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

[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.