Data Guy had something to say about the size of the SF market over at The Passive Voice:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/2016/...comment-363037
Quote:
US trad print SF&F sales (hardcover & paperback) = roughly 47M units a year:
– 34M of that is categorized as Children’s Science Fiction/Fantasy/Magic;
– 13M of it is categorized as Adult Science Fiction or Adult Fantasy.
Add the 15% or so non-Bookscan sales, and you get to 52M.
When it comes to ebooks, trad SF&F sales on Amazon.com are running at around 23M units for Kindle. Add in iBooks, Kobo, Nook, etc. and we’re talking about 33M or so total SF&F ebooks for trad.
So that’s 85M US trad SF&F sales annually for adult+children’s print+ebook combined.
OTOH, indie SF&F ebook sales on Amazon.com are at 32M units for Kindle, which, when you add in iBooks, Kobo, Nook, etc. will total out somewhere between 38M and 40M. Almost all of that is adult SF&F, not children’s (although Teen/YA makes the distinction murky).
Which means that more than half of all SF&F ebooks sold in the US — and nearly a third of all SF&F books *of any format* sold in the US, including children’s books — are indie.
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One thing that stood out for me is how almost three-quarters of print SF&F is categorized under Children's books. If true the younger cohorts are reading a lot of the stuff. Even if it isn't, the genre is a lot bigger than traditional reporting metrics make it out to be. Not Romance market huge but still, it's healthy and growing.