I take the liberty of importing some posts from another thread, for a fuller discussion here: I don't have any stats about the number of horror books being published over the years, so my post is based on sharing The Piper's experience of not being able to find new horror authors, on my querying process where I saw virtually no agents representing horror, my former co-agent who DID rep horror but had stopped taking on new clients because publishers aren't buying, and reading the same thing from another agent. I've seen horror authors discussing how poorly the genre does, in general, when self-published, so we can't blame the decline in trade horror on readers defecting to Amazon. So... what gives?
I feel like horror movies are still doing well? And maybe they've sort of taken over the market? I don't enjoy being scared, so I don't watch horror movies, but I certainly find them more frightening than even the best written horror, so if we assume the goal (for the crazy horror crowd) is to be scared, then maybe movies are just better at reaching that goal?
There was enough for a 20 Best Horror List for 2018: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/our-20-picks-for-best-horror-of-the-year/
I love horror movies and I think I've watched pretty much every one legally available to me, but I would happily read the same number of horror books if I could just find them. It's hard to say if that's usual or unusual, but I feel like movies and books generally have different audiences in any genre?
I don't write a lot of horror, but I've never really had a hard time finding magazines that will accept short stories of the genre. Apex and The Dark are two that I've submitted to.
This is true, I have no trouble finding horror anthologies. Hm. Another thing to puzzle over, since short stories usually do pretty badly compared to novels...
This is terrible news for me as a reader. I read mostly horror. But maybe @The Piper has a point. Maybe nowadays people are preferring to watch horror rather than read it? Or at least that's how the publishers perceive it? As a reader and a viewer I don't think it's the same experience at all.
If we're trying to figure out why it's a shrinking market - and maybe it is, maybe it isn't, maybe (if there's plenty on Amazon) it's only really shrinking in the traditionally published market, at least that which pushes its books out to actual bookshops - then a couple of thoughts. 1. Difficulty. Is horror a difficult genre to write? I wouldn't say it's any harder than, say, sci-fi or fantasy. Writing anything is about being able to make people see things that don't exist, and feel things that you're bringing into their lives, and with horror the main thing you're trying to get people to feel is fear. Now, that's just another emotion to play on, and I wouldn't say it's any more difficult to make people afraid with words than it is to make them happy or sad. You're focusing on a different part of the emotional spectrum, but so is a comedic writer. And I'd say that making people laugh with your writing is much, much more difficult. So in short, I can't say that a shrinking horror market is because it's any harder to write. Having said this, I think there's a preconception that it would be, and that's off-putting for authors. 2. Media. Despite this, it's a lot easier to scare people with clear visuals, with music, with scary lighting and well-crafted puppets and spooky cues. So where a horror film can make someone jump, a book just can't do that. You can make someone scared, sure, but can you make them physically jump with fright? Potentially, but it'd be a lot easier with a soundtrack. And this is an issue for readers, as well: you like the horror genre because you like to be scared, right? So if you know a film would scare you more than a book, why bother reading? 3. Growth in other genres. Game of Thrones. Do I need to say anything else? In truth, there's no clear answer, and I can't say that I know enough about publishing/trade to know whether it's a definitively shrinking market. But it seems like it to me. Having gone into the bookshop at my university and discovered that not only do they not have a horror section, but they stocked six horror books out of around 7,000 fiction titles (luckily my friend works in the shop so I didn't look too sad asking), I can't say that it seems like a popular market. Interested to hear what people think about this.
Okay, I wouldn't say it's quite "Horror" level weirdness, but... how is @Rosacrvx commenting on a point in post #6 that @The Piper doesn't make until post #8?
So many people saying my name... I haven't felt this special since the first time I felt the blood of a man wash over me first successfully ordered a pizza without crying! To be fair, my second point was pretty much a repetition of what @Rosacrvx said, although I don't want to drag a horror-specific thread into Groundhog Day kinds of sci-fi.
Thinking outside the box here, but maybe the social media-fueled perception (or concoction) of real life is scary enough that fiction has nothing to contribute anymore? At least as far as monsters and vampires and make-believey things go.
I would say horror (or rather good horror) is the hardest genre to write. It's all about atmosphere and convincing a reader something spooky is going down and you really have to balance logic with the illogical - spooky house terrifying you? - uh, get the hell out of the house maybe? lol. It takes a real knack to do good horror. It's my top in hardest to write genres with Historical second, Sci-fi third, Fantasy fourth, Mystery and Romance tying last place. My list could be bullshit but it's just an observation based on genres with built in story structures. It's not my personal list of hardest to do - for me Romance would be my hardest Sci-fi second hardest then Historical and so on. I also think comedy fiction is the off the scales - you either have it or you don't. Anyone else got their lists of difficulty in genres? I wonder if it's that the tentacles of horror have spread into other genres. In horror you had all your bad egg characters, anti-heros, gruesome violence, odd sex and those things have actually spread to other genres. And the publishing companies could have gotten fed up with submissions only reflecting certain trends - like vampires and zombies. I haven't read much interesting horror since the early 2000s and I really miss Kathe Koja she switched to YA books.
