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It's a really strong magazine. I was already a regular reader when the editor asked me about the D&D and sword & sorcery fiction article. No plans to record the talk yet, but the New Edge article covers some of the same material. Maybe after I do the presentation a couple more times I'll feel...

A few notes, from the various threads: Licensed novels can be a good deal financially for the writer, but it largely depends upon the contract. The D&D books tend not to pay as well these days as they did in, say, the 1990s, when the novels were selling tens or, more likely, hundreds of...

The authors had no real control over that kind of thing. As you figured, it would have been decided at the department head and company marketing level, possibly with input from Random House.

Absolutely. All important points. And before the TSR purchase, WotC had tried fiction both internally and as a license, with results that were not, in the end, satisfactory. So they were justifiably wary of fiction. This on top of the seismic changes to book sales occuring via Amazon in the late...

Ah, okay. Yup. That's a totally legit gripe. The company had included color maps in some paperbacks to mark them as "prestige" releases. The first edition of Prince of Lies might have been the first. And it would have made sense to include the color map in both the HC and the paperback. Just...

@Echohawk lots of great information here! Thanks for quantifying all the numbers, too. Great stuff. I'll read through again when I get some time, but a couple side notes: * There's a 2006 sequel to Quag Keep, Return to Quag Keep, by Norton and TSR stalwart Jean Rabe. It gets as close to the...

No. The deal meant TSR was getting paid on ship rather than on sale for everything, not just fiction. The company overproduced and overshipped some products, including fiction, but the problem was far bigger with games than fiction. Fiction has a much longer shelf life and the copies were far...

Hasbro also has limited experience with the book trade, which operates on different rules than the sale channels they are used to. Hasbro has tended to license comics and books, rather than publish them themselves, because you need specialists in sales and marketing to handle those channels, in...

Just to be clear, this is standard book industry practice with potentially successful releases--hardcover first, then paperback. TSR did not invent it.

That's not true. What killed the company was the debt TSR accrued with Random House through unwise use of an advance payment clause and then blowing up their distribution deal. Ben Riggs covers this in Slaying the Dragon.

Both are possibilities.

Thank you! The charts are great and Ben did terrific work putting them together, but often they are better understood with more context. The returns for the Dark Sun novels, for example, were triggered by TSR ending their distribution deal with Random House and then WotC declaring the books out...

I don't recall working from a calendar or having to create one in editing because of obvious inconsistencies. If those detailed notes existed, Troy would have been the one to put them together for his own use. I had already edited his novels Waterdeep, Dragonwall, and Parched Sea, and with the...

The head of Books after late 92 was not terribly interested in coordinating with Games, and at least some of the authors he brought in for the fiction were not gamers at all (and were not expected to become at least reasonably conversant in the games, as had been the norm before that with lines...

The plan from the start with Dark Sun was for the RPG and fiction content to be related. Mary Kirchoff, then head of the Book Department, was part of the initial Dark Sun team along with Brom, Tim, and Troy, and she was instrumental to that coordinated vision. Mary sometimes gets left out or...

Yes, I worked in the Book Department from 1988 to 1994 and was at one time series editor for both the Ravenloft and Realms fiction lines. I was also the go-to for RPG–fiction crossover projects, which was one reason why I got recruited to the Dark Sun team early on, immediately after Mary...

That's only true if you take the most cynical approach possible and the products do not stand alone, if you need to buy the fiction to enjoy the games and so on. In the case of Dark Sun and the other cross-media metaplot efforts at TSR, that was simply not the case. The novels stood alone. You...

And yet still far more qualified, through decades of direct experience, to speak to any part of this topic than you and to see where your hot takes are empty and cruel.

No, I don't. I do, however, regularly work with contracts in the tabletop industry, as well as with lawyers and agents. Just negotiated a successful license extension for a publisher with Disney. I wrote many of the agreements (creator contracts, licenses, translation agreements) several...

You have a lot of hot takes that turn out to be just hot takes. You claim bankruptcies are calm and orderly, when anyone who has worked in legal circles knows that's not true. You can even look at the coverage of bankruptcies in the business press to know that's not true, even before you get to...