Can you recommend any book series where the characters are as amazing as ASOIAF?

[Werthead]

18 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Is this even remotely true?

No. Grimdark has an audience, which is small and passionate, and is sometimes able to carry that across into breakout hits like Joe Abercrombie (5 million sales since 2006) and, to a lesser extent, Mark Lawrence (1.5 million). Anthony Ryan has just cracked 1 million, but beyond him the usual suspects grimdark crowd is notable by their lack of major commercial success. The hardcore grimdarkers like Bakker and Stover have been commercial disappointments.

The biggest-selling epic fantasy series of the last 10 years are Sanderson (26 million) and Rothfuss (c. 15 million), who are very definitely not grimdark. There are other authors like Martin (90 million!) and Erikson (3 million) who have some grimdark elements in their books who have also been successful, of course, although Martin had some pretty huge extenuating circumstances. Non-grimdark fantasy or fantasy which employs grimdark tone but doesn't necessarily fully fit into the genre (Hurley and Jemisin, for example) is doing much better, sales-wise.

[john]

Phipps isn’t saying that grimdark sells better than mainstream fantasy.  He’s saying it’s a profitable niche for self published authors.  It makes a weird kind of sense if you are an author or a reader looking to avoid the orthodox.

[C.T. Phipps]

1 hour ago, john said:

Phipps isn’t saying that grimdark sells better than mainstream fantasy.  He’s saying it’s a profitable niche for self published authors.  It makes a weird kind of sense if you are an author or a reader looking to avoid the orthodox.

Mind you, I sold my first 100K with superhero novels.

[C.T. Phipps]

FYI, here's my TOP TWENTY recommended Grimdark Novels.

Some of them being almost as good as ASOI&F.

http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-grimdark-reading-list.html