A book dealer who reads NRO e-mails:
Just as an aside, speaking as a used book dealer who does most of his
business through Amazon and who has consequently been shipping A LOT of
used books to Iraq for the past year, I can say without hesitation that
the biggest sellers have been Science Fiction and Fantasy novels
(actually, more the latter than the former). At the moment I have four
orders getting ready to ship to APO AE addresses (and based on the unit
designations, I’m pretty sure at least three of those are heading to
Iraq), and of those four three are Fantasy novels (one David Eddings,
one Katherine Kurtz, one R.A. Salvatore) and the other is SF (S.M.
Stirling, and in some ways is more quasi-Fantasy than true SF).
I would say I get between 5-10 orders to APO AE addresses a week. I can
think of only one Romance novel that I’ve sold (a Nora Roberts, I
believe) to an APO in the last six months. Besides her, the only other
non-SF/F authors that I can think of off hand have been Dale Brown, Tom
Clancy, James Patterson, Larry Bond, and one request for the Penguin
edition of Thucydides. Notice a pattern here? 🙂