Good point about Banks. Was amazed that MJH got this exposure--I believe Climbers which is more literary fiction outsold the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, and was reissued with the prestige preface etc. WRT the divisiveness (and I'm his number one fan) some of this is surely because he does go out of his way to be divisive. The nice 81 year old man wins the Booker Prize story is nice but the whole point of Viriconium was that fans of the previous instalment were stabbed in the back, and the overall recognition that people and events aren't internally or externally consistent is normally pushed to the point of provocation.

SF doesn't sell that well either. But I think it's not generally helpful to compare the genres as a whole with best sellers. The top literary fiction - and certainly winners of prestigious prizes - does sell well - and I'd assume that the very top significantly outsells SF for the same reason the very top non-fiction sells crazy amounts: Most people don't read much, and what little they read (or at least buy) is seriously concentrated things the mainstream deems culturally significant.

But I get the impression that the genres that sell well overall does so in large part because of binge readers that reads broadly. A client of mine runs a small press - I help them with tech stuff; small enough that they can "see" in the stats how often people buy an entire 20+ volume set of everything a given author has published at the same time. That doesn't happen in literary fiction, not least because few writers in literary fiction write enough significant books for it to happen.