"Changes in SF/F"
Mar. 3rd, 2014 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeHere are several figures to contemplate:
1) Worldcon has never had an attendance of more than 10,000 individuals. This includes supporting as well as attending memberships. Chicon, in 2012, had 6,197 recorded members (attendees and supporting).
2) During the arguments over popularity/value on Usenet Eric Flint posted sales figures for 1632 of over 75.000 sales. Although Flint is regularly referred to as "New York Times bestselling author" he is also not in the top flight of SF/F authors (Martin, Jordan, etc.).
3) GRRM's A Dance with Dragons sold 298,000 copies on the first day.
4) John Scalzi's Whatever, which is one of the more visited blogs in online fandom, gets in the tens of thousands of visits a day. James Nicoll's LJ, which is #5 in social capital rankings on LJ and #6 in page views, has about three and a half thousand page views, and GRRM (at #1 on the page views rank) has about thirteen and a half thousand.
5) Wiscon caps its attendance at 1,000 members.
I think I want to make a broad distinction between three categories: SF/F readers generally; fandom generally -- people who participate in one way or another in fandom, whether through conventions, local groups, or involvement (however minimal) in online fora; and vocal fandom, that subset of fandom which contributes in a noticeable way to ongoing debates / discussion.
There are clearly hundreds of thousands of SF/F readers -- all you have to do is look at GRRM's sales figures and extrapolate to the number of SF/F readers for whom he is too gritty, or who don't like fantasy. "Bestselling" authors can get that status with a smallish slice of the entire field, somewhere in the tens of thousands.
It's anybody's guess as to how many people can be said to be part of "fandom" in the English-speaking world, but I'm going to make a WAG and say that it's in the low to middle tens of thousands (this is pretty safe -- even doubling Worldcon numbers gets you above 10,000 and I'd be surprised if it goes above 70,000. An argument can be made for up to 100,000, but that's based on the inclusion of internet-savvy readers (usually younger ones) who link to / check on sites associated with the authors they like but have no broader association with fandom and who rarely if ever comment, even to the level of "me too".
I have a fair number of contacts who read a good deal of SF/F but who have absolutely no contact with or awareness of anything about the fannish world except that the Hugo awards exist.
I'm going to guess that "vocal fandom" is a small sliver of fandom proper -- probably in the low to mid hundreds. It overlaps with an important subset of authors who are also fans and for whom influence flows both ways: to skim a few names from rasfw or more recent SF blogs and LiveJournal, Scalzi, Stross, Elizabeth Bear, McGuire, Spoor, Flint, Stirling, Hoyt, Doctorow, Kowal, Williams, Jemisin, Monette, Wrede, Walton. There are then the non-(fiction)-author fen who are very prominent as voices: James Nicoll, Dave Langford, Kevin Standlee, Cheryl Morgan, PNH/TNH, Farah Mendlesohn, etc. Finally, there's a larger pool of commenters and bloggers who regularly interact on the "major" sites or on their own sites. And, of course, there's more than one fandom, and the effect someone will get from following Hoyt is rather different than the one they will get by following Stross.
All that being said, generalizations in this area are really hard. There's not a lot of evidence regarding how much any one of these groups is representative of the larger group(s) of which they are a part: too much of the selection mechanism is a self-selection one. And generalizations based on a turnover of age cohorts is just as slippery: if a new writer (say) comes from Arizona and grew up having Weber, Jordan, GRRM, Moon, and Bujold as favourites his or her worldview is probably likely to diverge from one who comes from Bristol and grew up reading as favourites Stross, Stephenson, Mieville, MacLeod, and Brust. For all the current attempts to open the field (more) to various divergent pools of talent -- ethnic and linguistic background, gender, etc. -- the actual establishment of authors is, again, a self-selection process combined with liberal helpings of chance.
When there is a major blowup in fandom, ripples will spread outward. Even readers who don't connect to fandom will be affected by upheavals if they affect the way in which the authors they read write or the way in which the staff in a specialty bookstore order or promote works. However, it's probably navel-gazing to assume that even the largest blowups have much effect outside a fairly small circle. Most SF/F readers have never heard of RaceFail, let alone the current kerfuffle over the Loncon awards presenter.
In particular, the future of the field is influenced to a small degree by feedback mechanisms within fandom, but it's largely driven.by forces outside fandom: the tastes of those hundreds of thousands of non-fannish readers, the market research by a handful of major publishers, and a rather slow process of literary influence and reputational winnowing.
(I should note here that I'm thinking of written SF/F, and not comics or media, which have different figures and different dynamics associated.)
