in through radio fiction and television fiction. People took those ideas, put them into stories, and that’s how they emerged in pop culture.

Fiction authors in particular have an opportunity to shape what’s coming next, because we can take those big ideas and illustrate them, showing how they might work out in a fictional context. That’s rich, and you can do it in historical fiction, sci-fi, or fantasy. Pick your genre.

The Keyword Minefield: 390 Flagged Terms

The bonus keyword sheets, over 1,000 scored terms across both genres, carry a compliance warning most authors will skip past. K-lytics flags 246 of 631 sci-fi keywords and 144 of 411 fantasy keywords as allowed in Amazon Ads but not recommended or not permitted in KDP’s 7 backend keyword fields. That includes obvious-looking terms like “fantasy books” (53.78 score), “fantasy series” (53.28), and “sci fi books” (48.79). Over a third of the highest-value search terms in both genres are metadata traps if you paste them into your backend slots.

Safe high scorers to build around instead: “fantasy litrpg” (49.45), “dark fantasy” (48.15), “cozy fantasy” (45.91), “scifi horror” (51.35), and “scifi romance” (50.33). And all 3 spellings of the genre name (“science fiction” 61.32, “sci fi” 60.64, “scifi” 57.83) score within a few points of each other, so cover every variant across your metadata.

The Survivorship Trap: Where Bestsellers Live Is Not Where You Should Move

Here is the mistake this data set practically invites you to make.

The Sci-Fi snapshot includes a table of the Kindle categories the Top 100 books are shelved in. The leaders are Military-Space Fleet (8 books), Post-Apocalyptic (8), Military-Space Marine (8), and Cyberpunk (7). The obvious conclusion is that those are the categories to target.

Now cross-reference the genre report, which measures those exact categories against their competition. Space Fleet: a 2.6 sales-to-competition ratio, classified Beaten Track Mainstream. Space Marine: a 1.7 ratio, Beaten Track Mainstream, and down 84% over 12 months. Post-Apocalyptic: 1.2. Cyberpunk: 1.5. Not one of them is a hot niche. Space Marine is one of the worst-performing categories in the entire genre.

Both facts are true at once. A category can host 8 bestsellers and still be a terrible place to launch a career, because the shelf count tells you where the winners ended up, not where a new book has room to breathe. It counts survivors. Meanwhile Cozy Fantasy, the single best opportunity in the genre report at a 23.1 ratio, places zero books on the Sci-Fi Top 100, because it is not a sci-fi category at all.

Read the 2 documents together and the lesson is sharp: the categories with the most bestsellers are usually the most contested. Shelf counts are a map of past victories. Sales-to-competition ratios and trend lines are a map of open ground. Only one of those helps you decide what to write next.

Two more cautions on reading the raw Sci-Fi list. Romance has colonized it, with roughly 15 to 20 of the Top 100 being sci-fi romance titles and LitRPG claiming another large block, so the “Science Fiction” list now measures 3 overlapping readerships. And a few shelf counts do corroborate the trend data rather than contradict it: LGBTQ+ Science Fiction places 5 books and GameLit & LitRPG places 4, both categories the genre report independently marks as rising or undersupplied.

What Authors Should Do With All This

• Sci-fi writers, come back. The 18-month rank trend, the Google search spike, and the cleaner post-category-limit data are the strongest demand signals the genre has shown since the pandemic. Aim at Adventure, Dystopian, and Space Exploration. Think twice before launching a colonization saga or space marine series into a 90-percent-class decline, no matter how many bestsellers are currently shelved there.
• Never pick a category off a bestseller shelf count. Cross-check every target against its sales-to-competition ratio and its 12-month trend. Popular categories are crowded categories.
• Fantasy writers, pick your lane. KU plus $4.99 to $6.99 plus a planned series is the indie playbook that captures 83% of the money. Wide plus premium pricing works only with tradpub muscle or a screen deal behind it.
• Price with confidence. Sci-fi’s sweet spot is $5.99. Fantasy’s indie lane tops out at $6.99, and epic fantasy readers pay $11 and up. The market absorbed 18 months of price increases without flinching.
• Write long, write series, keep the craft high. 428 to 537 pages, 5-plus book arcs, and a 1.1% bad-review floor is what the lists reward.
• Treat turnover as your opening. Half to three-quarters of these lists refresh every 6 months. Velocity breaks in.
• Above all, respect the dilution math. Flat demand plus 18% more supply means the average book earns less every month. The counter-move is not writing faster into broad categories. It is positioning into the Cozy, LitRPG, and YA Dark Fantasy gaps where demand still outruns supply, and building the author brand that survives a million-title flood.

