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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The 75th World Science Fiction Convention (commonly known as WorldCon) is being held this weekend in Helsinki, Finland. The convention is where the annual Hugo Awards are presented, and today, the convention announced the latest recipients.
This year, women almost completely swept the Hugo Awards, taking home the top prizes for literature in the science fiction community. That's particularly notable, given how the awards have been increasingly recognizing works from female and minority creators. The trend prompted a counter-movement from two group of fans, the self-described "Sad Puppies," and their alt-right equivalents, the "Rabid Puppies." These groups gamed the awards and forced a slate of nominees onto the Hugo ballot in 2015, prompting widespread backlash within the wider genre community. Another award, the Dragon, faced similar issues earlier this week when several authors asked to pull their nominations over concerns about Puppy interference and the award's integrity.
This year's sweep by female creators seems to be a strong repudiation of anti-diversity groups. 2017 also marked the year the ceremony earned its own award: a representative from the Guinness Book of World Records certified that the Hugos are the longest-running science fiction awards ever.
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(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday August 16 2017, @08:32PM (2 children)
It is worse, they apparently do not care about losing the business of everyone. That is the point, the sales figures suck. Go to a bookstore and look at the SF&F section. It is smaller than it once was but it is worse. You see a vast section selling franchise tie in junk (Star Wars, Halo, that sort of junk) and a lot of back catalog, i.e. the old stuff written by mostly white dudes. What you do not see much of is the new stuff by these diversity hires. The publishers keep signing these talentless politicians but the book buying public does not buy them. Because when they aren't political screeds they are romance books tarted up with some Syfy tropes. Young nerdboys aren't going to read them and anyone else who does is not going to be inspired to grow up and be an astronaut, they will grow up to be a buttpirate in SanFran.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @08:54PM
Your stupidity is showing. Now git off mah lawn!
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday August 18 2017, @02:35AM
When I go to a bookstore, I don't even see the back catalog stuff. I see the tie-in stuff, the last several installments of various urban fantasy, modern/future milscif, medieval milscif, and franchise series, and second or third books of excessively long fantasy trilogies by authors who started writing video game tie-ins.
I rarely see a standalone of ANY genre, nor do I see good short story collections, new authors or books in translation (despite seeing stellar reviews of foreign authors all the time).
My interpretation is that publishers and bookstores are so risk averse, they won't risk physically stocking anything new, old, or anything demanding, preferring the custom of casual repeat buyers to that of serious readers.
As an example from another genre, crime fiction author Sara Paretsky, in an interview a couple of years back, said that publishers are now unwilling to sign anyone they don't think will move 20,000 copies of their first novel, a total she didn't achieve until her sixth.
I expect they restrict new authors to primarily online sales until they reach a certain threshold, which means they not only are not seen in bookstores, where at least they can be discovered serendipitously, but also are hidden by online retailers' search algorithms from anyone whose buying profile is judged to not match the book's likely-sale profile--thus making it less likely that readers will read something they are not absolutely comfortable with, and consequently that publishers become even more likely to publish pap that sells quickly or that only matches the tastes of established customer categories than to tale risks on anything new, dangerous or interesting.
At least, with the exception of the Herbert estate, the spec-fic publishers haven't gone the way of other genres and started churning out vast numbers of books and sequels under the names of dead authors, even further diluting the market.