Presented without implied indorsement

[james_davis_nicoll]

Because I have no idea if the following is true or not.

David Drake on Robert Jordan

I'm inclined to be at least a little skeptical when he says I further said and will repeat: there were quite a lot of people who sneered at 'Robert Jordan' but whose own books wouldn't have been published without the Wheel of Time to subsidize them. Since the onset of Jim's (Jim Rigney's) illness, he hadn't been able to write--and a lot of those people are not being published any more.

The thing is, publishing is a horrible darwinian battleground, especially for writers, and over any given interval a large subset of mid-listers will find that their careers have come to an end. It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Tor's total number of titles per year stayed roughly constant at the same time that the mix of authors changed.

[Added later: titles per year should be easy enough to check. More later]

Comments

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

A top SF editor once told me it doesn't work like that. Each purchase has to be justified on its own anticpated sellability. However a bestseller certainly helps with cashflow, possibly easing the pressure on mid-lists to sell as rapidly?

[autopope.livejournal.com]

True, but Jordan was a major contributor to Tor's bottom line, much like J. K. Rowling at Bloomsbury. So much so that I believe Tor editorial and management folks were preparing detailed contingency plans for what to do after his death more than a year ago.

I believe Drake is over-egging his pudding, but there's a germ of truth in what he says: the biggest SF/F publisher in the US has just said farewell to its major cash cow, and only fools or incurable optimists would welcome this.

(My understanding is that "Robert Jordan" shifted a significant -- double digit -- percentage of all genre fantasy sold in the USA. Think in terms of Pratchett and the Tolkien estate combined, for a British equivalent. It doesn't matter how good the post-Jordan plans at Tor are, that's got to hurt: not to mention that James had a much closer personal relationship with Tor's senior folks than most authors have with their publishers.)

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

"the biggest SF/F publisher in the US has just said farewell to its major cash cow, and only fools or incurable optimists would welcome this."

This is not going to be good for booksellers, either. I'm already recommending shorting the hell out of Borders stock this Christmas just before the revenue announcements come in, and this is not going to help Borders's already prodigious problems. Everyone who's going to want a Harry Potter book has one, no more Wheel of Time, and a bookstore that's built its reputation not on decent customer service but on offering deep discounts to fly-in customers...if Borders doesn't merge with Barnes & Noble, as was anticipated last year, it's going to be in a world of hurt.

What's equally bad is that these two double-whammies, if they help take out Borders, are probably going to take out a lot of indie bookstores as well. Contrary to the protestations of a lot of us fellow readers, general consumers in the US won't suddenly flock to indie stores if Borders goes under. Considering the incredible number of entertainment options currently available, if they don't decide to move over to Amazon or B&N, odds are that they'll just stop buying books entirely. Suddenly, McSweeney's plans to encourage more readers to bypass bookstore distribution ills and buy books directly from the publisher comes off as more prophetic than ever.

[aisb23.livejournal.com]

Not to minimize the problems with Borders, but I can't see the sales Wheel of Time books being that big of a percentage of their annual revenue. Or even amongst smaller indie booksellers as well. Yeah it will hurt, but not enough to force a merger with B&N.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not going to say that it's the main reason why Borders will shut down, but it's just one of the many final straws. Borders has been coasting on its "marginally less incompetent than its indie store competition" reputation for fifteen years now. Considering how desperately the stores depend upon customers coming in for Events instead of regular visitors, mostly thanks to those deep discounts, this is just another straw flung at the camel from low-earth orbit.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

At a half-million copies in six weeks (a number cited in the thread James linked to), Wheel of Time novels are major, major forces in publishing. Those numbers only look small compared to Harry Potter; compared to anything else in fiction, they're huge--best-selling book of the year-caliber huge.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

Actually, I work in a small SF bookstore. We keep one copy of each of the Wheel of Time books in. They never sell. Partly because I guess everyone who wants it has them, or knows they can get them at Goodwill (which has multiple copies of all books, 2 blocks away) for 79 cents, or would be embarrassed buying them in an SF bookstore so they get them elsewhere.

While this may well have some impact on what other things Tor can afford to publish, not selling books we're not selling won't actually have any direct effect at the store level.

[mrbankies.livejournal.com]

Contrary to the protestations of a lot of us fellow readers, general consumers in the US won't suddenly flock to indie stores if Borders goes under

This presupposes that there are indie bookstores to flock to. As a resident of a small US city, there isn't much to choose from in that respect. The only one that carries a halfway decent selection of SF/F if the University bookstore, and shopping there is a major pain in the backside due to parking issues. The others are all small and specialized.

