We did some research on the relative commonality of different types of printed fiction over the period 2010-2020, to see if trademark filing trends have varied over the years. Drum roll… they haven’t, really. Filing numbers for types of genre keywords remained incredibly consistent over the years. General terms like “fiction,” “nonfiction,” and “novels” were all extremely popular – no surprise, since the trademark registration process incentivizes applicants to use broad descriptions to claim as much “turf” as possible.

The one big surprise – at least for the author – is how common filings for comics and graphic novels were. It was the single most common specific genre, dwarfing many more traditional categories. To speculate without a whole bunch of concrete evidence, I’d guess that there two things driving this. First, there seem to be more small publishers active in the comics / graphic novels front. Second, more authors in the space may be seeking trademark protection for characters, etc. with an eye towards licensing or merchandising than other genres, given how permeable the membrane between comics and TV/movies have been (at least at the high end). The fact that many comics are sold in a series also makes the registration process simpler compared to novels, where the “single creative work” rule has traditionally made the registration process difficult or unobtainable for authors.

How does this match up with sales figures? Per Book Ad Report, the top fiction genres in order were romance ($1.4b), mystery and sci-fi (between $728m and $590m), then children’s ($160m; not done as a separate category when we ran our numbers) and horror ($79m).