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



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.



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.