I'd prefer to goto a indie over a chain, but there isn't one available and not being stupid rich, I can't afford to start my own.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I live in a very small city and we have one bookstore -- a used one (although it is in Old Town, so it gets tourists). Outside the city a ways is another used shop plus one each Borders and Barnes & Noble.

We used to have an indie SFF book & comic store closer to the city than the Borders, but they kept trying to cram so much stuff into a small place that I stopped going and apparently others did, too, since they closed a few years ago.

I mostly buy online.

In which I am a callous bastard warning to James Rigney's friends

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that if one was an author with a potentially best-selling novel (or better, series of novels), this is the time to pitch it to Tor. Well, somewhere between a month and six months ago was, if the numbers at Submitting to the Black Hole are right.

Re: In which I am a callous bastard warning to James Rigney's friends

[armb.livejournal.com]

Does it really make much difference? I mean, it's not as if they'd say "oh, a potentially best-selling series of novels - no, we've already got one, that'll do" before.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Well, but he only had a new book come out every three years or so in the last decade; if he's responsible for that much of the sales, it has to be mostly backlist, and there's little reason to expect that to dry up immediately.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Sure, but how "sellable" is sellable?

Do they want 10% margin or a 20% margin, overall. If a few tentpoles cover most of that margin, and one collapses...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

If I didn't come from a nation that does most of its trading with an unstable and declining republic, I'd comment here about the wisdom of relying on too few sources of income.

[pats-quinade.livejournal.com]

I'd never even heard of softwood lumber until I came up here...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Were you around for the time Mulroney put the Americans in their place for softwood taxes by slapping an import duty on books imported into Canada? No, I have no idea what he was smoking.

[change of subject]

I wonder how much impact it would have made if BM had made books GST-exempt?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Sure, sure. Of course, then there is that old joke about the accountant to explains to the publisher, "See, some of your books lose money. Some make a little money. And a few are bestsellers, and that's where 90% of your profit comes from! Really, instead of publishing ten losers, ten winners, and two bestsellers, you should really just publish twenty-two bestsellers a year."

And the publisher says "Gee, why didn't I think of that?"

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

We had a bookchain up here that only sold best-sellers. In fact, I think that they were called Bestsellers. I don't see them around anymore, at least in KW.

[(Anonymous)]

At least in Ottawa, Bestsellers morphed into selling videos and then DVDs, with a small rack of paperbacks (the type sold in drug stores or convenience stores).

Why is it when I fact check, I end up more confused than when I started?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Stealing from this post, (http://groups.google.ca/group/rec.arts.sf.written/msg/e1013818fef7e70f?) and this post, (http://groups.google.ca/group/rec.arts.sf.written/msg/aa13e4ec8e970ec6?hl=en&)

       A             W
1993:               217                 The Fires of Heaven, Oct 1993
1994:               230                 Lord of Chaos, Oct 1994
1995:               260
1996:               246                 A Crown of Swords, May 1996
1997:               239
1998:               218                 The Path of Daggers, Oct 1998         
1999: 227           263
2000: 222           248                 Winter's Heart, Nov 2000
2001: 238           277
2002: 238
2003: 263                               Crossroads of Twilight, Jan 2003
2004: 235
2005: 232                               Knife of Dreams, Oct 2000
 

But where where the two sources overlap, they don't agree at all and SF Signal gives the 2005 total as 218, (http://groups.google.ca/group/rec.arts.sf.written/msg/e1013818fef7e70f?) so be warned that the A-sourced figures may not be any good.

I do see a bump in titles published the year after a WoT book comes out, except 1996/1997.

No, I don't have the right back issues of Locus.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

...I'm inclined to be at least a little skeptical...

The subsidy argument, I could buy--IIRC, many years ago Donald Wollheim was asked at a WisCon why he published the Gor books. He claimed in response that they sold Really, Really Well, and w/o that revenue stream he wouldn't have been able to take a chance on a lot of other authors (Doris Piserchia and Jo Clayton are the only ones who spring to mind, although CJ Cherryh may have been a DAW find).

What I have a lot more trouble with is the comment that

...the plots for individual volumes were decided by very highly placed people in council with the author.

That one looks like a pretty extraordinary claim, and I'd expect more proof than a comment by David Drake (even though he'd be far more likely to know about something like that than I am).

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

CJ Cherryh definitely got her start at DAW. The final H on her pen-name was to keep it from sounding too "girly".

