Back in Australia, somewhat jetlagged, somewhat mobbed by grandchildren. I’ve been struck by just how niche their interests are. Yes, they follow peer groups (they’re little kids – to be expected) but something that falls outside that niche is simply not even to be considered, in the one child’s case. Peppa big is everything to one, Bluey to the other, and neither of the other camp’s choice is even to be tolerated. Of course, the same is true of many adults and their entertainment or book tastes.

The thing I’ve noticed over years is how these have fragmented faster than African states. Now, many African states fragmented because they were never real ‘entities’ in the first place, sharing any real commonalities. They were just a piece of geography held together by a thin patina of colonial settlement. The people in that piece of geography might come from any number of tribes, speak any number of languages, have wildly different cultures and religions (This was true, of course, regardless of who the colonizer was, unless they conquered and killed all the males, and merely took the women, as was the norm in many cases.)

Remove the thin patina, and they really have no reason, or desire, to be part of the same nation. The only reason for staying together — in many cases — for doing so, is that the dominant — usually largest — group, don’t want to give up control of any of that lump of geography. There is sometimes the reality that minority groups or tribes are well aware that they’re simply too weak and small to stand alone. They put up with the others because there is no effective way out.

It’s equally true of reading. Fiction has fragmented. When my mother was young, there were romances and everything else, and even those two blended into each other. By the time I came along Genre-niches were pretty well established. They were big niches, sf and Fantasy basically being a niche.

By now, there are niches, and niches within niches, and micro-niches within that. I’ve met people who only read fantasy, but only litRPG fantasy, and then some subset of that (don’t ask. They lost me. Some sort of ?farming LitRPG). And there apparently subsets in that too.

I’ve no problem with this. I want people to read, I am not there to praise or belittle their choices. But, given that this is a natural tendency… where does it reach a commercial viability endpoint?