>It wasn't obscure to fantasy fans, but very few fantasy books break through and sell well. Most genre fiction outside of romance, thrillers/crime sell ridiculously low numbers.
is that still the case?
It seems that almost all media nowadays is some fantasy / scifi subgenre. As is often remarked the nerds won. It seems unlikely that the conventional wisdom about what sells would not have been changed somewhat by this state of things.
For the most part. There are outliers, especially in non-fiction the ones that makes it onto the bestseller lists at all are often very topical and so hard to predict runaway successes happen. And at least this year thrillers are also doing poorly.
Of the 20 best selling print books for adults so far in H1 2023 according to publishers weekly and Bookscan (so these are not total sales numbers, but they're pretty representative):
Romance: 11 out of 20. The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 8th 9th, 11th, 19th were all romance by Colleen Hoover alone (2nd and 3rd sold 885k and 882k each).
Non-fiction: 3 out of 20, including the 1st (prince Harry's biography; about 1.8m until end H1)
Non-genre fiction: 3 out of 20
Historical fiction: 1 out of 20
The first and only fantasy novel is the 11th: A Court of Thorns and Roses, which at 350k until end H1 is a breakaway success in fantasy.
Thrillers: 1
The number for e-books could very well shift that somewhat, but if you follow some writers on social media, you'll see romance readers churn through romance novels at an absolutely ridiculous rate.
The thing is the key demographics for fantasy and scifi don't read many books. As part of that demographics who does read, it's very noticeable how much of an outlier I am, and I still read a tiny fraction of what a relatively typical romance reader reads.
EDIT:
> As is often remarked the nerds won.
This is true, but not in books: Bertelsmann owns Penguin Random House and has a market cap of ~15bn Euro, and that also includes e.g. RTL and a bunch of non-publishing assets.
Electronic Arts has a market cap of $35bn. Activision has a market cap of $74bn.
"We" won through scifi and fantasy in other media far outdistancing books.
is that still the case?
It seems that almost all media nowadays is some fantasy / scifi subgenre. As is often remarked the nerds won. It seems unlikely that the conventional wisdom about what sells would not have been changed somewhat by this state of things.