Wollheim published a lot of stuff that wasn't terribly profitable. As I recall, the translated foreign words would be an example.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

That makes sense--"Caroline Cherry" sounds like a Harlequin Romance house pseudonym.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

...the plots for individual volumes were decided by very highly placed people in council with the author.
That one looks like a pretty extraordinary claim, and I'd expect more proof than a comment by David Drake

Could it be some sort of bizarro take on "author's spouse, acknowledged as author's most influential first reader, also happens to have professional connection with author's publisher" ? I know nothing about David Drake and can't judge whether this would be plausible from him.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about Drake as a person (I don't even know if he knew Rigney personally) but I believe that in the past published authors have from time to time been less than fully informed about the minutia of the publishing business. It wouldn't violate the laws of nature of Drake was incorrect.

I am fairly certain [1] that Drake and Jordan had different editors, FWIW.


1: I need an icon for "I may have no idea what I am talking about".

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Hartwell edits Drake, no?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I don't recall.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Googling suggests that this is the case.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Yes; I can attest to this directly, having worked with both of them on a book. (I wrote jacket copy for one of Drake's novels during my short career writing jacket copy.)

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Having learned that this is true, I now wonder why I knew it. It doesn't seem like information that's likely to be of direct use to me, or the sort of thing you'd just pick up in the normal course of existence...

[andrewwheeler.livejournal.com]

Jordan's editor was Harriet McDougal, his wife, and she didn't edit anybody else once she married him and moved south...so Jordan and anybody else (post 1991 or whatever) are guaranteed to have different editors.

From reports I got around the time of the publication of the last several books (which may or may not be completely accurate), the folks at Tor had no real idea what was going to be in Jordan's books until they were delivered. The books came in, in essentially final form, went into a lightning round of copyediting, and were shoved out into stores about as quickly as humanly possible.

I'm skeptical of Drake's claim, and posted about it in rasfw. But he may have inside information, so I won't be dogmatic on the subject. It is possible that Jordan talked regularly to Tom Doherty, and Doherty had some influence on plots...but I still doubt he would have told Jordan to deliberately slow the books down; Tom's a guy who loves and appreciates good books, and I can't see him making something worse on purpose.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

It could just be that he discussed plots with the publisher before starting to write each book. That's not remarkable.

I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's comments about how Deepness was essentially completely rewritten based on the advice of his editor.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

But there's a big difference between rewriting a single book based on editor's advice and the publisher telling the author to put in additional books because the series is selling so well. That's what I have trouble believing.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

That's an overstatement of what Vinge said at Lunacon, and according to Frenkel is an overstatement period. Vinge is obviously very pleased with Frenkel's editorial oversight, though--he has followed Jim from publisher to publisher and does, as you say, speak very highly of his input into the novels.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Not only that, but the claim that books were expanded into several at the publisher's request solely to pad sales. It seems discourteous, at least, to a recently-dead author to say this.

[kate_nepveu]

At least.

I also find it very hard to believe of Tor.

[daystreet.livejournal.com]

Isn't it likely that the WoT books will sell well deep into the future? I've never read them, but if they are this popular they are quite likely going to find great numbers of new readers in the future, won't they? It's not like the author passing on has caused all the books to disappear.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I know a few people -- including myself -- who were holding off the Wheel of Time books until it became clear whether the series would, in fact, ever finish.

If the final book gets put out somehow -- based on the outline I gather he left -- then it might trigger sales to people who would now know that they wouldn't be left hanging.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Once new books stop coming out from a given author, their backlog almost always suffers.

[doug-palmer.livejournal.com]

As a data point, I remember a discussion of the publishing strategy of the Picador imprint. My boss, a publisher by history and inclination, mentioned that Pan Macmillan wanted a way of publishing good books, for values of good that always involve an argument. So they set up Picador. To ensure that bookshops kept carrying the rotating stands of Picador books, they would occasionally drop an absolute guaranteed runaway bestseller into the imprint.

So not directly supporting Drake's argument. But it is possible to have certain forms of subsidisation going on.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

But it is possible to have certain forms of subsidisation going on.

Sure, but that's pretty-well accepted, and isn't an unreasonable thing for Tor to do. (Heck, anything that gives them more money to pay first-timers with potential is OK by me.) What's questionable is the claim that Tor's parent company negotiated plots with Rigney specifically in order to pad the number of books in the series. Not saying they didn't, just that I'd want to see more proof than an assertion by David Drake.

[doug-palmer.livejournal.com]

Sure, and I'm more than a little sceptical of that claim. But I was responding to the quote James chose to highlight.