HOW MUCH?!? TOP 10 FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION BESTSELLING AUTHORS OF 2022 (UK): Time for some Figures 

Recall those days well and agree. The rack spinner was a staple of newsagents even in the smallest towns and villages, shame that bit of bookselling is long gone.

Thanks Matthew- interesting to hear of genre separation on bookshop shelves where you are- this is incredibly uncommon, never seen anyone do this except myself. Yes, SFF are actually very common in 'mainstream' realist fiction guises.

All good choices for starters, I'd say. I regard SF and F as two totally different things - watch my 'Elements of SF' series to understand why - they are only really related for historical reasons, I think and they diverge sharply from each other from the 1970s onwards and keep diverging I'd say.

Completely agree. If you look at how long it took Chris Beckett, Dave Hutchinson and Nina Allan to become established (it didn't happen until their fifties- it used to happen for writers like these in their twenties in the 70s and 80s) that shows how hostile the market is to well-written, truly envelope-pushing SF. I put the blame not just on formula fantasy, but also on formula Space Opera- I think Hamilton, Banks, Baxter and Reynolds have a lot to answer for: you notice that the 'New Space Opera' emerged a decade after the Fantasy boom started in '77 and it was clear a fightback was part of the agenda even then, since New Wave for too challenging for mass market readers and Cyberpunk only produced a handful of writers of great quality (it was ahead of its time for many readers even then, I think). Ian is someone I've been re-reading recently and totally agree.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal I tend to classify Space Opera with fantasy containing dragons and elves now; all highly unlikely and not read by me! There is very little fiction written about the near future now, I believe because people are scared of what is happening in the world now and don't feel able to speculate about what will happen next.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Romantic fantasy and intermidable multi volume space opera is killing good SF

@@victorrodley9099 -Without doubt, sadly.

Absolutely true. You need a committed bookseller with actual buying power to make a difference. I've 'broken' authors in a city from a single book sold in a year to a hundred or more, but so few people are doing this or have access to the power to do it i.e. they are not the person doing the buying.

Well yes, it IS connected to the Potter generation growing up with mass media saturation of a phenomenon like Rowling, but it started way before that- though the fact that Young Adult as a marketing construct didn't really exist in the UK until around twenty years ago is important to. Although the term YA has been used in the USA for a good bit longer, I can confirm from on-the-ground experience in bookselling that a lot of the early attempts to publish books written as bridges between what is now called 'Middle Grade' i.e. 9-12 failed to establish that age-marketing group until the new century got going. And remember, it wasn't NECESSARY before the age of screen-saturation - kids just had to make the jump to adult fiction and most boys used to do it via SF (when I was a kid and teen in the 70s) before the Fantasy boom of 77 and after, then some of the next generation (who were of course children when 'Star Wars' came out - I was fourteen and had serious SF reading and dystopian-drama film behind me already by then), so the consciousness of genre as being something that used to be almost entirely book-led has been vanishing and vanishing. If you wanted skiffy when I was a kid, it was finite on screens because there were a finite number of screentimes where it was shown, so you had to adopt reading sophisticated texts earlier. Overall though, I'd say 'Star Wars', the Fantasy Book (same year) and the anti-New Wave conservative resurgence of Space Opera in the UK were the combinatory movements that dumbed everything down. As I say in the video, I've no problem with books by young women being read by younger ones, but the quality of them is the real problem as their sales are driving out the more thoughtful stuff.

This is exactly what is going on, sadly, Kristopher. I don't like to rain on anyone's reading parade but I find it a huge shame that the audience isn't discovering more rewarding Fantasy writers, female or otherwise.

I would agree with 2, 3 and 4. As for 1, research done by the Telegraph (admittedly some years ago) indicated that men read more than women, but across a wider variety of platforms. I would say from experience that women certainly seem to read a higher percentage of fiction than men in their reading, but I'd add to that my observation that publishers and bookshops (which are predominantly female-dominated professions) struggle with marketing and presenting fiction to and for men. As for 5, you're right, it would be interesting - I'm sure many SF writers now rely on online more than bookshops for sales.