1) Worldcon has never had an attendance of more than 10,000 individuals. This includes supporting as well as attending memberships. Chicon, in 2012, had 6,197 recorded members (attendees and supporting).
2) During the arguments over popularity/value on Usenet Eric Flint posted sales figures for 1632 of over 75.000 sales. Although Flint is regularly referred to as "New York Times bestselling author" he is also not in the top flight of SF/F authors (Martin, Jordan, etc.).
3) GRRM's A Dance with Dragons sold 298,000 copies on the first day.
4) John Scalzi's Whatever, which is one of the more visited blogs in online fandom, gets in the tens of thousands of visits a day. James Nicoll's LJ, which is #5 in social capital rankings on LJ and #6 in page views, has about three and a half thousand page views, and GRRM (at #1 on the page views rank) has about thirteen and a half thousand.
5) Wiscon caps its attendance at 1,000 members.
I think I want to make a broad distinction between three categories: SF/F readers generally; fandom generally -- people who participate in one way or another in fandom, whether through conventions, local groups, or involvement (however minimal) in online fora; and vocal fandom, that subset of fandom which contributes in a noticeable way to ongoing debates / discussion.
There are clearly hundreds of thousands of SF/F readers -- all you have to do is look at GRRM's sales figures and extrapolate to the number of SF/F readers for whom he is too gritty, or who don't like fantasy. "Bestselling" authors can get that status with a smallish slice of the entire field, somewhere in the tens of thousands.
It's anybody's guess as to how many people can be said to be part of "fandom" in the English-speaking world, but I'm going to make a WAG and say that it's in the low to middle tens of thousands (this is pretty safe -- even doubling Worldcon numbers gets you above 10,000 and I'd be surprised if it goes above 70,000. An argument can be made for up to 100,000, but that's based on the inclusion of internet-savvy readers (usually younger ones) who link to / check on sites associated with the authors they like but have no broader association with fandom and who rarely if ever comment, even to the level of "me too".
I have a fair number of contacts who read a good deal of SF/F but who have absolutely no contact with or awareness of anything about the fannish world except that the Hugo awards exist.
I'm going to guess that "vocal fandom" is a small sliver of fandom proper -- probably in the low to mid hundreds. It overlaps with an important subset of authors who are also fans and for whom influence flows both ways: to skim a few names from rasfw or more recent SF blogs and LiveJournal, Scalzi, Stross, Elizabeth Bear, McGuire, Spoor, Flint, Stirling, Hoyt, Doctorow, Kowal, Williams, Jemisin, Monette, Wrede, Walton. There are then the non-(fiction)-author fen who are very prominent as voices: James Nicoll, Dave Langford, Kevin Standlee, Cheryl Morgan, PNH/TNH, Farah Mendlesohn, etc. Finally, there's a larger pool of commenters and bloggers who regularly interact on the "major" sites or on their own sites. And, of course, there's more than one fandom, and the effect someone will get from following Hoyt is rather different than the one they will get by following Stross.
All that being said, generalizations in this area are really hard. There's not a lot of evidence regarding how much any one of these groups is representative of the larger group(s) of which they are a part: too much of the selection mechanism is a self-selection one. And generalizations based on a turnover of age cohorts is just as slippery: if a new writer (say) comes from Arizona and grew up having Weber, Jordan, GRRM, Moon, and Bujold as favourites his or her worldview is probably likely to diverge from one who comes from Bristol and grew up reading as favourites Stross, Stephenson, Mieville, MacLeod, and Brust. For all the current attempts to open the field (more) to various divergent pools of talent -- ethnic and linguistic background, gender, etc. -- the actual establishment of authors is, again, a self-selection process combined with liberal helpings of chance.
When there is a major blowup in fandom, ripples will spread outward. Even readers who don't connect to fandom will be affected by upheavals if they affect the way in which the authors they read write or the way in which the staff in a specialty bookstore order or promote works. However, it's probably navel-gazing to assume that even the largest blowups have much effect outside a fairly small circle. Most SF/F readers have never heard of RaceFail, let alone the current kerfuffle over the Loncon awards presenter.
In particular, the future of the field is influenced to a small degree by feedback mechanisms within fandom, but it's largely driven.by forces outside fandom: the tastes of those hundreds of thousands of non-fannish readers, the market research by a handful of major publishers, and a rather slow process of literary influence and reputational winnowing.
(I should note here that I'm thinking of written SF/F, and not comics or media, which have different figures and different dynamics associated.)
