Why I’m betting on writing fiction in an age of AI slop
I’ve wanted to write fiction stories for over a decade, but I always found ways to get in my own way.
The dream sat in a drawer while I built a non-fiction career, wrote seven non-fiction books, grew an audience of 190,000 people, and convinced myself that blogging, coaching and writing emails was close enough to the creative work my soul actually wanted.
It was close, but it wasn’t quite it.
So a few months ago, I committed to writing my first novel, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller called North of Nothing, and I made it a non-negotiable practice.
I spend at least an hour on it every day. Sometimes more than four. I protect the hours like an angry badger protects its sett. It is the most energising thing I’ve done in fifteen years of working online.
Here’s why I’m betting on fiction in the coming years:
1. The AI slop flood is your opportunity.
Everyone and their grandma can now generate 60,000 words of bland, soulless fiction in a weekend.
You can literally just tell Claude to write a book, and in a few minutes, it’s done. But these stories are poor. They lack creative discernment, are often incoherent in their story structure, and don’t actually represent any of the creative choices that make it yours. And writing a story that is truly yours is the best part.
Amazon will see an upsurge in novels that are purely AI-generated, reading like microwave meals prepared by committee. It’s technically complete, but spiritually dead, and an author without the satisfaction of having created something of their own.
This is brilliant news for current and aspiring fiction authors.
Readers are not stupid. They can feel the difference between a book assembled and one crafted. When the shelves are full of slop, genuine quality stands out, especially when written by someone who builds a personal and relatable brand around their writing.
The writers who slow the F down, who craft the ideas and the words with intention and finesse, who make creative decisions a machine cannot make, and who bring their own taste and obsessions to the work are going to own the next decade of fiction.
Whether they use AI in their process or not, the final quality is what wins.
The bar for “generic competency” just dropped to zero. The bar for “remarkable” hasn’t moved. And that gap is where a massive opportunity lives.
2. Honouring a creative dream is non-negotiable if you want to stay sane.
I spent over a decade building a career that was good, profitable, and satisfying in many ways, but it wasn’t the thing that really spoke to my soul or my need for the fullest form of creative expression.
Fiction was always there, waiting, and I kept putting it off because non-fiction was working and the timing was never right, and I wasn’t sure I’d be good enough and a hundred other excuses that all boiled down to fear.
When I finally committed to writing this novel, I had more energy. My enthusiasm for ALL my work improved. I started waking up excited again, like I did in the early years when everything was new.
Because when you honour the creative work you’ve been avoiding, you stop leaking energy into the gap between what you’re doing and what you actually want. That gap was costing me more than I realised, and closing it has been important for my mental health and my creative output.
3. AI makes the actual process of writing a novel dramatically more enjoyable.
I use AI every day on my novel. I know, I know. I’m not one of those AI doomers who rage against the smallest hint of AI support for something creative. I’m learning that it’s powerful as heck when used properly, with respect for the tool.
The way I’ve seen it used best is to view myself as a film director would a production crew. I make every creative decision. I choose the characters, the structure, the scenes, the emotional beats, and the voice. I talk with the AI as I construct scenes.
The AI handles the grunt work that used to make novelists lose their minds or quit, things like maintaining continuity across 80,000 words, ensuring all the necessary creative beats and obligatory scenes for a particular genre are included, catching errors, and generating raw material from my detailed scene outlines that I then rewrite. Yes, that means AI writes the first bad draft of my novels. That way, every sentence becomes the bones for the book. Those first drafts are often constructed with more than ten to fifteen runs until decent, with very close creative decision-making on my part. They are not the final sentences.
The output is mine. The voice is mine. The creative architecture is mine. But the process is three to seven times faster, and infinitely more fun, because I get to focus on the parts I actually love instead of the administrative slog that kills most people’s motivation before they reach chapter four.
This is exciting because I believe it opens the door to quality novel-writing that would otherwise have remained shut to thousands of aspiring authors with a vision.
