genre

My question is this: if Jin Yong is the most widely read contemporary Chinese author, not only in China but all over Asia, and thereby certainly one of the most widely read authors in the world, why is he so sparsely translated into English?

Kelly Link is an extraordinary fiction writer. She will take an old saw like the ghost story or the fairy tale or the girl with latent, supernatural powers, and completely reinvent it in a startling way; this always with a depth of character and emotional complexity that is lacking in so much genre fiction. Even people who are totally turned off by the fantastic and the supernatural should find themselves absorbed by her use of genre methods to get at what it means to be human.

There's a dramatic difference in scale between books and other media--especially the big three, television, movies and video games. If a book sells 100,000 copies it is a huge bestseller. If a television show has 100,000 viewers, it is cancelled. That said, The Da Vinci Code has sold over 60 million units worldwide.