So Goodreads announced their Choice Awards and out of curiosity I checked out the Fantasy category. Book recs are pretty common on this Subreddit so I expected to see some decent crossover. Obviously recency is a factor and a lot of recommendations here are "classics" but I was pretty surprised by the results.

I recognized a few of the entries but they are NOT ones I ever see recommended as staples of the genre. As someone who works in marketing it was a very fun reminder that audience bias is extremely real.

It's very clear that the audience on Reddit and Goodreads probably have very little crossover, but the books on top of this list had 50k votes. They are objectively extremely popular. It was also interesting that despite epic fantasy being the defacto default here, the top book on Goodreads was styled as Dark Academia. Looking at the other books there was definitely a common thread among them.

I'd probably post this on the FantasyWriters subreddit if that was still a thing but I think it's a great reminder to look outside of your bubble. Places like this often end up being an echo chamber. My biggest takeaway from this is that women are putting the fantasy genre on their backs. If you want to write a successful fantasy novel in 2024 make sure you're appealing to women, real talk, they're keeping us all in business. Only 4/20 top books were written by men and I'd hazard about the same had male MCs (if that).

Again, different platform, different audience. Just thought it was really interesting to see the difference. Food for thought for the writers out there. Also note that Romantasy was its own category so it's not like there was crossover there. These are main-category fantasy books.