Variol Farseer wrote:
1. Book prices. As Donald Maass, the well-known agent, has repeatedly said, 'Prices have gone up; unit sales have gone down. Doesn't anybody get this?' It's a lot more difficult to sell two million copies of any book — the kind of numbers the First and Second Chronicles got — than it was in the early 1980s.
I'm not going to bother researching the CPI, the average hardback price in 1982 (e.g.), and the average hardback price today, but my off-the-cuff impression is that this is totally inapplicable to hardbacks. IIRC, back in 1982
The One Tree was $15.99? And Runes is $26.95. Adjusting for inflation, I think
Runes would be a little
cheaper.
But the real situation is much more extreme than that, because back in the early 80s you had only a limited number of discount booksellers such as Crown, which were very regionalized and which usually specialized in remaindered and damaged books. And of course you had no Amazon and no Costco.
New hardbacks today, especially bestsellers, get much deeper price cuts than was the case 20 years ago. Back then, you might find bestsellers being discounted 15% at Waldenbooks. Today, it's 40%. Runes
actually sells for $16.17 on Amazon, and it's probably less than that at Costco. That's well under $10 in 1983 (or earlier) money.
As I said, I'm not even attempting to be scientific here by plucking out only two titles and comparing them from memory, but I'm pretty sure this back of the envelope estimation is a good approximation, even if I'm wrong at
The One Tree was, say, $12.99.
Now paperbacks are a different story, and that may be what the quote you gave referred to. And paperback prices can make up the bulk of the numerical sales of a book. Paperback prices have been raised aggressively even as the quality of the paper, printing, and binding has decreased drastically (anyone ever have the misfortune to own a perperback Robert Jordan book?)
Back when the
Second Chronicles were coming out, I was not a hardback buyer at all; in part because I was a cash-poor teen, but also because you could get about five or more $2.50-$3.99 paperbacks for the price of one hardback. Today's ratio is more like 3-1 when you consider the typical $6.99-$8.99 paperback price, or even 2-1 when you compare the discounted hardback price you actually pay to the paperback cover price, which is usually also the real price (Costco gives moderate discounts, but nothing like the cuts on hardbacks).
But none of this would apply to
Runes's sales yet, because it's available only in hardback. Also, although I'm also not going to bother to do a Lexis search on where, say,
The Wounded Land, peaked on the bestseller lists, I'm pretty sure it and its sequels did far better in its day than
Runes is doing. Whether pricing or other factors caused an
absolute rise or fall in book sales, I think the point of some was that
Runes is also not making much of an impact as compared to other contemporary books, even other fantasy.
Which is a point you also addressed:
2. Vast increase in the competition. When the First Chronicles were published in 1977, there was no commercial fantasy genre. None. There was Tolkien, who was considered entirely sui generis; there were various Sword & Sorcery authors, published in small editions by disreputable paperback houses (hello, Ace Books and DAW); there were kids' fantasy books; but nothing aimed at the mainstream (i.e. commercial) adult audience.
Just before that year, Lester del Rey took over Ballantine Books' ailing fantasy imprint and bet the farm on his hunch that there was a huge audience for imitations of Tolkien. (It's an amazing testimony to the ineptitude of Ballantine that their fantasy program was ailing, considering that they had the U.S. paperback rights to all of Tolkien's books, but they somehow managed it.)
...
Brooks and Donaldson were the very first writers for adults who followed in the footsteps of Tolkien. If you wanted to read epic fantasy in 1977, you had about a dozen books to choose from: The Hobbit, LOTR, a few obscure titles by Lord Dunsany and E.R. Eddison, and the five books listed above.
Just to fill in the chinks in the above account with some information you personally seem aware of but some others might not be, there had been a very aggressive fantasy presence in the market from the late 60s to the mid 70s: the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, edited by Lin Carter. It had been in the late 1960s that
TLOTR simply exploded on college campuses and in the mainstream, and it didn't take Ballantine or other publishers 10 years to try to start capitalizing on the new demand for epic fantasy!
It was just that they were caught without product. After exhausting the very few available 20th century British fantasy series novelists such as Eddison and Peake, the label kind of sprawled all over the place. It had decent success with Lovecraft, Dunsany, and CA Smith, but that was fantasy of a very non-Tolkienian kind that didn't feed the Tolkien appetite. Then there were reprints, even translations, of two- and three-century old classics, and works by new authors (such as Katherine Kurtz).
All in all, I think the BAF series comprised about 56 books over five years (one release per month, IIRC). Sales tailed off dramatically after readers found even the most Tolkien-like multi-volume series of its early days unsatisfying, and the succeeding books were progressively less relevant to the specialized Tolkien taste.
None of this is to contradict your account, just to fill in the gaps for those who wonder why it took so long for the industry to try to find the next Tolkien. As you say, fantasy in 1977 was at a low-water mark, and there had never been an "epic quest,"
TLOTR-style fantasy follow-up until the advent of Brooks and D&D in the late 70s.
