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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.
Shameless plugs on /., no way...when did this start?
=P
forget it.
My guess would be Harlan Ellison.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
If you get an accurate count of books sold, I'm guessing that the only thing you're going to see on the best-selling list is romance novels
It's good to be popular, or for people to suddenly discover you. It gets you more money, more opportunities, and with greater exposure comes greater influence. Look at Open Source and GNU/Linux - as it's popularity has risen, business have been forced to compete, support, and develop for the system. Like the article mentions with Country Music, sometimes there's an entire market waiting to be tappd.
At the same time, there's the dark side. As publishers notice "dang - there's lots of money to be made with science fiction", you can expect a flurry of studies, marketing strategies - imagine the N'Sync of sci-fi, as one evil example. It means the corner of the universe that used to be yours - or in the case of groups, ours, is now open to the world - with all the good and bad it brings.
So while I'm hoping this promotes more interest in sci-fi books and literature, and perhaps even more funding/greater recognition for those artists, I'm also worried about what the sudden press of "marketing studies" will do, or the effects of making sci-fi "mainstream" to try and get a greater public hooked.
Of course, I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
The large chain bookstores already track author popularity very closely and, if your last book didn't do well, your next book may not get the opportunity to do well. This discourages authors from branching out or trying something new. Several authors have found themselves forced to adopt new pen names to get around these problems.
I fear that this proposed system is only going to make things worse, not better. Yes, I would like to see SF treated with a little respect, but I'd also like to see authors free to experiment and to try something new and off the beaten track. I'm afraid that this will kill off what little market remains for interesting and innovative writers, and leave us with nothing but "popular" cookie-cutter pablum.
I think if you browse around on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America web pages, you may find some articles that address these concerns in greater detail.
At last, an empirical method to prove what the best books are! After all, everyone knows that Titanic is, scientifically, the best movie ever made. Finally, my Danielle Steele novels and R.L. Stine paperbacks will get the in-depth, intellectual criticism they've been *begging* for!
What does this mean? Having never worked at a bookstore, I don't know what it means for a book to come with sales stickers on....
The book was Dianetics, which is the big Scientologist book. The reason they show up at bookstores with price stickers already on them is because of the Scientologists' bestseller plan:
1) Everyone goes out and buys Dianetics.
2) Give the copies of Dianetics to the "church."
3) The church ships the books back out to retail stores.
The end product is that Dianetics goes sky-high in the bestseller lists, without costing the church typical manufacturing costs. And bookstores get copies of the book already with sales stickers on.
Years ago, the PTB reformed the process that music sales were recorded & how albums would thereby be certified as ``Gold" or ``Platinum."
One week, the best-selling record was some forgettable group created by the music industry & heavily hyped on MTV. (ISTR it was a group called ``Poison.") The next week . . . Nirvana was king. And Seattle suffered for it.
Just remembering a bit of history.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Ok maybe sci fi will become "hot" but would that make sci fi better - probably not.
Sci fi has been hot in movies for a long time and what do we have to show for it - several big budget movies that are complete crap (men in black independance day, that arnold thing, phantom menace etc.) with one medium budget movie that is not that bad (the matrix).
And even though sci fi movies were hot Douglas Adams did not live to see a Hitchikers movie.
Good sci fi gets written not because its on bestsellers lists but because people that write it love doing it.
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?
Look at your bookshelves (I'll wait). Welcome back. How many of your books are paperbacks, and how many are hardbacks? I would guess 90% paperbacks, but the main bestseller lists track sales of new hardcover books.
Thinking at the keyboard here, I would say most hardbacks are bought as gifts. Tracking paperbacks would tell you what people are buying for themselves to read.
The trouble with this is that paperback buying is probably more spread out over time. Did, say, 2001: a Space Odyssey make the best-seller lists? I don't know. But how many copies did it sell in paperback across the decades?
Hence, I conclude that best-seller lists are marketing hoopla, and we should ignore them.
I, for one, hope that the major newspapers publish both lists.
