by James Wallace Harris, Monday, July 2, 2018
Special thanks go to Chuck Litka for directing me to “2018 SFWA Nebula Conference Presentation” at Author Earnings, a website devoted to helping writers find marketing information. This SFWA presentation is a slideshow with an impressive amount of sales data that readers generally don’t get to see. Anyone who writes science fiction, or hopes to be a science fiction writer, should study these slides carefully. Fans of science fiction should find it interesting to know what other fans are buying and how.
The slideshow by Data Guy is mostly focused on sales numbers, but the slide I liked best is #35 – Science Fiction Ebook Unit Sales by Subgenre. Hope Data Guy doesn’t mind if I copy a couple here.
It is disheartening to me that short story collections and anthologies sell so damn little. I’m guessing “Short Stories” means single-author collections. I don’t know why “Anthologies & Short Stories” and “Anthologies” have two separate categories. My other favorite category is “Classics,” and it has sales barely above anthologies.
By the way, “Military SF” is my least favorite kind of science fiction. Growing up in the 1960s I felt like an oddball because I read science fiction. Few people read science fiction before Star Trek and Star Wars. Fans were considered dorks. And when folks did admit they were a science fiction fan, it meant reading science fiction, not watching.
Now I feel like an oddball because I read the least popular kinds of science fiction. Of course, I do love all the sub-genres from “Post-Apocalyptic” to “Exploration.” But I consume them in short stories, novelettes, and novellas. I seldom buy new SF novels anymore. I get the latest Kim Stanley Robinson or the Hugo winners, or the odd SF bestseller like The Martian by Andy Weir. And when I do buy a new science fiction novel, 98% of the time it’s an audiobook.
The impact of audiobooks and ebooks is the main point of Data Guy’s slideshow and the fact that self-publishing is making a huge impact on the genre. Since I’m older, retired, and spend a lot of my reading time consuming mid-20th-century science fiction, I’m not a typical buyer. But it does make me old enough to remember how vastly different book buying was half-a-century ago.
In the 1960s, most science fiction novels came out in paperback. They were mass-market papers, but we didn’t call them that. I don’t think trade paperbacks existed then. At least I don’t remember any. More often than not, paperbacks were purchased from twirling racks in drugstores than bookstores.
Few people bought hardbacks. I joined the Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) in 1967 to collect cheap hardbacks. They’d weren’t bound in cloth, but a thin vinyl-like plastic. Today collectors prize the paperbacks from this era for their covers. True cloth-bound 1st editions are also loved. But are rare. I often end up with old SFBC editions when I order from ABEBooks. (Or I end up with library discards. That’s another cause for depression, that classic SF is so little read that libraries discard them.)
The first new bookstore I shopped at when I was 16, had three shelves of science fiction books, a mix of hardbacks and paperbacks. It was pretty easy to keep up with the genre, and most of it was reprints. My favorite library then only had 8 shelves of SF books tucked away in a dark corner. I would guess less than 200 SF/F titles were published yearly back then. Today it’s well over 2,000.
Science fiction selling in hardback is something that’s evolved over the course of my lifetime. I was middle-aged before they started getting on the bestseller lists. My library in 2018 has 8 ranges of bookshelves for SF/F. In recent years we’ve seen more trade paperback editions and fewer mass market books. Now ebooks and audiobooks are wiping out the mass market book and have made a huge dent into trade and hardback sales. See slide #13.
My personal book buying habits reflect this chart, but instead of new print books, half of my book buying is used print books. When buying new books, I’d say 95% are ebooks and audiobooks. The last new print book I bought was Lost Mars: The Golden Age of the Red Planet edited by Mike Ashley, and I had to special order it from England.
I’m now renting more books, via Scribd.com, another distribution type that’s not in the data. I’m reading/listening to books from this service that previously I would have bought as ebooks or audiobooks. And most of the ebooks I buy are the bargain $1.99 editions. I’ve collected a huge library of classic science fiction at that price by watching the daily deals. Generally, any book I really love in audio is one I’ll also buy in ebook. I like having a reading copy for reference and reviewing.
I’m mostly a guy that looks backward to the future. I wonder what young people today who are looking forward to the future are buying? The data in these slides reveal buying decisions in format and sub-genre, but I actually think that view of science fiction has changed.
The futures I hoped for and feared are different from the futures that young people read about today. Readers are reading more fantasy, and much of the science fiction is unbelievable, not based on hard science. I read science fiction in the 1960s hoping it would shape the future, but I don’t think people do that today.
Science fiction has always been an escapist lit but was tinged with hubris. Much of that hubris has faded away. But Data Guy couldn’t document that in his slides. Today, science fiction is more like medical marijuana than project management software. This is why I spend most of my science fiction reading time on the shorter forms. Science fiction writers are more likely to speculate and extrapolate in short fiction than long.
