Posts Tagged ‘trends’
Urban fantasy: confirmed undead
Much of the discussion concerning the general state of the SFF market tends to ignore urban fantasy. However, remove urban fantasy from the current SFF bestseller charts, and they collapse. Most of the bestselling authors disappear; many of the most successful new authors launched over recent years disappear; many of the authors with most rapidly growing sales [...]
The Chart of Fantasy Art
Never let it be said that publishers don’t research their market. Having surveyed all the fantasy books published by the leading SFF imprints in the US, we are now one step closer to unlocking the greatest mysteries of fantasy cover design. Behold, the legendary Chart of Fantasy Art! What does all this mean? Well, the most commonly seen [...]
What’s selling?
All trade publishers now use data from Nielsen Bookscan. Skip if you already know all this, but briefly Bookscan tracks retail book sales (i.e. actual sales to consumers). It’s an incredibly useful tool for gathering market intelligence. It allows us, for example, to find out quickly and accurately how well a particular title is selling, and we can retrieve data relating [...]
The e-books are coming!
Within this post on a related topic, the always-interesting Mike Shatzkin predicts the manner in which the e-book market will grow over the next ten years. He defines what he sees as “four distinct stages of e-book adoption” (leading up to the new marketplace), and I suspect he may well be proven more right than wrong. Each publisher will have their [...]