Since we’re (s)trolling down memory lane, I thought I’d address this (because it reminds me of many of the posts I used to see on ---you guessed it--- the old novel forums) in the manner I did back in the day….
Whizbang Dustyboots said:
The people writing game novels for all game companies are almost universally amateurs and, mysteriously, most of them have personal ties to developers (or are developers themselves) or the publishing company.
You’d have to have a pretty broad definition of amateur, as well as a pretty paranoid notion of what ‘personal ties’ means (which, in the real world, often refers to friends, work acquaintances, contacts, getting to know people through basic networking, etc…with no conspiracies implied or assumed).
I’d also peg the first claim in the first sentence quoted above as simply wrong.
Go to your local bookstore and count the number of different titles for a line like the Forgotten Realms. Then count the number of times the same author name appears for each different book.
You’ll find a majority of titles are by the same set of authors. If you expand your search beyond the Realms (by looking at Dragonlance novels or jumping over to Star Wars novels) you’ll not only find more authors with multiple books under their belt, but also that some authors do in fact cross over from one genre to the next.
So the question becomes one of figuring out exactly what you mean by ‘amateur’. It certainly can’t mean ‘newbie’, because there aren’t all that many newbie authors compared to established authors.
Whizbang Dustyboots said:
If you hire people who could not sell a novel in the real world, you're going to end up with products of a lower quality.
But strangely enough, the people so hired typically have writing (or other, professional) degrees, at least some years of experience in the gaming industry (if they have ‘personal ties’ as you put it) and are actively involved in the hobby they’d be writing for, probably know most of the people that will be editing and publishing their eventual work and (based on the points made in my first response above) already have more than one book under their belt.
But I guess it’s too much of a stretch to believe a company might actually train, elevate and evaluate from within, huh?
The whole concept of the ‘real world’ is a false one, by the way. Splitting hairs leads to an empty argument.
Whizbang Dustyboots said:
There's nothing personal about that -- some of these folks have grown and become quite successful novelists in their own right. But most have not.
How does not becoming a successful (again, vague) novelist validate your claims?
Does this really prove that all authors who don’t write more than one novel are corporate-inbread, amateur hacks?
Whizbang Dustyboots said:
I have no idea what sort of people the writers are (other than not having been published elsewhere), and would not for a moment assume that they are not all fine upstanding people, wonderful friends and kind to puppies.
But you’d assume a whole lot about their skill sets and experience.
Whizbang Dustyboots said:
Making an objective statement about them (they did not sell fiction to any non-gaming outlet) is not a personal comment, nor is the observation that many people find the overall quality of game fiction to be substantially lacking.
It’s objective if it’s true regardless of who says it. ‘Many people’ is too vague and too unlikely to be true without real sampling to rely upon as fact.
Better to call it what it is, an
assumption.
J. Grenemyer
