Pack Up this Popsicle Stand
It’s official. Science fiction is dragging down its fellow genre, fantasy.
BOOKSELLERS COULD BE ignoring a potentially immense market by hiding fantasy books away at the back of the shop and displaying them together with science fiction, according to new market research undertaken by HarperCollins.
Some of the news is good: Jane Johnson, Publishing Director, Voyager at HC, notes that readership for fantasy paralells general readership. In their survey of 1,000 readers, they found 86% had read at least one fantasy title in the last 12 months. That probably is what SF could achieve.
But now HC wants to convince booksellers to move fantasy out of the dingy back, which it currently occupies with SF, to the highly visible but demanding front display space. “Fantasy and SF are completely different genres, as we’ve always known, but they get lumped together in the bookshops. That puts off a lot of people who would read fantasy, but don’t pay any attention to it when it’s tucked away under science fiction.”
HC also plans to change their packaging strategy to appeal to a more mainstream audience. Managing director Amanda Ridout says,
“The key thing is to simplify the jackets, and not to ghettoise them into what used to be traditional fantasy. What we want to do is to make sure
that people who have enjoyed a wide variety of fiction aren’t put off by the traditional fantasy look.”
The outlook for science fiction isn’t good. At the local booksellers, the science fiction half of the SF/Fantasy section is kept alive both in terms of eyeballs and at the bottom line by fantasy. Faced with a proverbial wall of fantasy knockoffs, the SF reader may moan about the good old days. Sadly, however, today retail SF depends heavily on fantasy.
Fantasy has a number of “anchors”–authors whose names entice a stream of readers past the covers of spaceships–something the SF market currently lacks. In the absence of its own “anchors,” the SF section depends on those of fantasy to attract crossover readers.
With the separation of elf and blaster, book store owners will notice that SF isn’t selling well. You can expect the SF section in your local bookstore to shrink even further or be eliminated altogether.
May 8th, 2003 at 6:27 pm
Unfortunately, what there survey probably didn\’t account for was the vast amount of near future SF that people read that =isn\’t= marketed as SF including Chrichton, some of that madcap guy Tom Clancy, and lots of Military SF that has technology elements not implemented yet.
I strongly suspect that there are lots of =general readership= who would read SF if given the right author without the packaging that predisposes them to reject it.