Every Saturday the Wall Street Journal publishes a best seller list. They break it down into hardcover fiction, ebook fiction, hardcover non ficition, ebook nonfiction and business titles. Often as not, best sellers in hardcover fiction will be Dr. Suess, or Shel Silverstein. Both of these are classic children's books, every child has, or ought to have, a copy. Parents, grandparents and grown up friends and relatives buy these classics for birthdays and Christmas presents. There is a steady market, proportional the the number of small children in the country. When one of these steady sellers makes it to the top of the best seller list, it really means that no other author has been able to sell all that many copies of their work. The last real best seller fiction were the Harry Potter stories, that J.K. Rowling fed into the market every other year or so. I can remember riding the Boston subway to and from work where a quarter of the riders in the subway car would be reading the latest hardback Harry Potter yarn. That's a best seller. We don't seem to have any best sellers of that magnitude any more.
Partly the dropoff in best seller fiction is the fault of the big publishers. They won't look at any new fiction unless the author has acquired an agent. There aren't all that many agents in the world and the ones that are out there, are swamped with clients. They won't take on a new author. They are too busy.
Even best selling author Tom Clancy had to go all around Robin Hood's barn to get into print back in the 1980's. His best seller, Hunt for Red October , was finally published by the Naval Institute Press, a specialty house for technical works for Navy officers. After the smash hit success of his first book, Tom had no trouble getting his second best seller, Red Storm Rising, published by GP Putnam.
What this means, is as the established authors die off, (for example Clancy died quite recently) there is nobody in the pipeline to replace them.
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