Sources:

K-lytics: E-Book Market Research, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Premium Edition, June 2026

K-lytics: Science Fiction Top 100 Market Snapshot, June 2026

K-lytics: Fantasy Top 100 Market Snapshot, June 2026

K-lytics members area: SF&F 2026 Summer Edition seminar and bonus reports

Wikipedia: Dungeon Crawler Carl publishing history and rights structure

Matt Dinniman official site

Jonathan: Don’t go where the bestsellers are. That ground is already taken. Go to open ground. Use the sales-to-competition ratios and the trend lines, see where the trend is going, and set up your beachhead there. Then you’ll be established when the tide of readers hits.

I was the same way when I started out in fantasy. I released In Darkness Cast at premium pricing and I tried to go wide. I’ve learned that if I want more books going out to more people, I’m in KU. That’s just how it has to be. I want to be wide and I want premium pricing, but that’s not the way this market works in fantasy right now.

Bryan: One caveat. I’m a publishing consultant, and I usually work with brand new authors publishing their first book. They’re already dealing with a learning curve. Craft of writing, editing, publishing, marketing, maybe audiobooks if they’re going that route. It takes time to get the infrastructure in place. Stay within the Amazon ecosphere until you have six to 10 books out and an established reader baseline, just for the sake of your learning curve.

The recommendation to be in KU, price well, and write in a series holds, unless it’s your first book. Please don’t make your first book the gateway to the rest of the series, because your first book had better be the worst book you ever wrote. People read it and go, “Eh, it was okay. Wasn’t bad.” They’re not going to read through books two, three, four, five, and six.

Get some standalones out there first, establish yourself in the genre, and don’t chase genre. If you’re a cozy mystery writer and you start doing fantasy, you’re establishing a new pen name.

Jonathan: You want to kill your series? Write a worse book than your first one.

Zeitgeist: How Shifting Public Attitudes on the U.S. Military Are Reshaping Storytelling

Jonathan: We chose this zeitgeist because Bryan and I are both veterans. We want to talk about military culture, and about how authors can use it to write more realistically. Less bad guy, more nuance.

We’re going to give you a lot of context, and we’re going to take shots at each other. It’s going to be a good time.

“Thank You for Your Service” Might Be Going Away

US military recruitment has rebounded strongly since late Biden years and continues to exceed goals under Trump, with all branches meeting or surpassing targets amid the 2026 Iran War.

Biden Administration Context (FY2022–FY2024)

Recruitment faced significant challenges early on. In FY2022 and FY2023 there were major shortfalls, especially in the Army, which missed its goals by thousands, running roughly 15,000 short in one year. The Navy and Air Force also struggled, and levels were the lowest in years, attributed to post-Afghanistan withdrawal perceptions, economic factors, and eligibility issues. FY2024 (October 2023 through September 2024, mostly under Biden) brought a strong rebound, with total accessions rising about 12.5% to roughly 225,000 from 200,000 the prior year, driven by improvements from prep courses, bonuses, and strategy tweaks that started before the election. The uptick predated Trump’s return, per Defense Department data and analyses.

