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

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.