Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index, which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating.

For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list?

No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, he had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than Anne McCaffrey, the next most frequent bestseller. Whereas Anthony had an astounding 21 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" nine.**

Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distinct books rise to bestseller status, his "most-total-copies-sold" book, A Spell for Chameleon, never actually appeared on a bestseller list. These lists work best at measuring rapid, meteoric rises in sales for books, but long-term, steady sellers rarely make the lists. Along similar lines, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land had over 50 printings but never once made a bestseller list. So, these lists aren't perfect.

Moreover, just because Anthony had 22 titles become bestsellers, that doesn't mean he outsold every other speculative fiction author. Nearly all his titles spent 1 or 2 months, at most, on the bestseller lists. In contrast, Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara spent nearly a full year on the lists (50 weeks total), and The Silmarillion won the genre fantasy sweepstakes by recording 139 weeks as a bestseller. Tolkien's book sold so well, in fact, that Houghton Mifflin had a record year financially. Its trade division in 1977 increased its sales by 48% over what it achieved in 1976 (Whiteside 126).

However, my Piers Anthony factoid isn't the most interesting thing to emerge from this analysis.

So .... last week at ICFA, I presented on Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey. Presentation went super well, and one of my arguments was that, rather than "mass market" or "commercial" fantasy, we should start calling the period from 1977-1990 the Del Rey Boom. The reason? They were just that dominant in shaping genre fantasy.

Despite making that claim, though, I honestly and truly had no idea just how dominant they were. Here's how many distinct titles the other SFF publishers had on a bestseller list through 1990:

• Bluejay Books (1983-1986): 0 titles.
• Timescape Books (1981-1984): 1 title ... A. C. Crispin's Yesterday's Son (Star Trek); ironically, this appeared two months after Timescape's editor was fired for lack of bestsellers (although, granted, Hartwell's bosses forced him to add the "Timescape" logo to ST novels in the first place).
• Baen Books: 1 SF title. Timescape's replacement at Pocket, Baen (like Tor) got started late -- i.e., 1984. Their first bestseller was McCaffrey and Moon's Sassinak (1990).
• Tor Books: 2 SF titles (Greely, The God Game, 1987; & Piers Anthony, 1985). Founded in 1981, Tor needed a little while before becoming the powerhouse they are now.
• DAW Books: 1 title (Tad Williams, Stone of Farewell, 1990). Yes, despite being around since 1972 and boasting Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series, Williams was their first bestseller.
• Warner: 5 titles. This inclusion's iffy since none of their books are originals. They're all novelizations like Alien, Starman, Aliens (Alan Dean Foster), and Batman (Craig Shaw Gardner).
• TSR: 7 titles. The famous Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms -- after 1990, that's when they really start hitting their stride on bookstore shelves.
• Ace Books: 7 titles; three belong to Piers Anthony, and there's one Thieves' World too.
• Avon Books: 11 titles. Better known for romance, Avon nevertheless published six titles by Piers Anthony, two by Brian Jacques, two by Richard Adams, and one by Michael Crichton.
• Berkley Books: 12 titles, but eight are by Frank Herbert, and the other four are novelizations from film and television.
• Bantam Books: 12 titles. Two Asimov, two Feist, and four Weiss and Hickman, plus a scattered few others, including (oddly) a collection of Frank Frazetta's artwork.

Now, guess how many distinct bestsellers Ballantine/Del Rey had. Go on, guess ... I double dog dare you. Whatever you say, though, you're wrong. The answer:

• Del Rey Books: 65 titles.

I mean .... Jesus. More bestsellers than every other SFF publisher combined? And by seven? Plus that number would be higher had not Lester del Rey pissed off Piers Anthony in the mid-1980s.****

Of those 65 Del Rey titles, 26 are SF, the remainder fantasy. Last week at ICFA, Stephen Donaldson told me that other publishers out of jealousy used to call them "Death Rey Books", and now I can see why. Sixteen different titles from Del Rey Books spent 30 weeks or more on a bestseller list, and from August 1984 through February 1985, they had a new paperback original reach the bestseller list each month. It's almost literally impossible to imagine how good the del Reys were at their jobs.

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** Notably, these were all paperback bestsellers, except for And Eternity (1990), Anthony's only hardcover book to reach the lists.

**More fun facts: Anthony's novel Ogre, Ogre was the first SFF novel to ever make the NYT bestseller list as a paperback original ... McCaffrey's The White Dragon was the first it in hardcover ... and Brooks's The Sword of Shannara was the first in trade paperback. The bestseller trifecta!

**** Pocket Books presents a liminal case. Timescape and Baen Books were their SFF-specific lines, but Pocket published some notable SF under "general fiction" ... usually titles they believed would have larger commercial appeal. This includes Douglas Adams's six Hitchhiker's books, Carl Sagan's Contact (1985), and the World Fantasy Award-winning horror novel, Patrick Süskind's Perfume (1986). So that's eight bestsellers. In the later 1980s, Pocket also had 51 best-selling Star Trek novels, which clearly aren't comparable to what Del Rey accomplished. So depending on how one counts, Pocket either had 59 SFF bestsellers .... or zero.

WORKS CITED

1. Anthony, Piers. How Precious was that While. Tor, 2001.
2. Justice, Keith L. Bestseller Index: All Books, by Author, on the Lists of Publishers Weekly and the New York Times through 1990. McFarland, 1998.
3. Whiteside, Thomas. The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing. Wesleyan UP, 1980.