Can someone still write and have published a good, new Thriller, Fantasy, Science Fiction, or Horror story (with extensive background) nowadays?

With all the plethora of new and highly-detailed movies, Television series’ Fandom and websites—don’t most of the Target audiences indulge their quest for tropes and ideas in these media—rather than getting into a book?

Here’s why I ask.

I won’t say anything too superfluous or boring but I need to get a little into by background,

I was a flunking-out special-ed student in school but was determined I was going to prove everyone wrong. I wrote a book. I hoped to finish it and be published even before getting out of school. I had to go to a Technical school that accepted me but eventually went to college and even got a Masters and usually wrote dissertations en lieu of taking classes because I never did well in classes or majors.

In my late teens, way back in the early 1980s, I DID get a book written and it was really quite good even by today’s standards but my copyeditor from the publisher wanted me to re-write it. I can see why now—a lot of illogical or unexplained extraneous material that should have been footnoted or in an appendix but mostly cut altogether. In my arrogance (subdued but enough to consume me)—I didn’t want to cut anything and also lacked the discipline to get the hashing editing and processing done. Writing a book takes discipline and hard work—the editorial process especially.

When I was a teensy bit more mature, I made the mistake of trying to write for Christian and Disney-type and Hallmark sort of audiences—you know—family oriented—because I was working with kids and families in churches.

In my thirties, in the 1990s, I was really into roll-playing games and had a fanbase, I actually did a lot of gaming by culling together ideas from dark-themed fantasy roleplaying games like Kult, Call of Cthulhu, White Wolf Game Studios, etc. I did a lot of all-nighter and multi-week games with an audience—a lot of work for no money. People said I should write books.

Later still, I became an ordained minister and briefly left the darkness behind except for spiritual warfare and occult themes. I was getting my fill of fantasy, conspiracy and thriller ideas from the internet as I suspect most are. I integrated my fantasy and fiction worlds with the ideas of thousands of others to make them mutually exchangeable but about half was my own spin on things and my own creations—usually grounded in a real-world setting.

I also integrate fantasy themes with ‘out there’ conspiracy theories, U.F.O groups, religious cults (including Urantia and some of the more oblique works of Mormonism) —I do maintain a real-world worldview and a basic Christian framework as it exists in the real world. But I like alien and spiritual warfare fiction in it for the purposes of fiction.

I am unemployed and on disability but someone has taken interest in my work about two years ago so I know it is marketable.

But honestly—I have SO MUCH material to process—I know my IDEAS already have a market— but most who like fantastical themes and fiction and historic fiction—do they still READ BOOKS?

Do books still sell in an age where people can get information and satisfaction from the ideas on the internet and in easier-to-consume movies and television ???

I may be having a midlife crises, but I want to be the writer I never was and always was. I have material, potential and opportunity but maybe lack discipline as I have failed to follow through so many times in the past. But mostly, I wonder if anybody READS new and arcane traditions in books——- in a world so saturated with the Internet. video games, movies, television, and other videogenic media