Just learned from inluminent that Amazon.com is supplying RSS feeds of the top sellers by category. So I signed up for the SF, Fantasy and SF& Fantasy feeds. There were a number of interesting things in these rankings. First Fantasy seems to outsell SF. If you look at the top of the Fantasy list, it is the same as the top of the combined list. The top item in the SF list – 1984 – is 9th in the combined list.

The other things is that D&D books top out the Fantasy lists. This means more people are spending $20 on a gaming book, than are spending than are spending $7 on a novel. Interesting.

Lastly new SF isn’t doing very well. The top SF novel is 1984, which was written decades ago. #3 is Fahrenheit 451. Of course this could be pre-school buying.