The benefit of consuming WSJ, NYT, the Post, or any of a host of others is their editorial expertise. Each newspaper has a brand they maintain. Science Fiction is simply not that compatible with their brands. If you want to know about science fiction, do you go to WSJ? Huh, didn't think so. Consumers expect the editorial bent of the paper to affect their content. (Perhaps the moniker "best seller list" is exceptional because it implies statistical rather than anecdotal analysis.)
The new format will be interesting from a sociological perspective. It will provide all kinds of demographic information. Unfortunately, I'm sure the information will be very expensive, so we will probably not benefit beyond the top 10 lists, which will be not all that interesting.
As to why Sci Fi and Fantasy are not taken seriously by the heavy hitters: those categories are, today, formula fiction as much as any thriller or romance is. Go to the "Reference" section of your bookstore. How many "How to Write Science Fiction" books are there? Now, how many "How to Write a Really Good Story" books are there? Sci Fi and Fantasy provide easy gimmicks to let writers off the hook, so the best writing no longer tends to be in them.
A similar thing has happened in TV. Look at any show that starts off really interesting. After a few episodes, people start having exrtraordinary things happening to them: they get shot, things blow up, they get amnesia (and it's prime time, not just daytime TV). That's because it's hard to write really good, creative fiction without using these easy devices. And once the devices were well established, the formula became well known, and its the exceptional writer that now really creates something new in any of these formula categories.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
No, no... the assumption was that because you read slashdot, you don't read the Washington Post.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
A sharp marketing department could notice that SF with such-and-such a cover and such-and-such a description sells a solid 5% better than anything else.
A few weeks later, editors and slushpile readers get standing orders to only vet manuscripts that fit a certain profile.
The next year, the books in your local bookstore's SF&F section fall into maybe three categories. Cover artists who want to continue eating ape a certain sterotyped style.
But, dang, SF books start hitting the Bestseller Lists, so it would all be worthwhile.
Stefan
When purchasing a Bible there are tons of options (Adult study, Teen bible, children's picture bible, etc...) as well as different translations (KJ, NKJ, NIV, NL, AS, etc...). Each of these Bibles (probably hundreds) has a different ISBN. So all of these would probably be counted individually under this new system. I think it is likely that the current sales numbers for "The Bible" are probably a combination of all Bible sales regardless of ISBN, which is why it is always a best seller. It will be interesting to see if the new tracking changes the results. Go buy your bible today!
-- Find the Truth...
The Music version of this is called Soundscan. In the music industry it's often referred to as "SoundScam", because of the abuses of the system, and the ease in which it can be manipulated to reflect what the label wants it to do. All you need is an indie promoter, a few thousand copies, and one unscruplous store owner or employee.
All their purchases are made electronically so that has to be the most accurate tracking of books sold. Ok, obviously amazon.com only tracks the books they sell which is slightly different than the article which talks about all book sales. But amazon.com has enough customers to make an accurate random sampling of the entire set of customers who buy books.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
The book isn't being returned to the stories, it's being 'cycled' through. Scientologiests buy the book, then ship it themselves to the publisher, who sends them back to the bookstories to be sold again. So the book cycles through without needing to be remade.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
WTF?
Clearly you have not read a really good book in a long time. I highly recommend hooking up with some intelligent, well-rounded, non-SF readers and finding out what they've read and giving it a shot. For many years I had time only for trade journals and tech books; recently I went back to real literature and have found it much, much more interesting than nearly all SF or fantasy I have read since the Tolkein/Asimov days.
Perhaps the general populace are "dull crayons" but that's because they're the colorful ones. The sharpest crayon in the box is always the white one...
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
I see a few people complaining that there's not enough good science fiction out now; I beg to differ. Off the top of my head, Egan, Vinge, and Bear have all written some great books in the past few years; and have you ever read "Ribofunk" by di Filippo?
For years I've been using the THE INTERNET TOP 100 SF/FANTASY LIST as my reference as to what science fiction I should be reading. It's not as flighty as a "current bestsellers" list is, but new books do work onto the list in due time. And most of the books on the list really do deserve to be there. Over the past five years, I've managed to read probably about half of the books on the list, and have an idea about most of the others. No small task, because the list does change over time. (Although looking at it now, I see a few names I don't recognize, which means it's time to start doing more reading).
