Onyx Storm Unleashed: Rebecca Yarros’s Novel Sells 2.7 Million Copies in Its First Week

Rebecca Yarros’s highly anticipated novel Onyx Storm sold an incredible 2.7 million copies in its first week. 

That makes the third Empyrean series novel the fastest-selling novel of the past two decades. Yarros is the face of the popular romantasy genre that had about 30 million sales in 2024 alone according to New York Times. 

Before writing the Empyrean series, Yarros had never written a romantasy novel before.

“I couldn’t write the fantasy without writing the romance,” said Yarros. “The romance is really what causes you to focus inward on internal conflict and character struggles. And it makes an even richer fantasy when you go back to it.”

Yarros doesn’t want to focus on only one of the genres and enjoys combining them.

“I get to balance both, so I honestly can’t imagine ever giving either genre up. They each enrich the other so very much that it would be impossible to let either of them go,” Yarros added. “Writing contemporary allows me to just let my brain go and really explore internal conflicts. And of course, love, because if it doesn’t have love, I’m not interested.”

To put this into context, the last novel to make a big splash in the literary world was , Colleen Hoover’s 2022 novel “It Starts With Us,” which sold 810,000 print copies in its first week. Onyx Storm sold well over a million printed copies alone in its first week. 

And with the release of Onyx Storm, Yarros currently holds the first three spots on The New York Times’s hardcover best-seller list, something that is rarely ever seen. 

There are still two more books in the series and I expect them to surpass the sales of Onyx Storm.   

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