Interesting suggestion, but I'm not sure I can buy the premise. The time that horror was king (Lovecraft, Stoker, et al) was a far scarier time than we're living in now. There were horrific wars, leaving almost no nation untouched. Murder rates were higher, deaths from epidemics were more common, and just about everybody knew somebody, and perhaps several people, who were victims of these scourges. I'd go so far as to suggest that, in many significant ways, English-speaking people have never been as secure or comfortable as we are now. (Of course, no culture previous to ours felt like we were facing total annihilation, say from an atomic war, but there were times like the Black Death or the Irish potato famine that sure seemed that way to the people of the time.) Could it be that we turn to horror because our lives are more comfortable now? Is that why zombies and vampires are such common tropes now ... they give us a sense of what life be like if our world was not as cozy and predictable? It may be that we're simply seeing a glut of horror that a limited market can't bear. When zombies became a thing, it seemed that everybody was writing zombie stories. Maybe Max Brooks could make an industry out of it, but how many others could before zombie fatigue set in?
and here I sit with my new book order of Shirley Jackson....I don't know about all of the rest of the comments but my take on the lack of Horror is uplifting and motivation to write more of it. Go to the masses and wonder lost in the high arches of the Bell curve but find comfort and a small, yet profitable, niche in the bottem of the bell where variety is scarce. It's all in how we look at it. The reader are out there and their waiting.
Folks are probably getting all the horror they can take, reading about news and politics these days. I know I am.
Well it might depend on what you classify as Horror these days. Though the stuff I have seen recently on amazon, is not the kinda stuff you would see trad-pubbed, as it is far too extreme and depraved for most people to want to touch it. However, you can still find traditional Horror stories out there as well, but it is kinda losing ground to the Gore/Torture/Porn type of Horror, that only works based on shock and awe tact to scare you, but then again you can get that from the News on TV.... So it isn't a shrinking market, you just have to spend some time looking for the type of Horror you enjoy reading. I think due to the more gruesome stuff that is flooding the market, has put pubbers off from wanting to put Horror out there.
I think I see a couple of factors at work. There's definitely a decline in mass popularity, but it's part of a longer timeline. I don't think it's less popular than it's ever been by a long shot. It only emerged in anything close to its current form in the Victorian era, and had a good run then, but wasn't wildly popular again until the days of Stephen King and Anne Rice (unless you count E.C. comics and other stories written to scare ten-year-olds in the fifties.) Stephen King became so popular that by the nineties, publishers pushed the genre too hard and published every bit of slasher schlock they could get their hands on, over-saturating the market and causing the beginning of the decline. It's just as likely that twenty years from now, people will ask, "Why aren't they making super hero movies anymore?" Well, because for decades they made five to ten a year, and the general public grew bored with it, which will probably be true. I think this is another big factor. Elements that were considered pure horror in the 1970's are present throughout sci-fi, fantasy, crime and thriller novels. Many of Stephen King's books were never horror in the first place. Firestarter is straight science fiction. Half of those that were considered horror at the time would be categorized today as supernatural fantasy or something adjacent. The Shining comes to mind. Sure, there are horror elements, but no more so than a lot of fantasy stories that would be considered tame in the scare department these days, at least for purposes of labeling. That really only leaves a few Its and Pet Sematarys in the mix. Ditto to Anne Rice. I don't think her vampire books would be considered horror now. They certainly were categorized as such in the seventies, whether they were even meant to be scary or not due to subject matter alone, but in the wake of Stephanie Meyer and the like? I don't know. (Correct me if I'm wrong here. I've only read a chapter or two, because blood puts me on the floor, and Anne Rice excels at describing it.) One problem contributes to the other. When people are bored with something, it gets rebranded. The record industry ruined "alternative" music in the late nineties, and now they call it "indie" music, and no one uses the word "rock" anymore, no matter how similar an artist is to rock from the past. A few of the authors carrying on the Stephen King tradition (including himself and his son) are still marketed as horror, but most newer authors with heavy King or Koontz influences are not. I recently read Paradox Bound by Peter Clines. The "faceless men" were just as scary as an antagonist in an early King book, but you're only going to find Clines on the sci-fi shelf.
I think that's a really good point actually and something that I hadn't considered, in that the market was over-saturated and lost its value. I mean, consider how many authors published horror at the time - King, Herbert, Laymon, Barker - and all the same kind of horror, to an extent (although I'm only ignoring your point about the labels of what is actually horror for the simplicity of this comment, I know exactly what you mean). Too many people invest in the same stocks, and they become worthless. One of the worst metaphors I've ever used, but I'll stick with it for now.
Were you getting any sense of what has replaced Horror? In other words, what kind of books are publishers now promoting instead? I don't pay a lot of attention to these things, but here in Scotland, anyway, Crime Noir seems to be the flavour of the month. I was just in the large Waterstones in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago, and these were the books being promoted near the front of the store. Acres of Crime, with enigmatically dark book covers ...lots of orangey-red and black and occasionally neon blue.
YA vampire romance? No,that joke feels dated now. Let me try again. Self help books with curse words in the title! That's the one. Attn: Amazon, please stop trying to convince me that I need to "unfuck" myself. Thank you.