4. Making a solid living from fiction is no longer a pipe dream for brokies.
There was a lot I hadn’t realised about the fiction market in 2025-26.
For example, US adult fiction sales hit $3.26 billion last year, up 12.6%.
The global fiction book market is nearly $11 billion and projected to hit $12.4 billion by 2030. Audiobooks alone are a $2.2 billion market in the US, growing at 13% a year and projected to reach $35 billion globally by 2030.
Self-published authors now capture 51% of ebook unit sales on Amazon. Indie authors account for 56% of the sci-fi top 100 and 49% of romance. The Kindle Unlimited fund paid out $677 million to authors in 2024.
One book every three years doesn’t cut it unless you’re George RR Martin.
But with AI as your creative partner, you can realistically produce multiple quality books a year, and that volume is what turns fiction from a beautiful hobby into a real income. Series beat standalones. With more books, your backlist compounds over time. And the readers are there, spending money, hungry for good stories.
This is all good news for authors who make the most of the current landscape.
5. Fiction is expanding into formats that didn’t exist five years ago.
A novel is no longer just a novel.
It’s an audiobook. It’s a serialised story on Substack or Kindle Vella. It’s a comic adaptation. It’s an AI-narrated audio drama. Heck, it may even be a video game or movie one day. And the tools to create all of these are becoming accessible to solo creators in ways that would have been unthinkable even two years ago.
I look at my novel, and I see a book, yes, but I also see a potential audio series, a graphic novel adaptation, and, maybe, eventually, a film. That might sound delusional. I don’t care. The infrastructure for turning a story into a multi-format experience is being built right now, and the fiction writers who are creating quality stories today are the ones who will have something worth adapting tomorrow.
Paid serialisation on platforms like Substack also means you don’t have to wait until the book is finished to start building an audience and generating revenue from your fiction. You can share the work as you create it.
I plan to start adding serialised novels to my fiction Substack ‘Story Cabin’ soon.
More reasons I’m excited about fiction, worth noting:
6. Fiction readers are the most loyal audience you’ll ever build.
Non-fiction readers follow topics first and authors second. But for fiction readers, they develop a loyalty to your work you won’t see elsewhere.
When someone loves your novel and falls in love with your characters, they buy everything you’ve ever written and everything you write next.
The backlist loyalty in fiction is something non-fiction writers rarely experience, and it compounds in ways that make your income more stable and more predictable with every book you publish.
7. Writing fiction makes all your other writing better.
Since I started writing my novel, my non-fiction emails have become sharper, my articles more vivid, and my ability to hold a reader’s attention has improved. A lot of this also comes down to having a real creative outlet that energises me.
Fiction also teaches you pacing, emotional resonance, subtext, and the discipline of cutting anything that doesn’t earn its place.
Those skills transfer directly into every other form of writing you do.
8. The male reader gap in sci-fi is an interesting market opportunity.
This may be more relevant to me personally, based on the types of stories I put out. I learned that 70% of sci-fi buyers are men, but publishing and agenting skews 78% female. This mismatch leads to new sci-fi releases being selected and shaped by people whose tastes don’t fully reflect what most sci-fi buyers actually want.
Male readers are turning to classics because new releases don’t serve them. An independent UK press launched in 2026 specifically to address this gap.
If you write sci-fi or thriller fiction aimed at male readers, you’re entering one of the most genuinely underserved markets in publishing.
If you’ve got a novel in you and you’ve been putting it off, I get it. I put mine off for years.
But the tools, the market, and the opportunity have never been better aligned than they are right now.
Stay posted here as I share more about this fiction journey in public. Yes, this means I’ll be writing less about online writing and more about fiction.
If you’re interested in hearing more about the latter, stay subscribed. And even if you don’t plan to write fiction, you’ll still gain a ton from what I’m learning in the fiction world.
Toodles for now,
Alex
P.S. You don’t want to publish a book to zero audience.
Online Writing Alchemy shows you how to write stuff that actually builds an audience of people who want to hear more from you.