Why Laura Hamilton sells more than Robert Jordan

[martin_wisse]

Andrew Wheeler has Taken on Patrick of Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, about the socalled changing of the guard in fantasy, that is, the idea that there is a top tier of bestselling epic fantasy writers and whether or not the people on the top will be replaced anytime soon or not. Andrew Wheeler thinks this is the wrong question to ask, but also says that the people obsessed with this question have missed what did happen:

However, there has been a changing of guard over the past decade, and the folks obsessed with epic fantasy have missed it. Who's the new breed? Laurell K. Hamilton and the several dozen writers following in her footsteps.

She has two bestselling series running now, and has hit #1 on the Times list. Her backlist is already deeper than Jordan's, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's selling more units annually than he is. She also has created a new, very popular subgenre in her wake: the contemporary or urban fantasy. Many of the first-wave writers in that subgenre (Charlaine Harris, Kim Harrison, Jim Butcher) are bestsellers as well, and even some second-wave writers (Patricia Briggs, Rachel Caine) are hitting the lists.

Epic fantasy isn't quite a backwater, but it's not the only game in town anymore, and it's not where the real excitement and splashy successes are happening, either. But urban/contemporary fantasy is mostly written by women, mostly about women main characters, and (presumably) mostly read by women, so it's obviously not important...

To be honest, I always thought, based on some possible misremembered sales data and anecdotal evidence, that epic fantasy itself was also a quite "woman friendly" genre, in that quite a few of its readers were female, though perhaps not a majority.

With Hamilton, I seem to remember most of her early fans, based on observations in rec.arts.sf.written and the like were female; she also seemed to be popular with those who liked romance novels, again mostly female. Hamilton therefore appealed to (mostly female) readers who liked epic fantasy, but who found that what they liked in epic fantasy could be found in much greater proportion in Hamilton's work, while simultaneously, readers who would not be caught dead reading epic fantasy because it was a bit too fantastic for them, also liked Hamilton more "realistic" setting. In short, she fused the romance novel with urban fantasy and created a monster....

And since romance is a genre in even lower esteem than epic fantasy, it is easy to dismiss her, especially when it all degenerated into not-so-softcore porn for a while.

Thoughts?

Comments

[vatine]

Well, in the "urban fantastic novel", there's Diane Duane's Wizards series (though the primary strand was published as kid's books, I believe). I suspect these predate Laurell K. Hamilton's early ones by a fair bit.

I don't know about the similarity to romance, but that'd be from a lack of romance experience, as it were.

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

Urban/contemporary fantasy has been around a long time. I think "Conjure, Wife" is often cited as one of the earliest appearances.

Hamilton's initial appeal for me was the combination of excessive violence with excessive sex with psychology heavily influenced by instinct. Anita Blake was an alpha dominant, even if it killed her; the monsters she interacted with were similarly bound in their behavior by what they were.

It was romance-tinged, but that didn't bother me. I like good romance. (There's a lot of bad romance, including virtually everything labeled "romance".)

Over time, she lost me when she started skimping on the plot and changed the ratio of sex to violence.

But, yeah, she fused romance to fantasy and will go to hell for it. Not on her own behalf, because her first six or eight books were fine worthwhile reads, but for the legions of sewage-spewing metoos and coattail-riders that make visiting the SF/fantasy aisle at the bookstore like walking through a five-dog backyard.