Rebecca Yarros’s first novel found her an agent, and then nothing. It “died on submission,” an ordinary fate that authors rarely admit to in public. She went back to the keyboard anyway once her husband, a US Army veteran who had already been seriously injured once, deployed to Afghanistan. The military romance she wrote to work through that, Full Measures, became her debut instead of the fantasy manuscript nobody had bought.
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Around twenty romance novels later, Yarros published a dragon novel called Fourth Wing. By the time its two sequels reached shelves, she had built the readership her first book never found. On 21 January 2025, more than 1,000 midnight parties marked the release of the third one, Onyx Storm. Bookshops from Liverpool to Los Angeles staged fancy dress, quizzes and cake to send it into the world.
By the week’s end, two different counts disagreed about how big that launch really was. The tally that ran across the trade press, drawn from the New York Times, put first-week sales at more than 2.7 million copies. Circana BookScan counted far fewer: about 1.3 million copies at outlets in its network. That figure split between roughly 1.1 million of the $32.99 deluxe edition and 179,000 of the cheaper $29.99 standard edition.
How big was the launch, really
The BookScan figure covers only outlets that report to Circana. The two counts describe the same week. They simply describe different parts of it, and the gap between them rarely survives into a headline.
The publisher had planned for scale before either count existed. Little, Brown told the BBC this was its biggest pre-ordered title since publishing the Harry Potter stage play script back in 2016. Waterstones expected the book to “completely eclipse” its first-day sales of the previous instalment. The deluxe edition alone carried a first print run of two million copies. Five months before publication, pre-orders alone were already enough to put the book on bestseller charts.
It was not the only title behaving this way that season. Two months earlier, Taylor Swift’s self-published Eras Tour Book had sold just over 814,000 copies in its first week, though only through an exclusive arrangement with Target rather than the ordinary bookshop trade. Onyx Storm reached bookshops generally. Barnes & Noble alone sold more than 200,000 copies of the combined print editions. The Empyrean novels took four of the first five places on the BookScan bestseller list that week, alongside Mel Robbins’s The Let Them Theory. The launch also lifted the first two books, which together sold roughly 88,000 copies that week. Within weeks, Yarros’s publisher said the Empyrean series as a whole, across all three books, had sold more than 12 million copies.
Where the idea came from
Yarros was a romance novelist for most of her career before she was a fantasy one. By the time Fourth Wing appeared in 2023, she had written around twenty romance novels and sat in what publishing calls the midlist. Of that stretch of her career, she has said: “It’s wild. I almost quit.”
What kept her at the desk was partly circumstance and partly a lifelong habit. She had read romance from the age of twelve and loved Anne McCaffrey’s dragon novels long before writing her own, which makes the swerve into fantasy look less sudden than it seemed from outside. What eventually broke through paired a war-college setting with the dragons she had always wanted to write.
The book that resulted follows Violet Sorrengail, a 20-year-old thrust into brutal dragon-rider training at the fictional Basgiath War College, and her enemies-to-lovers romance with Xaden Riorson. Violet shares a detail with her author: both have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic condition that means Violet dislocates joints and breaks bones easily. By the third book, Violet’s task has shifted from surviving the college to recruiting allies against an invading force the novels call the “dark wielders”. In Onyx Storm, the kingdoms of Navarre and Poromiel form an uneasy alliance against those magic-wielding invaders.
What it took to make this one
Iron Flame, the second book, came out in November 2023, only about six months after Fourth Wing. Onyx Storm took longer: more than a year passed between Iron Flame’s release in November 2023 and Onyx Storm’s on 21 January 2025. “A lot of Iron Flame shook my confidence,” she has said. What restored enough of it to finish the next dragon book was, by her own account, a contemporary romance she wrote in between called Variation.
The wait had its own milestones. The cover appeared on 8 July 2024, more than six months ahead of publication, giving readers something to anticipate before a single chapter was public. When Yarros announced the release date, she told fans to expect “politics, new adventures, old enemies and of course, dragons.”
Anticipation pulled Fourth Wing and Iron Flame back up the charts. Ahead of publication, both returned to the top two places on the New York Times fiction list, and both sat in the top five of the Sunday Times paperback chart in the UK.
Who made it
Yarros’s husband served 22 years in the US Army. He had already been seriously injured once before the deployment that sent her back to writing. She wrote as a mother alongside that career, and Violet’s chronic illness draws directly on her own diagnosis. Fourth Wing’s afterlife has since moved well beyond the page: Amazon MGM Studios is turning it into a television series with the actor Michael B. Jordan producing, and Netflix has separately optioned one of her contemporary romances, In the Likely Event.
Why it landed when it did
Onyx Storm arrived inside a genre that barely existed five years earlier. Romantasy, the blend of romance and fantasy the Empyrean series sits inside, grew out of the pandemic and BookTok recommendations. It moved from a niche offshoot of young-adult fiction into what one Guardian editorial called “a once-in-a-generation phenomenon”. In the year before Onyx Storm’s release, the market share of science-fiction and fantasy books rose by more than 41%. The wider romantasy genre took in around 30 million sales in 2024 alone, the New York Times has reported. Yarros followed Sarah J. Maas, credited with driving much of that growth through her A Court of Thorns and Roses series.
Fans built whole identities around the books. More than 125,000 TikTok posts were tagged #OnyxStorm around the release. They did so on a platform where the wider BookTok hashtag already carried 41.3 million posts of its own. At a Barnes & Noble launch party in Los Angeles, Yarros greeted the queue in a glittering black gown, her hair dyed violet.
At Waterstones in Trafalgar Square, a 23-year-old nail technician named Mollie Short collected a goody bag and took part in a costume quiz before midnight. She called the appeal of the series pure escape: “it’s not your everyday kind of thing”. Nearly 60 Waterstones branches in the UK opened early or stayed open past midnight for the release. More than 180,000 copies sold in the UK on the first day alone. At the Liverpool party, fans made friendship bracelets and decorated tote bags while they waited. In Portsmouth, a teaching assistant called the party friendly “because we all went for the same purpose”. In the US, some readers stayed up until three in the morning for an exclusive Target edition, then complained on social media that the retailer’s website could not handle the demand.
Rebekah West, an editorial director at Little, Brown’s Piatkus imprint, told the Telegraph that this level of fan devotion was something unmatched “since the days of Harry Potter”. Yarros marked publication day with a numbered message to fans on Instagram, thanking them for sharing the experience and telling them to “enjoy the ride”.
Not every reader agreed
The sales record and the reviews told different stories. A critic for Kirkus argued that, given the book’s length, “there wasn’t room for genuine character development” beyond a gesture toward its world. On Goodreads, Onyx Storm opened at 4.56 out of five but had slipped to 4.34 within three weeks, the lowest of the three books so far. The verdict did nothing to the sales figures. By the Friday after release, the standard edition was the 10th-bestselling book on Amazon, the deluxe edition sat at No. 23, and the novel topped Barnes & Noble’s own bestseller page. Yarros’s own response, posted to Instagram, was shorter than any review: “Astounded and so very grateful.”
What’s left
Two books remain in the planned five-book series. She still writes contemporary romance and fantasy in parallel, and says the romance is what pulls a story back to its characters instead of only its plot. What she has not settled is the pace: more than a year passed before Onyx Storm, against about six months between the first two books. The harder question left over is whether Circana and the New York Times will ever agree on how many copies got there first.
