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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 7808541" data-attributes="member: 28003">In 1992, all the Realms books were still selling at a very high level. Same with Dragonlance, Ravenloft, and so on. Over the years, Bob pulled away in sales from the rest of the Realms line, for a variety of reasons, but in the early 1990s, most of the Realms novels sold over 100,000 copies in their first year. The vast majority of fiction we were publishing at that time at TSR was making a lot of money.TSR was paying royalties, and everything else, quite regularly in 1992. They only got behind in royalties 18 to 24 months or so before the sale to WotC. When it became clear that TSR was not paying any time soon, some of the authors, including Salvatore, took them to court.This would have been the reason Lorraine wanted to do Middle-earth fiction. Compared to games, fiction has a lower cost to produce and was generating a lot of money for the company at the time. Just doing the LotR games would have been much less profitable.Plus, don't overestimate how much TSR valued any author, especially after Brian Thomsen took over as head of the book department in, as I recall, 1992. TSR came very close to replacing Salvatore on Drizzt just a few years later, because of a disagreement Bob was having with Thomsen. The non-Salvatore Drizzt novel Shores of Dusk was completed and, I believe, already at the printer when WotC bought TSR. WotC very wisely killed the book and brought Salvatore back. Had that book come out, Bob would have been done with Drizzt. TSR came remarkably, predictably close to screwing that up.All that said, I don't think any of us inside the book department were enthusiastic about the idea of the company publishing new Tolkien fiction. Can't speak for Thomsen, and he passed away some years back, but I don't recall any of the editors expressing a lot of enthusiasm for the idea.--James Lowder</blockquote>

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