Who reads epic fantasy?

[rachelmanija]

This post was not only prompted by a remarkably stupid NY Times review of the "Game of Thrones" TV series, in which the reviewer thought the story was a polemic against global warming, claimed that women don't like fantasy, and further claimed that women do love sex, so the sex was gratuitously crammed in to please them

Comments

[aberwyn]

In the early 90s, when I was being published by Bantam, my editor asked for a publicity budget for my books (Deverry series, Katharine Kerr) because they were doing so well in the UK and Australia. She was told by the head of the department "No, because men don't read books by women." AT that time, a survey by a UK newspaper showed that 60% of fantasy was read by men. IOW, the other 40% didn't count to this dork.

It's probably the reason I'm writing UF now.

[aberwyn]

Oops, I should add that judging by emails and the people who showed up at book signings, easily half my readers were and are men and boys.

[barbarienne]

I think you're on to something here. At the Very Big New York Publisher where I worked for 14 years, it was obvious that the folks at the top of the marketing department had (a) no interest at all in fantasy, even though it sold well for us, and (b) believed it was only by women, for women, and therefore should be sold kind of the same way the romance novels were.

That house now has at least one enormous-selling, female UF series. I had suggested to the editor that she try to get the first book under the general-fiction imprint instead of the fantasy imprint. I can't say as that caused the series to become bestselling, but I'm sure it didn't hurt. The marketing guys didn't know it was supposed to be a "girl" book, despite the leather-clad hottie on the cover, because it wasn't tagged "fantasy."

[bondgwendabond]

I think 2 is definitely *not* true in YA, where Kristin Cashore, Tamora Pierce and Megan Whalen Turner are the first three names that come to mind (and have all been on the bestseller list).

[bondgwendabond]

Oops, that should have been re: 1, but since teen girls are driving the sales of these books (and probably not a small portion of adult women) it's good for 2 as well. :)

[rachelmanija]

Yes, I know. This is specifically about non-YA epic fantasy. There's lots of discussion about why there's such a split in the comments.

[bondgwendabond]

Had not read through the whole thread, but the difference is always striking to me--so much so that I have always wondered how much of it is in the packaging and marketing... Especially because, as I've said elsewhere before, I think the boundary between YA and adult is probably thinnest in the high fantasy subgenre, since many of the protagonists are essentially treated as adults in their worlds.

At any rate, I know lots of only-sometime-fantasy reading women who have read Rothfuss and Martin, because those are the writers that are bubbling out to mainstream readers, in a way that many of the midlist women's writers mentioned above are not. I do wonder, though, if the women in the midlist are still making up a v. significant portion of the overall subgenre's sales (I have to think so, especially looking at the list of, say, Orbit). But I have no way of knowing the answer with any certainty.

[orzelc]

Melanie Rawn was a good suggestion. The only other plausibly-epic series that comes to mind is Bujold's Curse of Chalion and sequels, but they probably aren't big enough in scope to fit with the others.

Having made a couple of substantive comments, let me also add a tiny pedantic correction: It's Brandon Sanderson, not Brian.

[rachelmanija]

Oops, thanks! No, I'd count Bujold's Chalion fantasies, but her Sharing Knife series doesn't feel epic to me. Though now that I think about it, both series are about the same scale. Maybe it's because the first one is so intimate and small-scale that it colors the rest.

[barbarienne]

I enjoyed the Chalion books but found the Sharing Knife series unreadable. The romance aspect of SK felt more prominent than my tastes generally prefer.

[mme_hardy]

Hey, I like romances and found the Sharing Knife series unpalatable.

[undomielregina]

Here through the link from sartorias.

How about Tanya Huff? I know her more successful stuff was SF and Urban Fantasy, but I don't know how well her Quarters series did.

Another datapoint for the gender neutral set: Mickey Zucker Reichert

[jinian]

(Has Huff stopped writing? Pretty sure I'm still seeing those space-marine books pop up on shelves fairly regularly.)

Mickey is 100% a man's name to me; I was shocked to discover by chance that she was an authoress.

[undomielregina]

No, I think she's still writing. I used past tense totally inadvertently.

[amyaderman]

Two of my favorite epic fantasy series are The Belgariad and its sequel series, The Mallorean by David Eddings. The books themselves are filled with classic fantasy tropes but they're made interesting by the character development and high levels of snark. The first book was published in 1982.

I can't find the citation for this, but the story goes that Eddings's wife, Leigh, practically wrote all the books along with him but wasn't given credit on the cover because it was believed that men wouldn't want to read epic fantasy written by a woman. Her name appeared on some of the books written later in their careers.