What published metrics are there on how sci-fi is doing as a genre in the publishing business?

Question

I've heard that sci-fi is on the wane as a genre. Are there numbers to reassure me that sci-fi isn't going the way of Westerns/Cowboy books?

Answer 1

Locus magazine publishes a lot of statistics on books published in their annual year in review. The Feb. 2010 issue says that for original novels in 2009 there were:

• 232 SF
• 572 Fantasy
• 251 Horror

In 2001 there were:

• 251 SF
• 282 Fantasy
• 151 Horror

Overall for the last decade, SF has stayed fairly flat but is becoming a smaller percentage of the books published across all the related genres.

Answer 2

Gardner Dozois publishes an anthology of short fiction every year:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection
• and so on...

In each one, he has an essay summarizing major events in the field: books published, news about magazines or websites, deaths in the field, etc. Without going back and re-reading the essays for recent years, my impression is that books and some websites are doing OK, magazines not so well.