All a recipe for disaster for the future..

Hi Wean, thanks for your comment. In short, yes - but it's not often author choice that makes them follow the Fantasy series trend but it is what publishers like too. If you watch my video 'The Artificial Fantasy Trilogy Since 1977' in the Fantasy playlist (and popular uploads section as well) on the channel, I there give a brief history of how Fantasy publishing changed in that year. Although SF series existed prior to that date, there were far fewer of them and they were basically short stories that first appeared in magazines that were fixed up into short books - or into series of short books. As Fantasy boomed in the years that followed, more SF writers caved into publishers wanting to transfer the manner in which Fantasy series worked commercially to SF (series like 'Dune' were pretty uncommon). I can name SF writers who got their contracts on the basis of willingness to write a trilogy as their first books - but of course this has a big downside: say the first volume gets good reviews and sells, but many people don't like it for some reason (too challenging or original perhaps), then volume two fails commercially and by that point volume three is written and sells poorly as well. The author then looses their deal with the publisher. This is why no writer serious about SF should begin their career with a series. Next saturday a video interview with SF writer Chris Beckett will stream on the channel and it will show how he started writing short stories, wrote two singleton novels (no professional says 'standalone') and then won a prize for his first collection of shorts (which was £5000 and led to a deal with a bigger publisher). He then wrote a trilogy, the first of which won a more important prize....watch it to see how his career went from there. He's still writing for a major publisher, but not writing series.

Yes, it is down to the decision makers in publishing and I'm certain in many cases they are relatively inexperienced and not that widely read, many of them not being old enough to be so- but to be fair, they have decades more genre fiction to read to get up to speed than say I did in my twenties (the 1980s). There's also the factor of the 'three strikes and you're out' deal which has become more of a thing in fiction publishing over the last 20 years. I'll cover this in a future video, but I think few writers now get the chance to develop their craft over half a dozen books or more...

Absolutely true. All bookshops will do customer orders, of course, but the net is just so easy to use. Things look very, very grim for SF stock in bookshops now.

I think it's mostly what you say re prose style of those kind of literary fantasies being too much for readers of generic material. Gollancz seem to be on a Zelazny kick currently - they're doing a Best of very soon which has great stuff in it and the first UK edition of 'Roadmarks' for decades. They have relaunched FM many times but they never sell like SF Masterworks because - as we've already said- the Fantasy market isn't always very sophisticated in a literary sense, while in the SF market, there are a larger proportion of literary readers. As a result, Gollancz probably think they'll sell more Amber if they brand it as SF. Re SF as standing for Speculative Fiction too - well yes, of course. This is one of the reasons SF is favoured by serious devotees as it has multiple interpretations - Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction. Science Fantasy and Structural Fabulation...and as 'esseff' (phonetic spelling of SF) it'd like 'Dada' - it can mean whatever you like. Personally, I never use Speculative Fiction, as I think it's a flawed description (look at my elements of SF series and the emphasis on the Novum as being fundamentally scientific or representative of the scientific method and worldview) and the cod-literati use it because of the snobbish attitude they have toward 'Science Fiction' as a label...probably because so many people abbreviate it to the hatfeul and pejorative 'Sci-Fi', a term which NO serious devotee would use until comparatively recently. Structural Fabulation, though little used, does have its merits though...more on that in a future video.

Well, I'm sure this has occurred to lots of us Paul - trouble is, we're not the right audience to do short attention spans that tiktok loves- once reason why RU-vid is keen on shorts. It's also one reason why I'm so evangelical on the channel about standards in SF, even in insisting on the correct, established reference terms - SF not SciFi, singleton not standalone, not confusing anthologies with collections, not using fake words like 'duology' and 'quadrilogy' when long-existing terms like 'diptych' and 'tetralogy' have been in usage for decades. I think other RU-vidrs could pick up the bar by getting more professional in their presentation and start getting with the programme with their SF history and context. Otherwise, as you say, it'll be beat 'em by joiningg 'em!

@outlawbookselleroriginal keep fighting the good fight my good sir, we are all behind you 💪

@@paulm8253 You betcha!