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<blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 5142423" data-attributes="member: 28003"><p>Some of the creator-owned books sold extremely well. A few outsold some of the mid-tier shared-world titles. The TSR Books titles were, however, inconsistent sellers. One release would do brilliantly and the next would not do as well. The books required more advertising and more individualized support from the Random House sales reps to get the book chains behind them. Random House at the time was happier just selling another release tied to a specific game IP and some of the sales people pushed back against the creator-owned line pretty strongly.</p><p></p><p>More importantly, TSR upper management had begun to realize they did not own all rights for most TSR Books releases; they were unhappy, for example, that we could not just start pumping out game products tied to Mary Herbert's very successful Dark Horse series without getting her permission and paying her for the license. It wasn't like anyone slipped the creator-owned contract past them. They just didn't think about what the agreement meant in practice until it bumped up against something they wanted to do. So their enthusiasm for the whole idea of creator control and ownership was beginning to cool by the end of 1991, and the TSR Books line was already on its way out in 1992. There would be a few more books in 1993. The line would end officially by May 1994, as the last of the contracted books wandered, largely unsupported, into shops.</p><p></p><p>Late 1991/early 1992 saw the last substantial victories in the campaign some of us waged, particularly in books, to push contracts and the general approach to creating products into a more author-friendly mode. It would take a while for some releases to work their way into the schedule and reach stores, but behind the scenes, things were changing at TSR rather quickly. 1992 was a fairly large transition year for the book department. I resigned early in the year and became a satellite employee until parting ways with TSR completely in 1994, essentially over the treatment of writers (including myself). Mary Kirchoff, the head of the book division, would resign by the end 1992. Over the next decade, the book department moved steadily back toward house-driven plots (<em>Double Diamond</em>) and even house pseudonyms (T.H. Lain).</p><p></p><p>As far as the number of fiction titles released--I may have mentioned this before, but TSR management had realized in 1990 or 1991 that the book division was generating something like half the company's profit. We had a much smaller department than games, and the cost to produce a novel is much smaller than the cost to produce an RPG product (less art, easier typesetting, and so on). That was part of the reason for the explosive growth in the number of novels released in 1991 and 1992. </p><p></p><p>Some of us warned management that this growth could not be sustained and that readers would start dropping entire lines if we released too many, say, Forgotten Realms novels. We were told, rather bluntly, that we were wrong. As it turned out, the explosion of novel lines and releases, like the explosion in game settings/worlds that would soon follow, would rather quickly cannibalize or alienate the audience. Some of the lines that sold between 100,000 and 150,000 copies per novel in 1989 through 1992 were selling less than a tenth of that by 1996. Not all the series faced that precipitous a drop, but the overall lines would never be as strong as they were in the early 1990s. Ironically, the TSR/WotC fiction program would be shored up by the strength of individual authors--Salvatore, Hickman & Weis--meaning the company had to go back to hyping individuals over brands again. If you want to see how this plays out now, just look at the relative size of Bob Salvatore's name on his novels to the Realms logo.</p><p></p><p>Cheers,</p><p>Jim Lowder</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="JLowder, post: 5142423, member: 28003"] Some of the creator-owned books sold extremely well. A few outsold some of the mid-tier shared-world titles. The TSR Books titles were, however, inconsistent sellers. One release would do brilliantly and the next would not do as well. The books required more advertising and more individualized support from the Random House sales reps to get the book chains behind them. Random House at the time was happier just selling another release tied to a specific game IP and some of the sales people pushed back against the creator-owned line pretty strongly. More importantly, TSR upper management had begun to realize they did not own all rights for most TSR Books releases; they were unhappy, for example, that we could not just start pumping out game products tied to Mary Herbert's very successful Dark Horse series without getting her permission and paying her for the license. It wasn't like anyone slipped the creator-owned contract past them. They just didn't think about what the agreement meant in practice until it bumped up against something they wanted to do. So their enthusiasm for the whole idea of creator control and ownership was beginning to cool by the end of 1991, and the TSR Books line was already on its way out in 1992. There would be a few more books in 1993. The line would end officially by May 1994, as the last of the contracted books wandered, largely unsupported, into shops. Late 1991/early 1992 saw the last substantial victories in the campaign some of us waged, particularly in books, to push contracts and the general approach to creating products into a more author-friendly mode. It would take a while for some releases to work their way into the schedule and reach stores, but behind the scenes, things were changing at TSR rather quickly. 1992 was a fairly large transition year for the book department. I resigned early in the year and became a satellite employee until parting ways with TSR completely in 1994, essentially over the treatment of writers (including myself). Mary Kirchoff, the head of the book division, would resign by the end 1992. Over the next decade, the book department moved steadily back toward house-driven plots ([i]Double Diamond[/i]) and even house pseudonyms (T.H. Lain). As far as the number of fiction titles released--I may have mentioned this before, but TSR management had realized in 1990 or 1991 that the book division was generating something like half the company's profit. We had a much smaller department than games, and the cost to produce a novel is much smaller than the cost to produce an RPG product (less art, easier typesetting, and so on). That was part of the reason for the explosive growth in the number of novels released in 1991 and 1992. Some of us warned management that this growth could not be sustained and that readers would start dropping entire lines if we released too many, say, Forgotten Realms novels. We were told, rather bluntly, that we were wrong. As it turned out, the explosion of novel lines and releases, like the explosion in game settings/worlds that would soon follow, would rather quickly cannibalize or alienate the audience. Some of the lines that sold between 100,000 and 150,000 copies per novel in 1989 through 1992 were selling less than a tenth of that by 1996. Not all the series faced that precipitous a drop, but the overall lines would never be as strong as they were in the early 1990s. Ironically, the TSR/WotC fiction program would be shored up by the strength of individual authors--Salvatore, Hickman & Weis--meaning the company had to go back to hyping individuals over brands again. If you want to see how this plays out now, just look at the relative size of Bob Salvatore's name on his novels to the Realms logo. Cheers, Jim Lowder [/QUOTE]
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