Truth be told, it's anyway not that important. Roberts will certainly post his little comments on the next WoT books. While you might be thrilled by his brilliant humor and unchallenged shrewdness, I will probably just consider it pretty pathetic that he forces himself to read all this apparently boring, pointless and trivial crap, just to ridicule it afterwards in an even more unoriginal way. But we will see..

Rajashekar: "What do you think contributes to the commercial success of this series? "

Now that is an interesting question. You're quite right, there's no denying the books' enormous, and continuing, success. And I very much take the force of your (diplomatically restrained, but spot-on) imputation too: that I'm missing something significant here.

There's something or things about this series has resulted not just in many people reading them, but a good number falling in love with them too. Not me, or not so far at any rate, but I probably need to be more open to whatever this 'thing' or 'things' is/are. Part of me thinks it must have to do with the series sheer length; which by a sort of textual brute force can replicate the immersiveness a more skillful writer achieves through style, worldbuilding or character. The shift (as in Star Wars) into increasingly obviously sexualised territory can't have hurt either: I can imagine readers growing up reading the series.

Or, thinking a little more about this (and picking up on Larry's perceptive comment): by 'length' I suppose I mean more than just bulk of pages. I mean the immense accumulation of and attention to trivial details.

Put it this way: there's an interesting bifurcation in the 'market' (horrid term) for SF and Fantasy: on the one hand the texts themselves (as it might be: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars) which provide one sort of pleasure, and on the other immensely detailed and elongated fan encyclopedia-style anatomies and extensions of those texts: all the Star Wars novelisations, all the books of ships specs and timelines and whatnot. This latter body of writing appeals to a subset of broader fandom, those SFF fans who want to know every atom of the imagined world.

Now what's happening with WoT, it seems to me, is that after a conventional opening, the series is increasingly turning into a man-and-fly-in-the-matter-transporter-together mutant melding of these two modes of text. Each installment devotes a certain amount of energy to moving the story on, and much more to encyclopedically anatomizing world and character.