Some ad hoc market research

 

I had some time to kill the other day. Not enough to do anything really useful, but too much time to spend sitting in a waiting room doing nothing, so I did something I haven’t done in more than two years: I went to the nearby shopping mall and spent about an hour browsing around a bookstore.

Now mind you, this is—or at least until two years ago, was—a major suburban “destination” shopping mall, in a large first-tier suburb with a diverse, educated, and fairly affluent population, and the bookstore I went to is one of the last of the huge, major, nationwide chain bookstores. This particular store is so large, in fact, it occupies two floors in a prominent high-traffic corner of the mall and has its own internal staircase and elevator.

The following observations are admittedly unscientific. They are based entirely on the assumption that given the cost of square footage in that mall, the store ownership and management pay close attention to their inventory turns and what’s selling and allocate shelf space accordingly. Since my concern is fiction, I chose to ignore the fact that three-quarters of the store’s space is devoted to non-fiction and periodicals and instead began to count the number of bookcases in the quarter of the store devoted to fiction. 

Breaking it down by numbers of bookcases per genre:

25 - Mysteries & Thrillers
23 - Romance (including Paranormal Romance)*
14 - Manga
12 - General (Mainstream/Literary) Fiction
07 - Fantasy (excluding Harry Potter)**
06 - Science Fiction (including Star Wars)***
03 - Horror
03 - Graphic Novels (non-Manga)
03 - Poetry & Literary Criticism
02 - Black Voices
01 - LGBTQ+ Voices
01 - Westerns

Some observations: 

* It’s interesting that they no longer lump Paranormal Romance together with SF/F but now intermix it with the Harlequin romances et al. This supports my growing belief that there is now very little crossover between the SF/F and Paranormal Romance readerships.

** It’s also interesting that they no longer put Harry Potter in with the rest of Fantasy. Harry Potter is now an industry unto itself, and the books and associated products occupy about eight racks on the other side of the store, between the children’s books and toys and the gaming section.

*** Of the six racks of Science Fiction books, one entire rack is devoted to Star Wars titles. This is actually something of an improvement, as the amount of shelf space formerly consumed by Star Trek books is reduced accordingly. Of the remaining four-and-a-half racks of non-Star Wars / non-Star Trek titles, about half are repackaged reissues of old SF novels that have been given new life in recent movie or TV adaptations. For example, the entire Dune product line has been given new cover art and reissued in new, fatter, and more expensive editions. Which means that as far as new SF novels by new, living, currently working SF authors are concerned…

Well, draw your own conclusions. 

Submitted for consideration and discussion,
~brb