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).