Science fiction publishing trends quantified

Strange Horizons's Valentin D. Ivanov has scraped Locus Magazine's "Notable Books" column going back to May 1998 and built a 10+ year dataset of genre popularity in science fiction, fantasy and horror. It's easy to get all impressionistic and say, "Oh, everything in the sf section is space opera these days," but that's as apt to be confirmation bias as fact. Here's the numbers.

How significant are these trends? Having only three measurements, we cannot provide rigorous answers, except for the major categories that are populated with sufficient numbers of books. A linear fit to the points in Figure 1 gives us the rate of increase of the number of books included in Locus Online reviews, averaged over the entire time period. For example, for SF it is 11.5 ± 0.9 books per year. In other words, the number of the reviewed SF books has increased on average by 11-12 every year between 1998 and 2007. The rate for fantasy is 26.9 ± 7.7; for horror 3.1 ± 0.7; and for other books 4.1 ± 1.0 (all in units of books per year). The uncertainty margins are the formal fitting errors. The larger uncertainty in fantasy's growth rate reflects a systematic error due to the fact that this category has inflated only recently, and the linear model is not an adequate representation of its behaviour. Fantasy's lead over SF in terms of growth rate is a margin of about 15 books per year. The probability of this happening by chance is extremely small--about 1-in-1010. Therefore, we are likely facing a statistically significant nonrandom trend here.
It appears that the invasion of the sequels is truly happening. However, this result is not as obvious as the previous one--Figure 3 suggests that the proportion of sequels included in Locus Online reviews remains nearly constant after the 2001-2002 period. In other words, the changes are well within the expected random variations, shown in the plot with error bars.

A Statistical Study of Locus Online's "Notable Books" (via Making Light)

Discussion

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#1 posted by jjasper, July 13, 2009 7:46 AM

Shame about the horror anthologys and collections trending down. Laird Barron's short story collection "The Imago Sequence & Other Stories" is extraordinary, and the Ellen Datlow edited anthology "Inferno" is also great work.

Y'all should check them out.

#2 posted by Anonymous, July 13, 2009 9:25 AM

To judge the popularity of horror by Locus is not going to provide accurate information at all, since Locus as a rule, has always covered much less horror than it has sf and fantasy.
Ellen Datlow
(thanks Josh ;-) )

#3 posted by jfrancis, July 13, 2009 9:33 AM

That blue against black isn't really working for him

#4 posted by Anonymous, July 13, 2009 9:51 AM

Everything in SF today is war pornography, not space opera. I like space opera (Captain Future, Legion of Space, etc) David Weber, Eric Flint, etc. don't anything like that.

#5 posted by doc_roswell, July 13, 2009 10:46 AM

Much as that's interesting, if the dataset is that limited, we really have to take it with a grain of salt. A big one.

Maybe we could encourage the data distillers to find some other sources to add to the pool.

#6 posted by Baldhead, July 13, 2009 11:39 AM

How do they define sequel? From one point of view Raymond Feist has written exactly 2 non- sequel books, but form another, every min- series in the same world stands alone...

#7 posted by jjasper, July 13, 2009 12:14 PM

Anonymous - Everything in SF today is war pornography, not space opera.

What nonsense. You're on the blog of a major writer who puts out non military SF on a regular basis.

I like space opera

So buy some. People are writing it these days. Try Alastair Reynolds. He'll be writing a 10 book series.

#8 posted by datashaman, July 13, 2009 12:14 PM

If I pick up a book and it has Part 2 of 5, or The Third Book in the Whatever Cycle, I put it down immediately.

A few series I have enjoyed in the past, but so many publishers have jumped on the bandwagon - it's running on 1 broken wheel, and the horse is tired.

#9 posted by jjasper, July 13, 2009 3:14 PM

Yes. Reading book one is usually a better idea.

Despite your tastes, plenty of people like sequels, and buy them enough to make it a good bet for a publisher. If you don't like 'em, don't read 'em.

#10 posted by Anonymous, August 30, 2009 9:24 AM

I did expect some controversity, but as I said in the article - my goal is not to judge the tendencies, only to infer them. Sequels are not bad per se - I read them a lot myself. Pouring "water" in the naritative is bad, the lack of ideas is bad, the recycling of old characters, themes, and situations is bad.

Valentin D. Ivanov