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I'm finally (don't get me started) getting around to reading the February 2006 "Year in Review" issue of Locus Magazine. The many perspectives of the Recommended Reading sections are fun because they point out all the cool science fiction published last year. It's nice to see books I've read. It's not so nice to see all the books I want to read but don't have time for.
The 2005 Books Summary article is, as usual, comprehensive, interesting and full of fun figures, like the Total Books Published by SF Imprint in 2005. (The "by SF Imprint" table is more telling about SF than the "by Publisher" table since it focuses on the SF.) Here are the Top 10 with their respective book count totals.
Top 10 Total Books Published by SF Imprint in 2005
To add data to last year's post which asked if too many books were being published, in 2005 there were 2,516 genre books published. In 2004, there 2550 - that's the first decline in 4 years.
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| Posted by John on Friday February 24, 2006 - 1:47 AM
| Category: Books
| © 2006 SF Signal
Geeez...Del Rey doesn't make the list anymore, I remember when they were the tops. Ditto with Ace. Glad to see that DAW is still doing well!
Now if were to parse out all the **fantasy**, how would the lists change? Bet "Wizards" would be off the list.
Posted by Fred Kiesche on Friday February 24, 2006 at 9:08 AM
This list reflects SF only - fantasy is already filtered out. The numbers are much larger when you consider fantasy, though if memory serves (the mag isn't in front of me at the moment), the order is relatively the same. Even that is hard to tell since the table reflecting ALL genre fiction is by publisher (RandomHouse, Penguin Press) which contains multiple imprints.
Posted by John on Friday February 24, 2006 at 9:26 AM
Hmmmm...then I wonder how it would shake out if you took out the "media related", e.g, gaming (Wizards and Black Library", Star Trek and Star Wars, etc.
Scotty! We need more granularity in the datastream!
Posted by Fred Kiesche on Friday February 24, 2006 at 4:09 PM
Ah-ha! That's another chart! (See? That's why Locus Magazine rocks.)
Although they don't break it down by publisher, there is a chart for "sub-genre" (my term) types of original books. The chart gives tallies for 1997 - 2005, but for 2005 alone:
SF Novels*: 258
Fantasy Novels*: 414
Horror Novels*: 212
Anthologies: 89
Reference:39
Collections: 107
Media-Related: 198
Art/Humor/Poetry: 45
History/Criticism: 50
Omnibus: 47
Misc: 5
* Includes young adult titles
So, of the ~1465 original books, almost 200 (~13%) were media-related.
Also note how much fantasy overshadowed SF.
Posted by John on Saturday February 25, 2006 at 12:17 AM