In the comments he says, "Figures from memory: SF/F accounts for about 7% of fiction sales in the US market, while Mainstream is around 11%; crime/thrillers are around 16%, and romance is the 500Kg gorilla in the room at 52%." (someone else replies to say that 35% is probably a more accurate figure for Romance, but still a large chunk of the publishing industry).
I will also note one other comment from that post, which fits some of the graphs in your piece:
I'd like to point you at this 2005 paper by the Author's License and Collecting Society, titled "What are Words Worth?, describing the findings of a study organized by the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM)I, Bournemouth University. Briefly: in the UK in 2004-05, median (typical) earnings for authors were £4000 a year, with mean earnings of £16,531 — that is, while most authors earned very little, a handful earned a lot more and so the mean skews high. Once you discard part-timers and focus on professional authors who spend 50% or more of their time working by writing, the median rises to £12,330 (and a mean of £28,340). Many professional authors supplement their income by teaching or consultancy; restricting the survey to focus on main-income authors (those who earned over 50% of their income from writing) gave median earnings of £23,000 and mean earnings of £41,186.
Interestingly, the researchers went on to calculate a Gini coefficient for authors' incomes — a measure of income inequality, where 0.0 means everyone takes an identical slice of the combined cake, and 1.0 indicates that a single individual takes all the cake and everyone else starves. Let me provide a yardstick: the UK had a Gini coefficient of 0.36 in 2009, the widest ever gap between rich and poor — while the USA, at 0.408, had the most unequal income distribution in the entire developed world. The Gini coefficient among writers in the UK in 2004-05 was a whopping great 0.74. As the researchers note:
"Writing is shown to be a very risky profession with median earnings of less than one quarter of the typical wage of a UK employee. There is significant inequality within the profession, as indicated by very high Gini Coefficients. The top 10% of authors earn more than 50% of total income, while the bottom 50% earn less than 10% of total income. "
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Think we can also credit the rise of "romantasy" to the success of "Game of Thrones" - the show, not the "Song of Ice & Fire" series it adapted.
GOT was praised for its epic storytelling, well-crafted characters, and political intrigue. But let's be real: a huge reason for its success was mixing fantasy with graphic sex. I.e. smut.
However, because the show was considered "high brow," it gained credibility as a "prestige show" when a not-insiginificant portion of its mainstream appeal was due to, well, smuttiness.
I have been an avid fantasy reader for a very long time, and so when I saw that The Empyrean series was very highly rated, I decided to check it out. It actually made me angry how mediocre it was. I continued on, books 2 & 3, waiting to see what would happen that made this series regularly top 4.5 stars on Goodreads and elsewhere. It never happened.
In the end, my review is basically "dragons with occasional smut." And there is nothing wrong if that's what you enjoy. But it is not, in my view, great fantasy, not by the bar set for fantasy by the great authors of the genre, both men and women.
Nonetheless, the TV series will be coming out on Amazon Prime in the near future, so someone out there clearly enjoys it. I liked True Blood (though less-so as the series went on), which was basically vampires with smut, so I'm not above the idea. But I don't have high hopes given the source material.
I remember first hearing the term "smut" from my fanfiction days in the early '00s. "Smut" typically meant less story and more about the characters getting it on. There was also "fluff" which was more sappy and cuddly. It's surprising to see how these terms have caught on now that the romance genre itself is becoming so popular. At least three new romance bookstores have recently opened up in my city.
Calling Pride and Prejudice a "Romance Novel," is like calling Crime and Punishment a "Crime Novel."
This isn't a completely new phenomenon. I happened to recently be reading an old post by the SF writer Charlie Stross about the economics of writing from 2010: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/cmap-8-lifestyle-or-job.html
In the comments he says, "Figures from memory: SF/F accounts for about 7% of fiction sales in the US market, while Mainstream is around 11%; crime/thrillers are around 16%, and romance is the 500Kg gorilla in the room at 52%." (someone else replies to say that 35% is probably a more accurate figure for Romance, but still a large chunk of the publishing industry).
I will also note one other comment from that post, which fits some of the graphs in your piece:
----------------------- block quote-------------------
I'd like to point you at this 2005 paper by the Author's License and Collecting Society, titled "What are Words Worth?, describing the findings of a study organized by the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM)I, Bournemouth University. Briefly: in the UK in 2004-05, median (typical) earnings for authors were £4000 a year, with mean earnings of £16,531 — that is, while most authors earned very little, a handful earned a lot more and so the mean skews high. Once you discard part-timers and focus on professional authors who spend 50% or more of their time working by writing, the median rises to £12,330 (and a mean of £28,340). Many professional authors supplement their income by teaching or consultancy; restricting the survey to focus on main-income authors (those who earned over 50% of their income from writing) gave median earnings of £23,000 and mean earnings of £41,186.
Interestingly, the researchers went on to calculate a Gini coefficient for authors' incomes — a measure of income inequality, where 0.0 means everyone takes an identical slice of the combined cake, and 1.0 indicates that a single individual takes all the cake and everyone else starves. Let me provide a yardstick: the UK had a Gini coefficient of 0.36 in 2009, the widest ever gap between rich and poor — while the USA, at 0.408, had the most unequal income distribution in the entire developed world. The Gini coefficient among writers in the UK in 2004-05 was a whopping great 0.74. As the researchers note:
"Writing is shown to be a very risky profession with median earnings of less than one quarter of the typical wage of a UK employee. There is significant inequality within the profession, as indicated by very high Gini Coefficients. The top 10% of authors earn more than 50% of total income, while the bottom 50% earn less than 10% of total income. "
------------------- end quote -----------------------
Think we can also credit the rise of "romantasy" to the success of "Game of Thrones" - the show, not the "Song of Ice & Fire" series it adapted.
GOT was praised for its epic storytelling, well-crafted characters, and political intrigue. But let's be real: a huge reason for its success was mixing fantasy with graphic sex. I.e. smut.
However, because the show was considered "high brow," it gained credibility as a "prestige show" when a not-insiginificant portion of its mainstream appeal was due to, well, smuttiness.
I have been an avid fantasy reader for a very long time, and so when I saw that The Empyrean series was very highly rated, I decided to check it out. It actually made me angry how mediocre it was. I continued on, books 2 & 3, waiting to see what would happen that made this series regularly top 4.5 stars on Goodreads and elsewhere. It never happened.
In the end, my review is basically "dragons with occasional smut." And there is nothing wrong if that's what you enjoy. But it is not, in my view, great fantasy, not by the bar set for fantasy by the great authors of the genre, both men and women.
Nonetheless, the TV series will be coming out on Amazon Prime in the near future, so someone out there clearly enjoys it. I liked True Blood (though less-so as the series went on), which was basically vampires with smut, so I'm not above the idea. But I don't have high hopes given the source material.
I remember first hearing the term "smut" from my fanfiction days in the early '00s. "Smut" typically meant less story and more about the characters getting it on. There was also "fluff" which was more sappy and cuddly. It's surprising to see how these terms have caught on now that the romance genre itself is becoming so popular. At least three new romance bookstores have recently opened up in my city.
The average words per sentence definitely caught my eye.