Parenthetical.net

A comment on my last post, from ruthling:

“young adult” and “SF/fantasy” books get the double whammy, since no author wants to be painted by the genre brush if they can get away with it at all (see Margaret Atwood, for example).

It’s true, which I find perplexing. The stereotype is that the kids who read all the time are nerdy nerd nerds, who (being nerdy nerd nerds) read sf/fantasy. I don’t know about the nerdy nerd nerds part (some of my biggest readers are pretty damn hip, for twelve-year-olds), but it’s certainly true at my school that the kids who read the longest, most complex books, and who check out the biggest stacks of them, read a lot of sf/fantasy. And they grow up to be sf/fantasy reader adults.

But the plural of anecdote isn’t data, as a clever person once said, so I went looking for some numbers. According to Business of Consumer Book Publishing 2007 (via Romance Writers of America, who seem to collect the most statistics on book reading and publishing), science fiction/fantasy books earned $495 million for publishers in 2006, beating out “classic literary fiction” by $47 million (and mystery by $73 million).

Topping the list is “religious/inspirational” at $1.68 billion, followed by romance at $1.37 billion. Religious/inspirational ain’t getting most of its billions from Boston, so I can’t speak to that. But I can say that the other group of kids who check out big stacks of books are the ones reading The Clique, Gossip Girls, Sarah Dessen, and Meg Cabot — and those kids are primed to be tomorrow’s romance novel readers. But they’re smart kids, so they’ll want smart romance novels. Just like me and my fellow nerds want smart fantasy/sf/speculative fiction.*

So if genre = readers, wouldn’t you think authors would be clamoring to be labeled? YA authors certainly are, PP (Post-Potter); just check out the expanding YA fantasy/sf section in your local bookstore and see the shelves sag under the weight of 800-page tomes with dragons on them — an increasing number of which are written by adult and/or non-genre authors. Some of this new crop is great, some of it sucks — just like literature in general. But people read it, because fantasy/sf fans are Readers with a capital R. Sure, “serious” authors are shooting for quality, not quantity. I say, you can have both!

*A heaping pile of disclaimers: The statistics indicate how much people spent on new books, not how many books they read. It’s entirely possible that genre readers are just more likely to spend money on books. If you can find me stats on actual readership, I’d love to see them! Also, fantasy/sf readers aren’t all nerds, any more than romance readers are all middle-aged women with no lives and too many cats.

(Btw, that “smart romance novels” link above is to the blog of my friend Kate Diamond and her friend Anneliese Kelly, smart women writing smart romance novels (and sometimes asking for advice on bridesmaid dresses).)

If you want to keep thinking about this, take a look at Terri Sutton’s article in the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages.