I have no informed opinion on this

[james_davis_nicoll]

Andrew Wheeler discusses [the status of] Goodkind's upcoming books.

Comments

[montoya.livejournal.com]

So everything Wheeler says makes sense -- but (assuming all the unsubstantiated info is true) why the heck would Tor even make a $10 million bid, then?

I also tend to wonder if the rights to the Sword of Truth series really worked out for them. It always struck me as if they were going to pay Goodkind as if he were the next Jordan/Martin, but that he never really got to that level despite tons of promotion.

[andrewwheeler.livejournal.com]

Goodkind sells very very well for a fantasy writer -- not as well as Jordan, but no one else does. He's been Tor's #2 bestselling fantasy writer -- by a wide margin -- for many years now. He sells at least as well as Martin, and has been more consistent in turning in his books. I think it's fair to say that he floats a large portion of the Tor list, and not having a new Goodkind book will be a blow to Tor.

I don't know what the details of the new books are, but I have a very strong suspicion that they're not fantasy at all, which makes them a big gamble for any publisher.

And I probably would not characterize this as a "bidding war" -- Anonymous #2 didn't say what the form of the auction was, but if Tor was dropped after a too-low initial bid, it's probably some variety of "best-bid." (And, honestly, thinking about it now, the other bids might be not that much higher than Tor's -- I wouldn't be surprised if the agent and Goodkind had already decided not to take the Tor offer, unless it was really vastly the best offer, to make the break with fantasy more clear and obvious.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

What should I use instead of bidding war?

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Huh, I didn't realize he sold that well. I thought he was down in that second tier of Tad Williams and Mercedes Lackey and whatever else. Although for all I know, I'm totally off on their sales figures, too.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Question: what does Goodkind even mean by "become a mainstream writer" (as opposed to a fantasy writer)? Is going to become a helequin romance writer? A Rushdie style Srs Literature (ignoring that Rushdie mostly considers himself a SF&F writer) writer? Chicklit?

The mind boggles.

[rosefox]

It might just mean calling his work "mainstream fiction" and having it published by a "mainstream" publisher. Witness Tor billing Jo Walton's Half a Crown as "Fiction", even though it's the sequel to two books they billed as "Science Fiction", or Neal Stephenson's new book coming out from a mainstream imprint of William Morrow, even though it's obviously SF. The flip side is Michael Chabon selling Gentlemen of the Road to Del Rey; Chabon could have quite easily found a mainstream publisher for it, but he chose to bring it out under a genre imprint to emphasize that he embraces genre labeling.

These days no one much cares whether it walks like a duck or quacks like a duck. It's just about whether the sign around its neck says "duck" or "goose".

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

That Turtledove I mentioned a while back is labelled as science fiction.

I note that it not only has a former glacial lake like Lake Agassiz, the wildlife mentioned is native to pre-human North and South America....

[papersky.livejournal.com]

As a minor point of possible interest, Half a Crown is way more directly SFnal than either of the other two.

Also, this kind of thing totally tends to be a publisher/marketing decision in which authors don't even necessarily get informed.

[rosefox]

I actually tried to email you when the book came in to PW, asking your thoughts on having it reviewed in the Fiction section vs. the SF/F/H section, but the email address I dug up for you didn't seem to work. I figured you probably didn't get much say in the labeling, though.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Oh well. For future reference if you ever want to ask me anything, my LJ email address works.

[andrewwheeler.livejournal.com]

I think it's a desire for the perceived wider possibilities of "the mainstream," which is mostly, to my cynical mind, a grass-is-greener effect.

I'm not entirely sure if Goodkind is looking for a higher critical profile, or greater sales -- or both -- from the mainstream, and without knowing what these books are (even vaguely), it's impossible to say how realistic that hope is.

(My general assumption is that writers' hopes are unrealistic -- and the more successful the writer, the more likely their hopes are to be ever more unrealistic, since they've tasted some success and want more of it. But I am a horrible cynic.)