Now that we understand the interests, at least broadly, let’s delve into the buying habits.
However, only a few subgenres were tallied, so I didn’t find the answers especially useful. The survey captured further data on some subgenre preferences within SF and fantasy. Horror seems to be dropping off a little in the past couple of years. Both are far more popular than horror, at least with this audience. There’s nothing too exciting or surprising here: readers have a slight preference for sci-fi over fantasy. To get warmed up, let’s look at the broad genres that readers are interested in, from 2010 to 2019: Thus, it’s reasonable to assume that the 837 respondents offer a representative sample of the SF/F readership, albeit one that leans a bit toward the traditional publishing industry in the US. Also as expected, 83% of respondents said that SFF forms the major part of their pleasure reading. This isn’t terribly surprising, since it’s a trade magazine. In other words, most people taking the Locus survey are stakeholders in the SFF industry, either on the creative side, the editing side, or both. Of note, around 60% of respondents chose “Writer/Editor” as their primary or secondary occupation. The majority are college-educated homeowners.
Interestingly, only 32% of those claim to be Locus subscribers and the rest are readers who are obviously familiar with the magazine. In 2019, the circulation is 3,600 and 837 survey ballots were returned. These figures are from the survey published in issue #703 (August 2019). As readers of this blog know, I am pathologically incapable of seeing good data relevant to the SF/F world without digging into it. To their credit, the good people at Locus provide dozens of detailed tables tracking not only the respondents’ answers, but the results of previous years. Each year, they conduct an in-depth reader survey that provides a glimpse of the evolving SF/F market. Locus Magazine is the trade magazine for the science fiction & fantasy field.
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