Trump Administration (FY2025–FY2026)

FY2025 (October 2024 through September 2025, a transition year) marked the best recruiting in 15+ years. The Army brought in 62,050 recruits, 101.72% of its 61,000 goal. The Navy brought in 44,096, or 108.61% of 40,600. The Air Force brought in 30,166, or 100.22% of 30,100. The Space Force brought in 819, or 102.89% of 796. The Marines brought in 26,600, hitting 100% of goal, for an overall average of roughly 103% across branches.

FY2026 (ongoing as of July 2026) shows branches hitting goals early, with some goals raised higher, such as the Navy’s 10% increase. The Navy reached 45,000 three months ahead of schedule, and the Army, Air Force, Space Force, and Marines are also on or ahead of pace.

Key factors cited include improved pay, bonuses, and the Future Soldier Prep Course, all built on Biden-era foundations. The Trump and Hegseth emphasis on “warrior ethos,” a reduced diversity focus, and leadership changes also feature heavily, along with economic and job market signals and a surge in patriotism.

Impact of 2026 Iran War

Limited direct data ties the conflict to recruitment spikes. The war began in early 2026 amid US/Israel-Iran tensions. There is no evidence of a major negative hit, and numbers remain robust into July 2026. Some attribute sustained strength to demonstrated military action and “strength” messaging.

Implications for Authors: Geopolitical events like the Iran conflict can boost defense-related book sales, thriller genres, or policy analysis titles. Track DoD reports for real-time data.

Sources

DoD/PRHome Recruiting Data

AP Fact Check on Trends

War.gov FY25 Summary

Deseret News on 2026 Progress

Additional DoD, USAFacts, and branch reports.

Jonathan: The American people aren’t as patriotic as they used to be, but the big holdover was that everyone would say, “Thank you for your service.” No matter who they were, that’s what they said. Lately, that hasn’t been the case.

It’s always awkward when someone says it because they have no idea what I did.

It comes out of the backlash against ICE, or the National Guard going into places, or the fact that the military answers to a commander in chief who happens to be one of the most hated human beings on the planet. There’s a lot of association going on right now.

At the very least it’s segmenting. It used to be across the board. Now the first question is, “Who did you vote for?” MAGA is still strongly pro-patriotic, but a lot of it is done out of ignorance. They see a uniform and say, “Thank you for your service,” to a hobo in the middle of the street. The time of “Thank you for your service” is done.

Different Military Cultures

Jonathan: What Bryan and I want to discuss is the divide between civilian United States culture and the warrior culture of the military. When you join the military, you’re joining a culture, and which culture depends entirely on the branch.

We’re both veterans, but we come from very different subcultures. The Marine Corps is a very different place than the Army. We do different things. Marines go eat stuff, and then the Army moves in and takes care of it. You do not want Marines living in your town.

Bryan: We have a word for Marines. Cannon fodder. You send them in, let them take all the bullets, and then you come in behind them and sweep.

Jonathan: My dad calls us the rocks they load into catapults. Meat shields, meat sponges, we have all the names, because Marines are really good at going in and breaking stuff. We’re hyper-aggressive, we make terrible decisions, and we destroy. Then we leave, because you don’t want us to stay. If you have any questions about that, ask Okinawa.

Our culture comes from what we’re required to do, but also from what we love. I didn’t buy a class ring for high school. I bought one for my boot camp graduation. I wrote an article on my blog called “The Man of Two Rings,” one being my wedding ring and one being my boot camp ring. They represent the two spheres of my life.

I’ll love a woman and be her greatest dream, and I’ll be the worst nightmare of anyone who tries to hurt her. I prepared my whole life for that. I scared some Marines when they dropped profanity around my wife. I told them, “My wife is a lady. I’m going to hurt you, and you know I can hurt you.”

The culture of the Army is something totally different, and sometimes it confuses me. I’m always asking, “Why we aren’t charging?” My brother-in-law is Army, he’s EOD, and he says they just watch Marines go. The Army is about infrastructure, maintaining, and protecting.