Another area that Data Guy didn’t document is series. Writers are devoting more of their efforts to writing book series. Many of my science fiction reading friends love book series. Series might be comfy books, but to me, they are vast wastelands of words because they have so little science fiction speculation in them. If they have clever ideas, they’re all in the first book.
I wish Data Guy had the numbers on sales by age groups. I wonder how many over-65 science fiction readers are like me – focussed on the past? I’ve recently rediscovered that exciting science fiction is still being written in the shorter forms. It always has, I just lost my way.
My current SF reading involves jumping back and forth from new and old anthologies. The annual best-of-the-year anthologies are new books I do buy, usually in ebook format, but also as audiobooks when they are available. These large collections are actually easier to read electronically.
I wonder how much of the sales Data Guy tracked involved books, ebooks, and audiobooks found in libraries? More and more my library is offering to let me to check out via download rather than visit. To me, Scribd.com is merely a public library where I’m fined $8.99 a month to use.
Finally, one more sad note to contemplate. If book sales move to ebooks and audiobooks, what will collectors collect in the future? You can’t go to musty old bookshops hoping to find lost treasures when they never existed in the physical world to begin with. But there is a practicality to ebooks. The beautiful old paperbacks I find in pristine condition today really aren’t readable. They are collectible, but often they’re too fragile for eye tracks and page flipping. Most of the classic novels of science fiction are easily found today as ebooks, and usually well priced. Audible.com has republished nearly all the classic science fiction novels I grew up reading.
And I’m starting to see more and more classic short stories show up in ebook format. I’ve been collecting Robert Sheckley and Clifford Simak stories that way. What I hope is all of classic science fiction short stories will eventually show up in audiobook too, read by great narrators. That’s how I really love to “read” today.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
That is an interesting presentation for sure, and I laughed out loud at your line, “Today, science fiction is more like medical marijuana than project management software.”
As to your lament for musty old bookshops, I say good riddance. I would much rather have the market of 2018 than 1978 as it is much easier and cheaper to find things. When I was finishing off my collection of Compact Books’ New Worlds magazine, I didn’t find a copy of #142 until I was on holiday in Western Australia in 1999, half the world away. I see it semi-regularly (though not frequently) on EBay nowadays.
That’s true Paul. In the old days I could go years or decades trying to track down a book I wanted. Now, I just look it up on ABEbooks and order it. There are a couple titles that aren’t available, but that shows just how rare they are.
I lament short story anthologies being so low on the rung, but it’s been that way for a while. I used to have a rule of buying short story collections when they came out even if I didn’t intend on reading them right away. I thought e-book editions would change that, but I’ve noticed that some anthologies in e-format go out of print quickly too — presumably due to rights issues.
That classification system is interesting. It would explain why I get so many notices for military sf, and they are almost invariably series. However, I read few of them. It’s not that I’m not interested, but the opportunity costs are too high because I want to read other things more. I’m surprised that “genetic engineering” and “cyberpunk” (30+ years after Neuromancer) are categories.
What’s the criteria for getting thrown in “classics” I wonder. And “metaphysical & visionary” as categories? Are these books by public intellectuals and celebrities who have some sort of point to make?
Not being a fan of audio books, I’m way out of the mainstream in only ever purchasing one audiobook — and then because the author herself said she preferred the audiobook to the text.
On the other hand, as you said, you can get a lot of stuff now cheap in print and by ebook. $5 books will get you an e-book collection of Arthur Machen. Obscure chapbooks costs less than a hardcover.
I miss used bookstores. We used to have over a dozen in Western New York a decade ago. Now, we just have a handful struggling to survive. I miss the thrill of finding a book I’d been looking for. Or discovering a book I never knew existed! Yes, online shopping is more efficient, but there are fewer surprises. The market for short story collections has always been iffy.
My surprise with online shopping is when I get the book. Is it in bad shape or great shape. Sometimes I get a pristine copy in a Brodart cover. That’s when I feel like I’ve discovered a great bargain.
As a data analyst in addition to being a science fiction reader, I would be curious how a book gets categorized as one subgenre over another. One of my favorite books over the last few years is a military space opera with LGBT themes that heavily relies on genetic modification. But I’m assuming that book was classified as military SF.
I think you’re right that there is less hard SF being written, and I wonder if that’s because, as science advances, it gets harder and harder to write hard SF. It seems like it requires more knowledge, more research than it did before. Especially now knowing that your readers can just Google to see if you fudged the science.
As a younger reader who’s a Millennial (OH NO!), your perspective is very interesting to me. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but I definitely appreciate your thoughts on this.