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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 9679047" data-attributes="member: 28003">The fiction line suffered some bloat in the mid-1990s, to be sure, like all the company lines, and TSR would have done better with fiction by having fewer hardcovers and not trying to support so many game settings with novels. Some people inside the company saw this, even as the fiction program was expanding circa 1990. (In 1991 I personally cautioned Lorraine about the company publishing too many fiction titles in the coming years, in my role as (secret) interim managing editor of the Book Department while Mary Kirchoff was on maternity leave.) But it's always good to remember that the fiction releases were far, far more likely to earn back their costs and make a profit than the game products. They had limited text and art costs, required far fewer staffers and freelancers to create than game products on average, and often sold many, many times what the game line releases were selling.The fiction also had a longer active sale window than the games. In fact, the old fiction still sells pretty well, thirty-plus years on. The 40th anniversary omnibus of the first Dragonlance trilogy even hit the New York Times bestseller list earlier this year. Most of those fiction titles Random House returned when TSR (foolishly) ended their distribution deal in the late 1990s were still selling. Even many of the paperback books TSR had overprinted would have sold through their print runs in time. They largely came back because the distribution deal with Random House ended, not because RH didn't think they could move them eventually.So overproducing game products was a bigger problem for TSR than overproducing fiction, though failing to accurately track all costs and returns was a massive problem impacting all lines.On the overall trajectory for TSR--from all I have heard from colleagues who were working at TSR before me, Gary was driving TSR toward a cliff (or, more accurately, allowing it to be driven toward a cliff by the folks in charge in Lake Geneva while he was in California) when the company was taken away from him. I can't speak to that directly. I only worked with Gary after his time at TSR.Lorraine took over, turned away from that cliff, built up the company through the late 1980s in some impressive ways (for which she does not get enough credit--and I say that as someone who had years of legal issues with her and the company after I left in 1994), but she eventually turned the bus toward a different cliff, while actively populating upper management with people who helped her stomp on the accelerator as they approached the edge of the world. The company would have gone over that cliff and into the void were it not for Peter Adkison and WotC. But it likely would not have made it through the 1980s without Lorraine.</blockquote>

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