Bryan: We do logistics. You win battles with combat power, but you win wars with beans and bullets. The supply systems and the infrastructure get food, ammunition, and fuel into theater.

I was an acquisition officer in Iraq, and the Marines had these real cool things called MRAP vehicles. The Army was driving over landmines in Humvees, and we’d up-armored the outside so it was like a big giant turtle. When you run over a landmine in a turtle, it blows up inside and contains everything. It just kills everybody.

The Marines had big, tall trucks with V-shaped bottoms, so when a mine blows up underneath, the blast gets redirected out both sides. Somebody decided we needed that for everybody in Iraq, not just the Marines, so the Army stepped in and took over the whole acquisition program. They were going to field maybe 10,000 vehicles. We put in 300,000 in a third of the time.

The Marines were the forerunners, though. They tried it, tested it, and proved it worked. The Army systematized it.

The Air Force is a different culture too, but there are common elements across all of them, and one is a core value on leadership. It just gets expressed in very different ways, and those differences can shape how you write a villain or a hero in your book.

Historical Overview

Jonathan: Let’s go over some recent history of how our military is changing, because it’s affecting “thank you for your service,” and it’s affecting the quality of the recruits going in.

Vietnam was a bad time for the military. Nobody liked the military because we were perceived to have lost, and there were a lot of allegations directed at the soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen who took part. They were spat upon.

Then we got a resurgence of patriotism in the Gulf War, which we won handily. We destroyed Iraq’s military in a week, maybe two, and recruitment numbers were much better.

Then came the Global War on Terror, and that’s when thank you for your service culture got huge. Everyone was thanking service members, and it was good. A lot of the benefits and the disability programs came up in that period, and we got the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which helped a lot of service members find careers after the service.

Before COVID, the military attracted men who were looking for adventure, because the United States is topographically unassailable. You can’t invade us. To get to us, you have to cross one of two oceans, come through the wasteland of Canada, or come up through Mexico, which presents a whole bunch of its own problems even though it’s probably the most viable invasion vector. Illegal immigration is the worst invasion we’ve faced in a long time.

That safety created a culture where we go to war and war does not come to us. Our most adventurous young men are the ones who join, whether as officers or enlisted, and we go out to war and prove things to ourselves. We’re just about the only ones in the world who do that. Everyone else is fighting wars on their own soil. Russia and Ukraine are being invaded. Europe has centuries upon centuries of being invaded.

In the GWOT era, those young men also used the military to improve their families. We could get house loans. We could go to college. It was a way for the wage slave class to improve their lot if they took advantage of the opportunity.

Then we hit the COVID era, and suddenly we weren’t being adventurous anymore. You were mandated to take the vaccine or be thrown out, and a lot of our most principled young men chose to get thrown out. I’m good friends with a guy who was ejected from the Air Force for refusing it. It was a long three years of “you obey lawful orders” and “this is not a lawful order,” and what it did was reduce the number of principled men in the ranks.

Bryan: It actually did two things. It pushed out the ones who were already in and didn’t want the vaccine, and it kept out the ones who never came in.

My stepson had always wanted to be a Marine. It was his dream, and COVID hit right at his prime enlistment window. He said no. The vaccine mandate was one reason. He wasn’t going to have somebody mandate what he had to stick in his body. The other was the woke culture. He was very disenchanted, and he gave up and never went in. He would have been a great Marine.

Jonathan: At the same time, recruiting was way down because we had a commander in chief who was considered weak. Joe Biden didn’t present well publicly. People don’t want to join the military when the commander in chief looks weak, especially not if you’re an adventurous young man seeking strength. What you got was a bunch of people who joined for the benefits, which is not what you want.

Bryan: It sickens me that the military was using my tax dollars and your tax dollars to do sex change operations for soldiers. People were enlisting because they wanted a sex change operation and couldn’t afford it. It’s elective surgery, and those things cost tens of thousands of dollars, but you could enlist and get it done for free because the military adopted a gender affirmation policy.

