[vidarh]

"Everyone" very much didn't. Most of the people in my life have seen the movies. Relatively few have read the book even now. Most of those close to me who have read the books did so after the movies came out as a direct result of hearing about or seeing the movies.

It wasn't obscure to fantasy fans, but very few fantasy books break through and sell well. Most genre fiction outside of romance, thrillers/crime sell ridiculously low numbers.

In a 2003 interview, the project manager for Tolkien at Houghton Mifflin, who held the US rights, stated that they had at the time only had two million-copy bestsellers in the company's history: The Silmarillion in 1977, and LOTR in 2001 in the runup to the first movie.

By 2003 they'd sold 2 million copies of the one-volume trade paperback in the US.

Worldwide, combined sales went from 50 million copies in 2003, already massively boosted by the movies, to 150 million by 2007. In other words: Nearly half a century to get to 50 million, with a significant proportion of those 50 million in the last few years of that period, and then 100 million in the following 4 once the movies were well known.

The readers of "any must read fantasy bookshelf" are a small enough demographic that if they were the only ones who'd watch the movies, they'd have bombed spectacularly.

[coldtea]

>"Everyone" very much didn't. Most of the people in my life have seen the movies. Relatively few have read the book even now.

Those aren't the people that read fantasy in the first place. If they haven't "read the book even now", it's not like it matters that they seen the movies. For them it could be any other movie in their place, and they would be just as satisfied.

[vidarh]

The point was that the people that read fantasy in the first place other than when nudged by movies is a tiny little subset of people.

And the proportion of people who rarely read fantasy who went on to read LOTR multiplied it's total global sales several times over in a few short years after it'd been out for half a century because of those movies.

[bryanrasmussen]

>It wasn't obscure to fantasy fans, but very few fantasy books break through and sell well. Most genre fiction outside of romance, thrillers/crime sell ridiculously low numbers.

is that still the case?

It seems that almost all media nowadays is some fantasy / scifi subgenre. As is often remarked the nerds won. It seems unlikely that the conventional wisdom about what sells would not have been changed somewhat by this state of things.

[vidarh]

For the most part. There are outliers, especially in non-fiction the ones that makes it onto the bestseller lists at all are often very topical and so hard to predict runaway successes happen. And at least this year thrillers are also doing poorly.

Of the 20 best selling print books for adults so far in H1 2023 according to publishers weekly and Bookscan (so these are not total sales numbers, but they're pretty representative):

Romance: 11 out of 20. The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 8th 9th, 11th, 19th were all romance by Colleen Hoover alone (2nd and 3rd sold 885k and 882k each).

Non-fiction: 3 out of 20, including the 1st (prince Harry's biography; about 1.8m until end H1)

Non-genre fiction: 3 out of 20

Historical fiction: 1 out of 20

The first and only fantasy novel is the 11th: A Court of Thorns and Roses, which at 350k until end H1 is a breakaway success in fantasy.

Thrillers: 1

The number for e-books could very well shift that somewhat, but if you follow some writers on social media, you'll see romance readers churn through romance novels at an absolutely ridiculous rate.

The thing is the key demographics for fantasy and scifi don't read many books. As part of that demographics who does read, it's very noticeable how much of an outlier I am, and I still read a tiny fraction of what a relatively typical romance reader reads.

EDIT:

> As is often remarked the nerds won.

This is true, but not in books: Bertelsmann owns Penguin Random House and has a market cap of ~15bn Euro, and that also includes e.g. RTL and a bunch of non-publishing assets.

Electronic Arts has a market cap of $35bn. Activision has a market cap of $74bn.

"We" won through scifi and fantasy in other media far outdistancing books.

[PhasmaFelis]

The OP isn't talking about the megahit live-action movies. They're crediting LotR's popularity to the cartoon movies that came out between 1977 and 1980.

[vidarh]

I wasn't commenting on OP's claim, but on the claim by the person I replied to, who claimed "everyone" had read the books.