Comment by alexitorg
17 days ago
There are a heap of self published sci-fi and fantasy novels that fill the top selling lists on amazon in their respective niche. These are not included in the database that this analysis used. Space travel, multiple worlds and aliens are all really common tropes in those, even if the book is a pulpy progression fantasy or litrpg. The other top sellers are Romantasy which are published professionally. These have lots of dragons, were-wolves and vampires for sexy reasons. The professional fiction publishers are 70-80% women publishing for a majority female fiction reader fan base. Even old best selling men's action authors like Clive Custler and Tom Clancy would probably have to self publish if they were writing today.
Poking around on Amazon's Kindle books for Science Fiction and the "popular" list seems to be all established names at this point? Some of them got their start self-publishing, ofc, like Dungeon Crawler Carl or Andy Weir's books but didn't stay that way. They don't make it particularly easy to sort/inspect the popularity stats, and I'm sure there are some super niche sub-genres out there, but for the genre as a whole I'm not seeing any surprises.
(Space travel, of course, is a major part of many of them, like Project Hail Mary or the Pierce Brown stuff. Not nearly as much in the Star Trek utopian vein, of course, as the parent commenter pointed out.)
Feels like folks like Blake Crouch or Mick Herron are filling similar spots as Cussler or Clancy these days, but again shifted to today's general worldview. Not as verbose as Clancy, though.