Jonathan: Those policies were demoralizing at the same time. Soldiers get one elective surgery for their first term of service, so I wanted to do LASIK, because I’m very blind. If you ever look through my glasses, you’ll understand.

The problem was that I could never get the time off. I was mission essential. I was the senior linguist on the watch floor, all reports ran through me, and I ran most of the intel analysis for southern Iraq during the height of the ISIS conflict.

None of us who were working the mission could get time off for elective surgery. The one person who got it was the one we had to kick off the watch floor because she wasn’t good at her job. That was a shot in the gut for retention, because you can see how the priorities go. The people who don’t do anything are the ones who get the benefits, and the rest of us just work harder because now we have to cover her spot too.

What happened to “Be all that you can be”?

Jonathan: I will say, though, that the Army came up with the best ads in that period.

Bryan: The Marines have always had the best ads. I admit it. The Army ads were another sign of the times.

When I signed up it was “Be all that you can be.” That was a good one. Then we went to “An Army of One.” What the heck is that? We’re not one, we’re a team. It was very individualistic. It pointed at the benefits you can have and the things you can achieve, and the teamwork was de-emphasized. We’ve gone through five more slogans since I got out, and we’d been “Be all you can be” for 100 years.

Jonathan: My favorite was the one right after that, “Army Strong.” It’s almost Frankenstein talking. Army strong, fire bad.

Bryan: The same thing happened at West Point. Part of our mission statement was “To prepare leaders for the Army, to lead people into combat and defend our country.” They changed it to “Producing leaders for our country.” That’s so vague. If you want to be a leader for the country, go to Harvard or Yale or the University of Texas at Austin. If you go to West Point, your job is to get out and lead in the Army.

Jonathan: Recruitment dropped through COVID, and then President Trump got back into office a couple of years ago and the numbers spiked again. I wanted to know how much the Iran conflict was contributing, because typically when we’re winning a war, people want to join and you see a spike. There’s no reliable data yet, only anecdote, so I can’t give you that piece.

What I can point to is Pete Hegseth as secretary of war, which was a great rebranding. The Department of Defense sounds like something very different from the Department of War, and the people who want to join the military for that reason like the Department of War. We like winning.

Bryan: The very first department was the Department of War. We’re just getting back to the original name.

What is zero-defect culture doing to military leaders?

Jonathan: Last year Hegseth gave a military-defining speech to all the top brass across the armed services, and he was redefining the culture. The piece most helpful to authors crafting protagonists and antagonists is the idea of zero-defect culture. Bryan, you were an officer in the Army. Tell me what zero-defect culture is.

Bryan: It crept in over a very long period of time. It didn’t happen in two or three years.

Everybody gets an Officer Evaluation Report at least every six months, and sometimes more often depending on transitions between jobs. If you don’t get top block from your senior rater, your career is done. You’ll never get promoted past that. The result is that soldiers start to think, “I can’t make any mistakes, because if I make a mistake I get a two block or a three block and I’m finished.”

That mindset wrecks leadership. The job of a real leader is to provide everything his team needs, whether it’s a platoon, a battalion, or a division. The training, the equipment, the supplies, all of it, and then to shield them from everything coming down from the top. If it goes well, your team did it. If there was a problem, you own it, because you’re the one in charge.

You don’t get that mindset in a zero-defect environment. You get deflection. “It wasn’t me, it was my platoon sergeant, or my first sergeant, or my sergeant major.”

Jonathan: Take the credit, pass the blame.

Bryan: Which is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing.

The other thing that developed alongside it is “Up or out.” You used to have spec fives and spec sixes, not just spec fours, so you could be the best darn tank driver there was and still progress up to E6 rather than getting stuck at E4. You can’t do that anymore. You have to move into leadership, up or out.

The same is true in the officer ranks. If you wanted to make a career of the military, you had to adopt a zero-defect mentality, but the military is about taking risk.

