Are Science Fiction And Fantasy Dying?
This Publishers’ Weekly report claims that science fiction and fantasy readership is in the process of declining, with fewer books being purchased every year.
The problem with this report is that it only tracks sales of traditionally published books, and a small subset of traditionally published books at that. It doesn’t track self-published books like mine. Even then, the data sources in the report tend not to be 100% accurate. There are lots and lots of science fiction and fantasy books being written, bought, and read right now, but since they’re self-published the “official” sources don’t notice them. (A good explanation of the phenomenon is here.)
An example may illustrate the point.
In the early 1990s, if you walked into a Best Buy you would see rows and rows of shelves of PC games in colorful cardboard boxes. In 2015, if you walk into a Best Buy, you’ll see maybe one shelf of PC games (mostly various Blizzard titles) in small plastic boxes. The logical conclusion is that PC gaming is in the process of dying…but that overlooks Steam and GOG.com and other online platforms that handle most of the sales of computer games. Once you factor in Steam and GOG, you realize that PC gaming is exploding! And if you count tablets and smartphones as computers, then computer gaming has never been bigger.
The same thing is happening with science fiction and fantasy books. When I typed this post, I looked at the top 20 books for Epic Fantasy on Amazon and the top 20 books for Science Fiction on Amazon US. Of the top 20 Epic Fantasy books, nine of them were self-published, and of the top 20 Science Fiction books, ten of them were self-published. (And I suspect a bunch of the other publishers are actually LLCs or S-corporations created by self-publishers for tax reasons.)
So science fiction and fantasy are doing well, and they’re doing a lot better than they did in the care of traditional publishers. I don’t think the large publishers were actually in a conspiracy to eliminate reading as a form of recreation in the English-speaking world, but they certainly acted as if they were.
-JM
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! How can people be so cruel as not to read the best kind of books?!? Guess you’re going to have to write in the space of those missing books! 😀 😉
I will get to writing, then. 🙂
Completely agree Jon.
I’d say PC gaming is healthier than it ever has been. It is driving the gaming business and computers outside tablets really.
Books are the same way right now.
Everything is digital. I have bought dozens of games in the last few years all online. Haven’t been to a store sense 2007. Same for books sense 2012.
Very true. I think the last game I bought in disc form was SKYRIM, and that was back in 2011. Of course, the first thing the disc did was install Steam.