Monitoring online activity, though, necessarily involves knowing where the endpoints of the transmission are. So it's a matter of surveillance almost by definition. And I can find out a lot about you by tracking where you go even if I don't know the specifics of what data you've downloaded. But I can tell a lot less about where a book goes after a sale no matter how much I know about its contents.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
The $cientologists aren't the only ones who did this sort of thing.
The way the New York Times bestseller list works (or at least used to work, not sure what they do now), is they get the sales figures from a few stores. Since they are (or used to be) the same stores all the time, intrepid authors/publishers used to go out and buy as many copies from those few stores that they could find. Instant bestseller list, which becomes self-perpetuating as people buy it because it was on the list.
IIRC the books usually were those non-fiction business fad books (How to Drive Your Company to Just Unbelievable Success by Shouting Slogans at your Salesforce kinds of things).
If we really tracked best sellers we would probably see coloring books, shopping catalogs or other weird things showing up in the lists as well. We may even see the one thing that publishers never want known: the biggest determining factor is what is and what isn't a best seller could well be price.
A lot of the built in prejudices of the best seller lists is that the dime novels of yester year were out selling literature, largely because of price.
But the Colorado Supreme court just unanimously overturned a lower court's decision forcing Tattered Cover to turn over records for an investigation by a Denver-area drug task force. And the protections for public libraries are even stronger than the ones enjoyed by bookstores.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Considering that new paper backs cost around $10 now, no wonder price is such an issue.
.
:) (err, but keep him away from the co$ wackos)
I do not even bother to look at the price of Hardbacks any more, they were ~$17 last time I checked (around ten years ago) so I can only imagine what they have gone up to since.
I have not bought a new (fiction) book in quite a few years, hell I can no longer AFFORD to buy new books. Especialy considering that it takes me all of two or three hours to finish a standard length novel. . .
I used to be able to tell people that buying a book was more bang for your buck then going to the movies, but now I am getting to be rather unsure about it. (of course I only go to $5 movie theaters so. . . . heh. I understand that some people go to expensive ones. ^_^ )
Books are getting to cost WAAAY to much, and the damnest thing is that every time they raise their prices their number of sales go down.
Hell last time I was buying new books I was going to buy 3 books but was instead only able to buy 2 because the books were $7 a piece.
So strange too, when buying the older classic science fiction books (which are a pain in the arse to get ahold of mind you. ^_^ ) paying $5 for a book that has a 25 cent price tag on its label, LOL!!!
Oh well, well worth it though! The Goldern Era Rocked, we so need to clone John Campell.
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It is a proud and defiant ignorance allowed because the audience doesn't know better- they don't know of the SF books beyond the "Sword of Han Solo" serials on the NYTimes lists. The same reviewers would never review a modern comedy as "the tradition of Mark Twain and Charlie Chaplin" or a mystery as "part of the long history from Poe to Doyle." i.e. if it is another genre they'll have at least a basic knowledge of it: for example, that westerns went from simple ("Indians bad") to complex, and that other countries (Japan, Italy) are part of cowboy movie history. They'll know that Elvis isn't modern rock and Martha Graham isn't cutting edge dance. But with SF they'll use 40 year old movies as their example (in turn based on 60 year old stories/ideas, as SF movies tend to be far behind the literature) without embarrassment.
So what- let them be ignorant, some could say. But when reviewers don't know about or ignore modern SF, it hurts more than some thin-skinned fandom:
So I'll be happy to see (what I assume are at least good sellers) books like Dozois' Best SF Stories of the Year and more showing up. Reviewers will have to first account for the writers like Ian McDonald, the rapidly approaching (and hope he pulls it off) Singularity Charlie Stross, and just intensely good Greg Egan, before they blow off SF as spaceship-westerns.
Adjusted for Inflation, Gone with the Wind is still #1. Titanic is #7.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted/
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Maybe one day the worm will turn, and the game will be up, but I think the cracks of doom will have opened and I'd be as cold as a stone before that happens - his plays are a dish fit for a God, and meat and drink for me.
Still, come what may, I'd advise you to learn of his contribution to English. All these phrases in bold are his. The language would be a sorry sight without him.