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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 5052827" data-attributes="member: 28003">I hadn't looked at the Empires Trilogy Novel Ideas column since it was first published, but your comments prompted me to dig out my copy of Dragon #164. Your notes, and the original article, are worth a reply.Unless you're working on a book "on spec" -- that is, without a contract -- you're working with a deadline, one that is mapped out months or years in advance. That's true of every publishing house and magazine. Deadlines can be good. They can help a writer focus. Really short deadlines are not good, but the Empires books did not have really short deadlines. Not that you'd get that impression from the Novel Ideas column.At this point in TSR's history, changes were underway in the book division that gave writers more time to write and more input on content. This was a direct result of the mistakes made in the creation of the original Avatar Trilogy, which had unreasonably short deadlines and was placed on the schedule without a clear idea of just how complicated it was going to be to coordinate all the various tie-ins between books, games, and licensed comics or computer games. (As Avatar coordinator, I still suffer from flashbacks on bad days....)The Horde game material/Empires Trilogy fiction was generated in a manner that was a specific response to the top-down approach of Avatar. Zeb Cook provided the individual vision for the core of the Horde project; he wasn't brought on to write the material after a management group decided this would be the next Realms "event." Troy and I entered the picture early, and the three of us wrote almost all the game and fiction material. We were given a great deal of creative freedom. In short, the Horde/Empires project was far more individual-driven than Avatar. While there was a fair bit of PR built up around the project, this reflected sane deadlines and a better corporate grasp of project roll-outs, not corporate control of the actual content. Big roll-outs and tight corporate control of content can often be tied, but they are not necessarily tied.From a book division perspective, Empires was an attempt to find a more creator-friendly approach to a process that can (and did) chew up writers. It reflected a swing of the constantly moving pendulum toward more authorial control and creator-generated ideas and characters. This is reflected in the content of the Horde/Empires products and in the marketing -- e.g. the novels are credited to individual writers and not a house name like Avatar's "Richard Awlinson," and the Novel Ideas PR piece is focused on the writers even more than the content or the line. This is a big deal for a company that, just a couple years earlier, refused to put the names of authors on the spines of the novels.The Empires Trilogy Novel Ideas column caused no small amount of consternation to management when it ran because it cast a project that was consciously intended to be more open, more creator friendly, as just the opposite. Looking back at the article now, it's clear from the quotes that Zeb, Troy, and I were not all that used to giving interviews. (This may have been my first interview, and, wow, does that show.) It's also worth noting that the person who wrote the column was not very fond of shared-world books. Theresa was a book department editorial assistant who, I recall, left the company shortly before or just after the article was published. During her brief tenure, she and I had several discussions about shared-world books; it's safe to say that she wasn't a fan of a lot of the novels TSR had published.Combined, subjects and author produced an article with lots of awkward quotes and an emphasis on how crushing all the deadlines were, how stressful the shared-world process could be. (While deadlines are often helpful to writers and are necessary for publishing, they are also stressful. That does not make them unreasonable or bad, though it's easy to frame them as such.) So the article is an inaccurate characterization of this particular project. It's also bad PR.The fact that the article ran in this flawed form highlights two things about TSR in 1990. First, communication between the departments was still tentative. Coordination between books and games and magazines was often a bit haphazard. Second, fully coordinated marketing -- particularly internal crosspromotion -- was not considered a high priority. It was something that you tried to do, but it was not given a lot of attention by higher-ups. So the Novel Ideas columns were not coordinated with other possible PR pushes, or controlled tightly by one office. This article probably ran without review from the head of books or anyone in marketing.Subsequent Novel Ideas columns would be reviewed by the head of the book division before they went to Dragon, to prevent another PR article from actively countering a product's intent. I was going to say that marketing might have gotten formally into the loop, too, but in 1990 the marketing department at TSR was still very small. Editors in the various departments were often tasked with writing ad copy and doing PR things that other staffers would handle in just a few years. (The book division, for example, was still directly setting up author signings at Waldenbooks....) I don't recall marketing having formal, systematized and rigid "sign off" on PR articles, let alone covers or any sort of product content, until late 1993 or 1994. If they reviewed the Novel Ideas columns before then, it was probably still informally.In any case, this particular Novel Ideas column -- and the Horde/Empires project as a whole -- reflects the constant struggle within TSR between corporate control of products and PR and the recognition or empowerment of individual creators, particularly those outside the company. The tension between the two philosophies is one that goes back to TSR's origins and continues to this day at Hasbro/WotC. How this tension is reflected in the pages of the magazine is not always going to be clear, though, and assumptions -- particularly about intent or the creative process going on behind the scenes -- can sometimes prove very wrong.Cheers,James Lowder</blockquote>

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