Quote:
Originally Posted by starrigger
In my little corner, the SF world, it has become harder and harder for even previously successful midlist authors to keep a decent audience.
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Anecdotally speaking as a heavy SF & Fantasy reader since the '60s, it's not because I read less. It's because there's more to choose from. It used to be that I'd only be able to pick currently-in-print novels that were stocked at the local bookstore. I rarely ordered something not on the shelf. Then Amazon.com (
et al) expanded my potential selections of in-print novels and since I was going to wait a couple days to receive a new book there was no longer a barrier to waiting the same time for an older novel that no longer ever showed up at my bookstore. With the advent of ebooks, previously out-of-print books have started appearing again. Looks like Google Books will be taking that further.
SF authors are no longer competing for reading time against just their active and/or popular reprinted peers. There is a tremendous amount of very good, previously-published mid-list SF(&F) from years or decades ago by dead or currently inactive writers that disappeared and is now reappearing. There's an awful lot of excellent stuff I missed in the 80s and 90s that I can now read. That leaves a correspondingly smaller amount of time to read new SF.