It is hard to get traction with less than 100k words and being frequent with updates, at least from what I have heard. Otherwise, following that same advice, GL, isekai, and LitRPG are the easiest genres to gain traction with.
However if you want my two cents, I have a rant for you. I have a feeling that SH, and English web novels in general, are in a period of change where stories that break the mold are going to get more and more popular. Where every chapter brings you a noticeable distance towards the end of an arc/story. This means tighter plotting and pacing. Also, I believe that the current popular genres are going to change/metamorphosize. That readers will be looking for less golden finger and/or isekai stories. And that drama, comedy, and tragedy might start trumping traditional power fantasies, however this is my weakest claim imo. In the next section I will get into why. First however, in short, I believe that we will be seeing less power fantasies and more of every other genre until a new meta pops up. In tandem with that more tightly plotted stories will become common.
The main reason is because of AI. I believe that the prevalence of AI slop will push readers and authors into reading/writing more unique stories with a higher emphasis put on plot and character than spectacle and action. AI writing is good at short, ~2 page scenes with clear action. However the more details for it to juggle the worse and worse it gets. Purely LLM generated stories are extremely bland and fall apart the further into the story that the author goes. It will quickly forget characters, their development, items, settings, etc. Power fantasies are realativly simple and, at this point, require unique gimmicks or twists to stand out. All an AI needs to do to seem like the average, or slightly below average, in the genre is follow a formula similar to this, MC gains power, MC defeats villain/obstacle, MC gains power, etcetera.
Getting back on point, this means if a story can be complex and have an approaching direction, scene by scene, it can be seen as a sign that this story was human made and not AI made. LLM assisted stories, where the author asks the AI to rewrite what they wrote, read like an author not knowing which moments are important and which are not, making every sentence have a bland purple color when together. I see this being a fad that will die down, or a weapon of last resort, unless the models get significantly better. In a reaction against such changes I believe that prose and dialogue will become more targeted and weighty, stories/arcs will be plotted scene by scene, or chapter by chapter, and that the popular genres will be in flux.
Of course this is all just opinion.
