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<blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 9259588" data-attributes="member: 28003"><p>TSR was around for 24 years. What eventually became known as the Book Department played a significant role in keeping the lights on for 15 of those 24. Before the novels it was the Endless Quest books, championed by Rose Estes. From 1982 to 1987, with the department run by Jean Blashfield Black, those EQ books and the initial Dragonlance novels made the company a lot of money. From 1985/1986 to the end of TSR, the novels were a massive revenue source, exploding in number and overall sales after 1988. TSR dominated the chain store and genre bestseller lists for five or six years, starting in 88. In 1990, the Book Department, led by Mary Kirchoff, was doing so well it was moved out from under Games and made a separate division within the company organizational chart. For the next few years, many of the book lines outsold the related game products many times over. Fiction sales got shakier by 1995--partly due to the market overall and the general company dysfunction, but also, in my opinion, to bad book line and department management post-Kirchoff--but the older novels and some of the new fiction sold pretty well right up to the end of the Random House distribution deal. So it's fair to say the Book Department was a major revenue source for TSR from 1982 through the sale to WotC, much of the company's lifespan. Had TSR not had that revenue, they never would have been able to weather the Satanic Panic downturn of the 1980s and then the loss of entertainment dollars to computer games in the early 1990s as long as they did.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="JLowder, post: 9259588, member: 28003"] TSR was around for 24 years. What eventually became known as the Book Department played a significant role in keeping the lights on for 15 of those 24. Before the novels it was the Endless Quest books, championed by Rose Estes. From 1982 to 1987, with the department run by Jean Blashfield Black, those EQ books and the initial Dragonlance novels made the company a lot of money. From 1985/1986 to the end of TSR, the novels were a massive revenue source, exploding in number and overall sales after 1988. TSR dominated the chain store and genre bestseller lists for five or six years, starting in 88. In 1990, the Book Department, led by Mary Kirchoff, was doing so well it was moved out from under Games and made a separate division within the company organizational chart. For the next few years, many of the book lines outsold the related game products many times over. Fiction sales got shakier by 1995--partly due to the market overall and the general company dysfunction, but also, in my opinion, to bad book line and department management post-Kirchoff--but the older novels and some of the new fiction sold pretty well right up to the end of the Random House distribution deal. So it's fair to say the Book Department was a major revenue source for TSR from 1982 through the sale to WotC, much of the company's lifespan. Had TSR not had that revenue, they never would have been able to weather the Satanic Panic downturn of the 1980s and then the loss of entertainment dollars to computer games in the early 1990s as long as they did. [/QUOTE]
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