Yet another depressing article involving SFF publishing

Toby Frost

Toby Frost

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Here's another depressing article about publishing. Some of it isn't about SFF, and the tone is pretty tongue in cheek, but the stuff about fantasy strikes me as bleak. No doubt thinking this makes me a snob or some other form of bigot, but I find it sad that the genre of Tolkien, Le Guin and Peake could end up as, y'know, porn. Hopefully things will improve.

www.theguardian.com

My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled – and I soon found out why

From fairy porn to romantasy via the Omegaverse, publishing is sexier than ever. The reason? A big shift in gen Z and millennial attitudes to respectability and shame ...
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
Toby Frost said:
Here's another depressing article about publishing. Some of it isn't about SFF, and the tone is pretty tongue in cheek, but the stuff about fantasy strikes me as bleak. No doubt thinking this makes me a snob or some other form of bigot, but I find it sad that the genre of Tolkien, Le Guin and Peake could end up as, y'know, porn. Hopefully things will improve.

www.theguardian.com

My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled – and I soon found out why

From fairy porn to romantasy via the Omegaverse, publishing is sexier than ever. The reason? A big shift in gen Z and millennial attitudes to respectability and shame ...
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
Click to expand...

Tolkien , Le Guin and Peake will endure and be remembered long after we're gone and, these other books , will become forgotten and dust.
 
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Toby Frost said:
Hopefully things will improve.
Click to expand...
I suspect/hope that this is a craze that will settle down once the novelty wears off and it will become just part of what's available. From what I've seen of romantasy (and the omegaverse -- sheesh) there isn't enough in it for it to become a long-term staple of an intelligent reader's literary diet. Or at least, those who read it avidly long-term aren't people who would read much else anyway.
 
Genuinely bemused by your OP Toby.

Romance and Erotica have been massive sellers since the year dot - probably the biggest genre consistently (I believe; happy to be corrected by statistics!) And like all big framing genre labels, it has been divided into a multitude of sub-genres. Just have a look at Mills and Boon and the various imprints they publish!

So I don't think SFF is morphing into porn, nor do I think Romance and Erotica really influence (or supplant) the cutting edge of other genres. They are what they are and these genres do have a large avid fanbase.

TL;DR Yeah, you sound a tiny bit haughty :giggle:. It's of no harm, let them have fun!
 
Yes, I think you're right.

One of the problems is that I catch myself thinking "Why isn't modern SFF like it was back in X?" (X being some mystical point between 1960 and 2000, depending on what day it is). The answer is that the background changes as well as the subject-matter. The way books are consumed and published changes as well as the topics in them.

But the genre (somewhat) and publishing (a lot) seem to be in a state of weird flux.
 
It is shocking, absolutely shocking that a level headed genre preoccupied with knights, maidens, rescues, towers, princes, magic jewelry and horsies could get waylayed into the world of the romance novel.


SF, on the other hand, needs to get back to its publishing roots: Novels for men that write car repair manuals.
 
Fantasy has always had a sexual edge. It's the genre of Norman's Gor and all those book covers with women in their underwear (from at least the Weird Tales days onwards). Maybe this wave of books will have a far longer hold on the market - and if you go into the right place, their hold is huge - but it's not really an invention.
 
I could tell you things about Peter Pan
Or the Wizard of Oz there's a dirty old man

 
-Scraps ideas for new novels- Lord of the Rooster Rings and The Kitty.

K2
 
Pretty much the second paragraph and the last paragraph sum it up for me.

" Leah Koch started the independent romantic bookshop Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles with her sister, Bea, in 2016 (they recently opened a second shop in New York). She says readers tend to assume erotica is sexier. “The technical definition is that, in erotica, character development happens from sexual situations. We stock both.”

It's just another flavor of character development, apparently what everybody wants nowadays.

The last paragraph explains why it works so well.

"And, in the end, it doesn’t matter, because if there is one thing that has come to pass, maybe through TikTok, maybe just by the march of time, it is that readers no longer care about respectability, literary or any other kind. They don’t care if they are reading an Omegaverse novel in public; they don’t even care if someone mistakenly thinks it’s furry pornography. They don’t care if what they are reading could be mistaken for YA and they are not young. They don’t care if the patriarchy thinks they are silly."

These readers no longer care about respectability, and that's followed up by 4 more they don't cares about who cares about what they're reading. They're having a good time reading.
 
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