Jonathan: When you de-incentivize risk at the level of the decision-makers, how are we supposed to do our jobs? I’m supposed to go charge that machine gun nest. That’s risky. We want to mitigate the risk, because I don’t want to get shot, but the nest is covering a vital supply route and shooting at Army supply trucks. How are we going to steal anything from the Army if the supply trucks don’t come back? We have to do this.

If the LT says we can’t do anything because it might look bad on his OER, he’s not a war fighter. He’s not a war winner.

Bryan: You can’t win that way. Jonathan said something before we came on camera that I thought was hugely insightful, about the transition that happens when an officer loses somebody.

Jonathan: We had a warning we passed on to our Marines. Never be an officer’s first. Never be his first NJP, never be his first fraternization case, and never be a second lieutenant’s first command.

Our theory was that the way you make a good officer is when he loses Marines. In school they learn theory. Be the best, be top of the class, answer before anyone else, volunteer for everything, push, push, push. It’s a shark tank. When you see young Marine officers around each other, it’s blood in the water. Destroy weakness, be first, because if you’re not first you’re last.

Then they get their first command, and being first and being best causes them to lose Marines. That’s when they stop, and one of two things happens. Either you get zero-defect culture, where the lesson is, I never want that to happen again because it looked bad on my record and my ego can’t take it. Or it makes them good officers, and from then on they gauge the level of risk they’re willing to expose their Marines to instead of gauging what advances their career.

Bryan: You should go see Young Washington. It came out about a week ago, and you’ll see exactly what he’s talking about portrayed in there. Keep in mind that an author wrote that. It fits the historical context of what really happened, but the dramatic presentation was an author’s work, and he captured that idea exceptionally well.

Jonathan: I haven’t gotten a chance to see it yet. Historically, though, that was the defining moment of Washington’s life, the one that turned him into the leader we know. The fearless risk-taker who knew how to take care of his people, who would pray that God would provide for his army but wouldn’t allow them to retreat from the British. He’s complicated.

How do you make a great officer? You do it by losing people. Sometimes you make mistakes, and sometimes you do the best you can and people die anyway. Learning how to absorb that steadies you. It sobers you. It ages you.

Bryan: It’s understanding the consequences, that what you’re dealing with is war and combat and people’s lives, and that it’s not about me and my career and my advancement. It’s about the mission and taking care of the soldiers.

Jonathan: For us it was two things, troop welfare and mission accomplishment, equally weighted. Take care of your Marines, take care of the bad guys, and those mean two very different things.

Bryan: That’s the hard thing about military command. Sometimes you have to make the decision that you’re going to lose people. There’s no way around it, but the mission is higher than that, as long as it’s a worthy mission given to you by the right people.

How do you write a last stand that means something?

Jonathan: I wrote a novel called Semper Die, and this is exactly what I was exploring in it.

Hollywood loves the line, “To the last man.” They love it because the character who says it doesn’t know the men under him, because the writer never did that level of thing. When you know Sanchez, when you know Freeman, when you know Ottinger, and you still say to the last man, it means you’re all aligned to confront something greater than yourselves. You won’t fall back and you won’t step back, because there are thousands behind you who need you to stay. So you’ll stay, and you’ll watch each other die. That’s a powerful moment.

Then you go through the last stand and the people dying are friends, brothers, family, the most precious things in your life. That’s what makes a great version of that story. The casual, blase version that people like to throw out there means you don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know the pain that goes into that kind of loss. Especially as the officer, because it’s your fault. Every life is on you.

Bryan: For the guy with the weapon in his hand, it’s about him and his buddy in the next foxhole. On top of fighting together as a team, you also have to have a basic belief in what you’re fighting for. If you don’t believe in it, you won’t stay.

Jonathan: There must be shared values, and what happens a lot is that the enlisted and the officers have split values.

The enlisted want to go home at 1700, and on Fridays at noon. That’s the goal. Get everything done so we can go home. Officers typically didn’t go home until 1800 or 1900, and God help you if the officer decided you needed to stay too. So you have bad priorities on the enlisted side, “We want to go home,” and bad priorities on the officer side, “I need this on my OER.”

