Re: Yes, just not as fast. Now with counter-questions!
Werthead Send a noteboard - 31/08/2009 05:47:41 PM
Think of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Powerful well written books that I think could be argued didn't become well-known until they were referenced by Led Zeppelin. Once that happened all kinds of "Frodo lives" type things started to appear.
Erm, no. LotR took off in a bigger way, especially in America, during the general 1960s hippie boom and I'm sure The Zep added a few thousand sales to the books, but the actual massive boom in sales of the books took place in 1966-68, whilst the The Zep didn't even form until 1968.
A much stronger argument is that a lot more people probably started listening to The Zep once they'd heard they were Tolkien fans
Now with the arrival of Wheel of Time, Sword of Truth; I pick these two since in my opinion they've been the best marketed books, and the virtual simultaneous expansion of the internet. I would say the Wheel of Time had a very short fuse until it's popularity exploded.
Well, EYE OF THE WORLD sold 40,000 hardcovers in a few weeks by itself, which was virtually unknown for a new fantasy novel. That was back in 1990, many years before the Internet became really widespread. I would argue that the Internet didn't start playing a major role in WoT fandom until 1996-1998, somewhere between ACoS and PoD, and notably Dragonmount and Wotmania both opened in 1998. By that time the series' popularity had been hugely established. Same thing with the SWORD OF TRUTH series as well.
Where the Internet has been much more important is spreading the word of lower-profile authors. I would feel quite confident in saying that a lot, maybe even the majority, of Steven Erikson and Scott Bakker's sales come from online reccomendations, whilst the 'buzz' about Scott Lynch and Pat Rothfuss before their first books came out was generated almost entirey online. Joe Abercrombie's American sales hugely benefitted from the Internet buzz about this books coming from Europeans who'd already read the trilogy.
Would Wheel of Time gone to 15-16 books without the internet exploding it's popularity? Or would Robert Jordan instead had somehow wrapped it up in a more concise tighter say 5-6 volumes?
I think it wouldn't have made any difference. If anything, the impact of the 'controversy' over the later books and horrendously bad reviews of PoD, WH and CoT would have been tremendously reduced without the Internet, and it's possible that hundreds or thousands of people who were interested in reading the books but put off by the Internet coverage of how it had gone downhill would have been oblivious to the controversy and picked up the books regardless.
So in that sense the Internet can be as much of a drawback as an aid. The numbers of people who now avoid Goodkind like the plague purely from online coverage whilst they were prepared to maybe read him a few years ago is significant, although not decisive.
Would the Wheel of Time be what it is without the internet?
31/08/2009 05:43:38 AM
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Yes, just not as fast. Now with counter-questions!
31/08/2009 07:15:03 AM
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Re: Yes, just not as fast. Now with counter-questions!
31/08/2009 05:47:41 PM
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I read my first wot books back in... 1996, I think. It was loaned to me from a friend.
01/09/2009 07:20:22 PM
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I would have eventually forgotten about it and not understood a lot of it if it weren't for the
03/09/2009 04:23:39 AM
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