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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 5238939" data-attributes="member: 28003">As with the TSR game lines, the fiction lines in the mid-1990s would see a lot of experiments, new lines that will be given increasingly shorter periods to prove themselves before cancellation and replacement by the next potentially "hot" project. You're seeing the early signs of that here.The TSR fiction lines reached their peak of stability in 1991/1992. After that, lines would begin to falter, in large part because the company was publishing too many titles. (The real decline would begin in 1994 or 1995.) Readers couldn't keep up with all the Realms or Dragonlance books being produced, let alone find enough time to jump to new lines. The company was, in short, competing with itself for reader attention.In the early 1990s, new Dragonlance books would typically sell something like 125,000 copies in the first six months after release (and continue to sell steadily for years afterward), new Realms books slightly less. Some individual titles or trilogies would do much better, a few a little worse, but the lines were incredibly successful and rather stable. The numbers for even the successful series dropped off sharply in the mid-1990s, as the individual lines bloated and the company started releasing a lot of new lines. Even the initially successful series, such as Ravenloft, saw the sales numbers for new releases drop by half by the mid-1990s and even more by the time TSR was sold. There were exceptions. R.A. Salvatore's numbers rose during this same time, justifying his move to hardcover status. (The "master hack" shot is uncalled for, by the by.) He was establishing himself as a name, a brand within the Realms brand, much as Hickman and Weis had done earlier with Dragonlance; while the company liked the Salvatore sales numbers, TSR's deep-seated reactionary impulse against individual credit, which had caused them trouble with Hickman and Weis, would eventually rear its ugly head with Salvatore and Drizzt, culminating in the Shores of Dusk debacle.The creator-owned TSR Books line started to trail off because upper management grew displeased with the idea that TSR did not own the books outright. (What do you mean we have to pay Mary Herbert royalties if we do a Dark Horse D&D supplement...?) Plus, the sales were always rather uneven. Some titles and series sold very well, others not so much. It was easier for the company to throw its support behind books it owned outright and which would sell more predictable numbers. The Random House sales reps were happier with more shared world books, too. The creator-owned line also had a hard time escaping the shadow of those game-related books, which meant that critics and some fantasy readers dismissed them as yet more "game fiction." Calling the line something other than TSR Books would have helped there. Anyway, this meant the books were competing for many of the same readers with the shared-world books, exacerbating the growing audience attention issues.</blockquote>

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