I worked a 13-hour shift overnight one night, 1800 to 0600, and then we PT’d, and our captain decided he needed a mental health seminar at 0900. We were furious because we knew what was happening. He needed it on his OER to show he was taking care of his Marines by bringing in a third-party mental health provider.

I felt bad for the ladies teaching it, because it wasn’t their fault, but they passed around a sign-up sheet that said you came to this voluntarily. None of us signed it. They said, “We don’t get paid unless you sign.” We told them we weren’t there voluntarily, we were ordered to be there, and it was a waste of our time.

I had to sleep. I had work again that night, and instead I was sitting there being yelled at about my mental health. About three quarters of us eventually signed it, for their sake, since we were stuck there regardless. Our captain was extremely upset with us.

Bryan: In that case it sounds like it was his initiative, but another aspect of zero-defect culture is that somebody trips over something and now there’s mandatory annual training for everybody. You stack these things up until you can spend six, seven, or eight days a month doing mandatory training that is all ridiculous. It’s compliance dictated from on high, because the military can’t have you doing anything that might hurt you.

Jonathan: We would have three days of computer work, sitting and clicking through slides on stupid stuff that boiled down to don’t assault people, don’t be openly sexist, and don’t crash your motorcycle. I don’t have a motorcycle. Well, don’t crash it.

We had tricks for it. If you turned on the closed captions, you could read the slides and never watch the videos. Then you took the little quiz, which you can’t fail because you can retake it as many times as you want.

How can we change military culture?

Bryan: There has been a very significant culture shift, and it happens over a long period of time. Part of it is direction from on high, but part of it is thinning out the people who made it to the most senior positions because they were yes men. Your highest ranking general officers, your highest ranking sergeants major. It takes time. You can’t just replace them. You can appoint a secretary of war. You can’t appoint a four-star general. They have to grow.

A lot of this came in during the eight years of Obama. Trump won saying he was going to drain the swamp, but he didn’t understand where the swamp was. He didn’t realize that the people who had grown up under that system and then been promoted into senior leadership were part of the problem.

I remember the chain teaching when we went to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell under Clinton. Before that, the answer was simply that the military is not a place for you if you have different sexual preferences. The chain teaching was mandatory. Read this briefing verbatim, don’t insert any of your own words, and it had to come from the senior leader, which in a battalion was almost always the lieutenant colonel, or the company commander at the lower levels. They had to read it, and you could look in their eyes and they were dead-faced, reading out this policy of what was “right and wrong.”

That thinned out a generation and grew a group of people through the Obama years who were then put into senior leadership positions during the Biden administration. Like it or not, and there are lots of things to like and dislike about Trump, this administration came in and took out that entire cadre of leaders who had grown up in that system.

That’s part of changing the culture across the military. I don’t know whether it’s going to be successful. It’s not the only thing, and it takes more than one presidential term. They certainly came in strong and said we need to change the culture of our military. We have to reinstill a sense of patriotism, that you’re fighting for your country because you believe in your country, not because you believe your country has exploited everybody in history and taken advantage of the third world.

You have to believe your country is good, that we were founded on Judeo-Christian principles of honesty and freedom. We were the first experiment in this. They tried it a little during the Roman Republic, and we modeled a little off that, but we were the first truly successful representative democracy in history.

What does disillusionment do to a soldier?

Jonathan: You can do this with your heroes, your antagonists, and your side characters, and the tool is disillusionment.

Take what Bryan just said about bringing freedom to people in the world. Based on when I was in, I would say half the military doesn’t believe we do that. They would tell me we’re terrible at what we do and we’re not making anyone’s life better. I had to throw stats at them. Did you know that in Afghanistan, for the first time, a whole generation of girls got to go to school? That happened because we were there and we built schools for them. Then Biden pulled us out and the Taliban destroyed all of it. That’s where a lot of the disillusionment comes from. Nothing we do matters.

