D&D General No One Reads Conan Now -- So What Are They Reading?

[Paul Farquhar]

New Conan novels and a comic book and a magazine sure point to the property being relevant.

In order to be relevant, people would need to be reading them. Conan is in the public domain, anyone can produce a knock-off. It doesn’t mean anyone is buying them. I’ve never seen them in shops (including online shops), and I’m the only person in my D&D group who has even read the originals.

Conan is relevant to those interested in the history of D&D, but most players just want to play, they don’t care about the history.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It was quite weird the other night to hear my partner being a grog over the latest BBC Agatha Christie adaptation, Towards Zero. "That character wasn't in the book" [/sulk]. I thought it was fine (if easy to solve if you know Christie's one trick), but then I barely remember the book, if I ever read it. She likes Rings of Power - she's never read the book.

 

[Bedrockgames]

In order to be relevant, people would need to be reading them. Conan is in the public domain, anyone can produce a knock-off. It doesn’t mean anyone is buying them. I’ve never seen them in shops (including online shops), and I’m the only person in my D&D group who has even read the originals.

Conan is relevant to those interested in the history of D&D, but most players just want to play, they don’t care about the history.

I still see them at the book store (and you can still reliably pick up Howard). And most gamers I know are pretty familiar with the original Conan stories

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I still see them at the book store (and you can still reliably pick up Howard). And most gamers I know are pretty familiar with the original Conan stories

You can get a collected works original stories at my local bookshop, but nothing else. None of my players are over 40 (and 1/3 are not male!) so none have read the stories, they only know the name. They could tell you all about DragonballZ though,

 

[Umbran]

It would be better to ask: do the sales of titles in certain subgenres outperform? E.g., does the median sword and sorcery book outsell the median romantasy book, or vice versa? That could be a sign the publishers are not accurately reflecting the market.

I don't see how one genre outperforming (which I take to mean outselling) another shows publishers aren't reflecting the market. I would not expect all genres to be equally popular with the overall reading audience, and so they wouldn't perform the same.

Just above, for example, we noted that women read more fiction than men do, by about 19%. So, genres that are typically targeting men are likely to perform poorly compared to those that target women's interests.

 

[Bedrockgames]

You can get a collected works original stories at my local bookshop, but nothing else. None of my players are over 40 (and 1/3 are not male!) so none have read the stories, they only know the name. They could tell you all about DragonballZ though,

That is just your group though. Liking Conan and Dragonball Z isn’t mutually exclusive (heck I used to watch stuff like that myself and I am passing into 50). In the 90s we liked all kinds of media, including anime (back then it was still largely called Japanimation where I lived). But people were still reading Moorcock, Tolkien and Howard. I know plenty of gamers under 40 who might like a lot of new media properties but are still familiar with the Conan stories and with things like Lord of the Rings

 

[The Firebird]

In order to be relevant, people would need to be reading them. Conan is in the public domain, anyone can produce a knock-off. It doesn’t mean anyone is buying them. I’ve never seen them in shops (including online shops), and I’m the only person in my D&D group who has even read the originals.

Conan is relevant to those interested in the history of D&D, but most players just want to play, they don’t care about the history.

The ability of anyone to produce a Conan story is a bit more complicated, because the character remains trademarked. See a good post here.

I don't see how one genre outperforming (which I take to mean outselling) another shows publishers aren't reflecting the market. I would not expect all genres to be equally popular with the overall reading audience, and so they wouldn't perform the same.

Just above, for example, we noted that women read more fiction than men do, by about 19%. So, genres that are typically targeting men are likely to perform poorly compared to those that target women's interests.

I didn't say it was about comparing overall sales.

In general, if you're looking for evidence of discrimination, a good bet is to see if a particular kind of author is overperforming relative to expectations. There's a quality of being "so good they can't ignore" that lets people at the top break down these barriers (think about examples in sports). If the publishers are choosing between two authors who don't have track records it's easy for them to choose the one they favor beyond economics. But if they're looking at a top performer, they have to put their opinions to the side.

So the question becomes, who are the publishers taking risks on? Are they accepting every middling sword and sorcery plot that hits their desk while rejecting all but the most popular romantasy books? Or vice versa?

Does that make sense to you?



Caveat: this is only about discrimination by the publisher. If the audience has its own biases, like not buying books from authors with names like "Joanne", that's a separate issue.

 

[SteveC]

You've mentioned "Correia getting published" a few times as evidence that there has not been a narrowing, but this fact doesn't support your claim. The fact that one thing X exists does not demonstrate a lack of structural barriers to thing X existing.

I think this is a great point. I've been a fan of Larry's since I read the first sentence of his first book ("On one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream. I was able to throw my incompetent jackass of a boss from a fourteenth-story window.") I've been reading him ever since.

Larry came into the industry as a self-published author, and even though he's been picked up and sells tons of books, he is very much on the outside of mainstream Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror publishing. The whole point of Sad Puppies, which was over 10 years ago, was to highlight these differences.

In the case of the Hugo's, when I was reading the most (in the 80s, when I was in school and had the time) I read just about every book that was even nominated. I remember going to the library to pick up a list of Hugo Award winners so I could read past years. I typically have only heard of one or two of them now. And it's not like I'm just reading pulp, popular literature. I'm an English major, and I try to stay in touch with the book world, but what's awarded in the Hugo's is not what I'm interested in reading.

And I feel it's important to say this: that's fine. I'm 100% not trying to yuck anyone's yums here. The problem I see is that new authors getting into writing have problems getting noticed. That's only one of many problems these days, where if you're writing a multi-book series, it's hard to get published or get traction because so many people expect the series to not get finished.

I think, much like the Oscars, there has been an issue with what's awarded versus what's read or watched. And with publishing houses that are risk averse, that's a problem. Put that together with political issues where authors that get read find it hard to get into book stores, and this is a problem. It's a problem for me, I suppose. If you don't like Larry's books (or similar authors) I would not expect you to care. I do care because I want to see lots of books by lots of authors with different perspectives. Even if I'm not going to read a lot of them.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That is just your group though. Liking Conan and Dragonball Z isn’t mutually exclusive (heck I used to watch stuff like that myself and I am passing into 50). In the 90s we liked all kinds of media, including anime (back then it was still largely called Japanimation where I lived). But people were still reading Moorcock, Tolkien and Howard. I know plenty of gamers under 40 who might like a lot of new media properties but are still familiar with the Conan stories and with things like Lord of the Rings

It’s rather a good job none of my players have read Conan. They would never play D&D again!

Lord of the Rings presumably still gets read sometimes, since the bookshop stocks a lot more copies than it does Conan. Most folk know the movies better though.

Moorcock is woefully under-read even by the grogs on this forum.

 

[Desdichado]

Just above, for example, we noted that women read more fiction than men do, by about 19%. So, genres that are typically targeting men are likely to perform poorly compared to those that target women's interests.

There's a pretty good chance that you've got the cause and effect backwards there, though. Books that target mens' interest have been (relatively) few and far between, and that's a change that has happened in my lifetime.