McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Are Readers Growing Tired of New Urban Fantasy?
Dresdenus Prime:
I was looking around good ol' Amazon this morning, seeing what other books I could add to my Kindle that I don't have time to read (lol), when I found a book which had a positive review, but the first line was, "The supernatural scene is growing unbelievably tiresome, but.....etc." (Not word for word)
That got me thinking, is this true? Maybe. Just a few months back Harry Connolly's Twenty Palace series was cancelled, and I was a big fan of it.
My current project is Urban Fantasy. I'm trying to use the best of both worlds - by creating my own breed of supernatural, while at the same time using inspiration from existing ones. With any luck I'll succeed and create something original but comfortable for people who are interested in the supernatual that already exist.
But it's certainly something to think about for those of us who are currently hoping to publish a book in this genre. What do you all think? :o
Kali:
Sadly, I know I am. There are rare exceptions, but for the most part I'm over the genre and don't read it anymore. I'm craving good epic fantasy. And I'm half-heartedly shopping around a UF book myself.
Shecky:
The hipster syndrome ("it's cool now, so I don't think it's cool") is a fairly basic human reaction; we crave newness. UF, for example, just plain didn't appeal to me for quite a while, because it seemed that it was all just retreading old stuff with fluffy new looks. Then TDF came along, and it rode those clichés like rented mules... and made the genre interesting to me.
And every now and then, something truly new comes along. Take my current bookstore-commando mission: Myke Cole's Shadow Ops: Control Point. Technically under the aegis of UF, but it's modern military fantasy and takes ooooooooold concepts and remixes them in a new way. I highly recommend it. http://mykecole.com/products-bibliography
Kali:
"Then TDF came along..." When TDF came along, Urban Fantasy had already been cranking for a few years, and "Storm Front" was published twelve years ago.
Twelve years.
Guilty Pleasures, the first Anita Blake book, was published in 1993 and I feel comfortable saying this book started the UF craze. It was not, to forestall the 'But what about _____' posts, the first UF book by any means, but I think it was the series that launched it into the public eye. (I've been reading UF since the 80s when Mercedes Lackey published her Diana Tregarde novels, for instance.)
This is not "newness", not even to a geezer like you.
MClark:
Harry Connolly's 20 Palace series was cancelled?
Yes it was. This news depressed me so much I stopped writing this morning.
This may not mean the death of UF. Connolly has a post on the poor sales of the last two 20 Palace books. He checked Amazon and said many of the negative reviews had comments like
* main character unlikeable
* too dark
* no romance subplot
* background world unexplained
So Twenty Palaces may have sold poorly because it was too unlike most other UF, though he does mention other dark/grim UF is doing well. Last time I checked a bookstore's shelves - almost a year ago?- UF seemed to be doing very well, way better than hard science fiction. Laurel K Hamilton, Charlaine Harris and Kim Harrison had more books between them than all the hard science fiction in the section.
Of course hard SF is not very popular so this may just mean a few UF authors are totally outselling a dying genre.
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