I really love Tolkien and Jordan, and also GRRM… I would treat competing against them as entirely accepted and obvious.
Teenagers buying Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, or Jordan for the first time… Wonderful. Of course you will be stocked there… These are the gateway to the genre, IMO.
It shouldn’t be viewed negatively or as a sort of competition - which is why I respect the meme.
I don’t think writing better books will help. Every big bookstore I’ve been to has a whole section for Harry Potter and those aren’t exactly literary masterworks. The real ticket is “get someone who has a big movie/tv studio to think they can make money off your books”.
I don’t know who she is, but I think she has a valid argument.
She’s fighting against the Zipf law. VSauce made a nice video about it years ago. Popular books being more exposed lead to popular books being even more sold hence more popular, leading even less space for new books.
I had a twitter discussion with another author making the same point… I pointed out that a) she had only written one book, and b) it was categorized under “Young Adult”, not “Fantasy”.
Kind of hard to “get more shelf space” when you only have one book.
In THIS case, the author actually does have a decent collection of books:
“She is best known for writing The Green Bone Saga, the first of which, Jade City,[2] won the 2018 World Fantasy Award and was named one of the 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time by Time magazine.[3][4] The Green Bone Saga was also included on NPR’s list, “50 Favorite Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of the Past Decade”.[5]”
Jade City is actually amazing. I feel for her, but bookstores are just gonna present the most popular because they’re trying to make money. Bookstores cooler than B&N might have a “like that, try this” kind of thing which would get attention.
Tolkien and Jordan also have recent TV shows, which definitely influence what books the stores will display.
Quick edit to say if you want a good fantasy book written by a woman, try Jade City.
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