Bryan: We abandoned in place the Afghans who were helping us. Most of them were killed the next day. We announced in advance that we were leaving on a date regardless of conditions, and that we were leaving behind the people who had helped us. We left them to be murdered. It was criminal.

Jonathan: It hurt our guys, the ones who spent their careers in Afghanistan. The Army built the schools and the roads and the infrastructure. The Marines were fighting in Helmand, taking on the Taliban directly, but behind us was the Army building everything that was going to make life better for the people there.

When we got pulled out against our will, we lost all of it, and the suicide rate skyrocketed. It was awful. I remember reaching out to so many of my guys. Hey, are you okay? Reach out to this guy, I haven’t heard from him in a while. We were all checking on each other because we were losing guys like crazy, because nothing we did mattered.

For a lot of men, joining the military and fighting for freedom is the greatest thing they’ll ever do, until they get out, go to college, get a job, and work nine to five to feed their family. That one time in the military, when you hung out with your bros and drove tanks and fought for freedom, that’s the best you’re ever going to be. That’s how it ended. There was anger, and there was a lot of giving up.

Put that in your stories. If you want to attack your hero, do it through a bureaucratic administration. Do it through someone more concerned with ladder climbing and keeping a clean record than with doing the right thing. When strong men with guns are held back from fighting enemies, you destroy those men. It just eats them.

Bryan: It’s a fourth turning theme, so it’s very relevant right now. If you capture it correctly, it will resonate. I know it will resonate with military people, but I think it also resonates in the broader culture, and you can help re-inspire a new generation of patriotism and give people a country worth being proud of.

Jonathan: Reject the zero-defect culture. Have your characters reject it. Have them be brave and take risks. Have them be strong. Have them choose to sacrifice. Take that young kid, the new PFC in the squad, and have his ideals vindicated. Don’t crush him. Give him the hope and the fighting spirit that will preserve a young man and let him become who he is supposed to be later on.

The stories matter for this, guys. Military culture is shaped by movies. Did you know the military didn’t used to swear the way it does now? Movies in the sixties and seventies came out with a bunch of military people swearing, and all the kids who watched them went into the military and started swearing, and it changed the whole culture.

Bryan: I don’t believe that.

Jonathan: Swearing like a sailor was one thing, but it wasn’t as bad as it is now. I used to correct my guys. There are families over there, so get a hold on your mouth. If you can’t control your mouth, I’m not giving you a weapon. We had some heart-to-hearts, and I got in some fights over it.

Stories and fiction inform a young man or a young woman about what to be in the military. Either they need to resist that culture or they need to become a better part of it. Fiction tells them what they’re supposed to do, which is why military members in your stories, good guys or bad guys, need to be done right.

There are no mwah-ha-ha bad guys in the military. Everybody thinks they’re the good guy. I heard a line, I think on The Good Doctor, that “that’s just reality” is what people say right before they do something wrong. The compromises you feel like you have to make are what makes a bad guy in the military. Well, it’s a zero-defect culture and I can’t have a bad OER. Well, you have to go fight a war, bro.

Bryan: If you’re going to write a military character into your novels, go find one. There are a bunch out there. About 5% of the population is in the military or has been, so go find somebody and talk to them about what it was like.

Jonathan: If you really want to know, understand that this person is going to filter themselves for you. Put them in a room with four or five other veterans and you’ll hear exactly what it was like, because they’ll stop caring about you and start having fun with their buddies.

Bryan: Do it now, because they’re disappearing very quickly. If you know somebody who served in World War II, find them and learn those life lessons. We’re losing that generation.

One of my Amazon ads clients wrote a whole bunch of books on World War II based on interviews with individual veterans, and those books are selling like crazy. He’s making tens of thousands of dollars a month on them. I’m thankful for him, because he’s preserving those stories and they’re important to our national culture.