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Why Doesn't Sci-Fi Hit the Bestseller Lists?
Pomeranian writes "Sci fi readers often deplore book bestseller lists -- because review editors actively ignore many sci-fi sales, since they don't consider that stuff "popular", even though sci-fi titles often sell in far greater numbers than "serious" highbrow lit. But this all might change soon, with the launch of Bookscan: New technology that tracks actual sales at the cash register with greater precision than ever before. When similar technology launched in the music industry ten years ago, it proved the popularity of "new country" and hip-hop overnight. This story in the Washington Post wonders: Will Bookscan do the same thing to sci-fi? NOTE: this is a *shameless* self-aggrandizing plug, because I wrote the Washington Post story! But I figured it'd be of particular interest to Slashdot readers"
CD: While I'd love to see lists that are more reflective of reality, I don't think that a pure unadulterated list is in the interest of the reading public. When I worked at Waldenbooks many moons ago, we would commonly receive copies of one book, Dianetics, from the publisher, with our (And our competitors) sales stickers already on them. While this was an extreme case, it does serve as a cautionary tale about the lengths some will go to manipulate the numbers.
Pfui. Snow Crash. Neuromancer or almost anything else by Gibson. Many titles by Gregory Benford.
Herbert, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein had much less of an idea of how technology would affect society. For example, Asimov's robot stories are brilliant, but the connection to real life is subtle, because so much else of society is going to change radically before we have sufficient AI to get Asimov's robots.
"Modern authors" have been "rehashing the same old plots" for thousands of years. Read Joseph Campbell.
Aw rats. I been trolled...
Back in the early nineties I used to work in a now non-existant bookstore, that had the task of compiling the list of bestsellers for the local newspaper. The bestseller list was compiled in order using the following rules:
1. The number of copies we had of the book in stock (not the number sold). This true for fiction only - our best selling books were always stuff like "Introductory Accounting Book 1" - which we never bothered listing. Sci-fi was not exempt - we had a hardcore Scifi customer base - although we weren't a genre bookstore.
2. If the book was selling poorly it was placed higher in the list to try to boost sales!
3. Some random book that the manageress liked would be in the top ten regardless of sales (in many cases we didn't have any copies of it - embarrassing).
At least these where the rules as far as I could figure them! Scientific huh?
The Harry Potter books are a good example of the NYT's biases, in fact. You see, Rowling was taking up "too many slots" on the NYT Best-Sellers list, so they suddenly decided that they really needed a separate list for childrens' books (apparently to keep fantasy cooties away from the "good stuff").
This despite the fact that the Harry Potter books sell to adults as well as children.