Musings on sales and popularity of genre...

[seawasp]

 According to most conventional wisdom,fantasy is drastically more popular than SF of all types; yet Spheres of Influence just broke 20 reviews on Amazon compared to Phoenix Rising, which has only 12 despite being out a year longer, and what little I know of Spheres' sales indicates it's outselling Phoenix too.

While obviously an author's quality will vary off and on, I don't think Phoenix is SIGNIFICANTLY worse than either GCA or Spheres, so I was kinda expecting Phoenix to do better than my SF ventures, but that appears not to be the case.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

General preferences may not apply to specific authors.

[saintonge.livejournal.com]

        Given how wonderful Grand Central Arena was, I'd expect the sequel to sell well!

        Me, I really like both of these series.

[shanejayell.livejournal.com]

To be brutally honest, I didn't like Phoenix. Tried reading it twice, and both times it just didn't grab me. *shrug* No idea why.

[niall-shapero.livejournal.com]

Maybe you struck a chord with GCA & Spheres - really fun space opera, well written, with more than a tip of the hat to EE "Doc" Smith. Ok, maybe some of my literary tastes are still locked in the 40s & 50s, but I LIKED GCA & Spheres. And if I have a choice between SF and Fantasy, I'll generally pick SF over Fantasy works (although there are some authors for whom I'll reverse the choices - I much prefer Lawrence Watts-Evans Eschar stories & novels to his SF works). Phoenix Rising may be no different from Spheres as to inherent literary quality - but the fan base that likes it may just be smaller.

I wrote (back when) an SF role playing game - OTHER SUNS - that I considered to be far superior to any of the other competing products of the time. But the market disagreed - there are still fans of my game, but not as many as, say fans of other competing products of the period.

What's my point? If you did the best that you could on Phoenix at the time you wrote it, then it shouldn't be worse than GCA or Spheres; since you presumably learned something from writing GCA and then Spheres, it should be better (I haven't read Phoenix yet, so cannot say what my personal opinion of the quality is). But just because it's better from some literary viewpoint does not mean that it will sell better. (And yes, I know that I am, in effect, "trying to teach my grandfather how to suck eggs", but it is meant to be a "judge your work by your own standards, and do the best you can each time - someone will recognize it, and pay you something for your time", or that's the theory anyway.)

[chuckcr.livejournal.com]

Several thoughts:

1. Spheres is more like your previously published works than Phoenix.
Readers of yours, looking for more of your product,
are more likely to be looking for something like Spheres than something like Phoenix.

2. Spheres is a special case.
GCA ended at a perfect point. No sense of incompletion, no cliff-hanger.
But, all the tantalizing ways the story could go! So many inherent possibilities to get even wilder.
I spent quite a few hours myself thinking of different ways it could go from there.
As a result, I was quite impatient to see which way you took it, and was really frustrated waiting.
I suspect that many GCA readers were impatiently waiting for Spheres.
So Spheres had pent-up sales waiting, while Phoenix is a new venture for you; these are not comparable.

3. GCA fits well into the arc of SF and space opera; modernized EE "Doc" Smith.
I'm not sure Phoenix is centered in the fantasy genre, to me it feels more like SF than fantasy.
I'm digging deep controversial traps for myself in trying to express why that is, but I'll do my muddled best.
On the emotional spectrum, with romance novels on one end and action novels on the other,
much of fantasy is on the stereotypical feminine side of center, with internal emotions and romantic tension
being central and being supported/justified by action, magic/technology and world-building.
Much of SF is on the stereotypical masculine side of center, with external action, magic/technology and world-building
being central and being supported/rewarded by emotions and romantic success.
Yes, there are lots of exceptions to these and all stereotypes, I'm just trying to express how the genres feel to me.
Phoenix seems to me to fit in with SF more than with fantasy in this regards.
The very fact that you'd developed a detailed large and complex world,
with a long history, and are writing a story within it,
rather than developing a world to support a story as you go,
contributes to the story feeling more SF-like than fantasy-like.
If it's read by people who are looking for fantasy, the SF feel may not be satisfying to them.
I may be all wet, or maybe there's a nugget of truth here, I dunno.