Kevin's Watch

The committment SRD had to write all three volumes at once before ever receiving a contract or even interest from a publishing house was enormous. What an inner drive this man has.

Did Ballantine Books know they were going to release all three books or did they first wait to see how Lord did?

“Lester del Rey, the man who discovered me, bought all three books at once. It was a single contract for all three volumes. I had them all written. They were committed to all three in a really unexpected way. Ballantine Books was, of course, a paperback house. They do hard covers now, but in those in days it was a pure paperback house. Paperback originals were considered crass, that’s were you put your books that aren’t very good, you publish them as paperback originals. Good books get published first in hardcover. (with a bit of sarcasm) Well Ballantine came up with the idea of approaching not just a hard cover house, but a hard cover house with a literary mainstream reputation. In those days it was Holt, Rinehart and Winston. They had a reputation for publishing only literary heavyweights. And they persuaded Holt, Rinehart and Winston not just to publish the first three Covenant books in hard cover, but to publish all three of them on the same day. Now this is a large scale commitment to publishing all three books."

He was rewarded in the end though. When it rains, it pours.

I believe that Donaldson began by shipping around his first novel. But that all three were completed before anyone picked them up. So he naturally included the others as they were ready, perhaps to get someone to consider them where they hadn't considered them before.

I'm quite possibly wrong. At least one editor discussed receiving a single manuscript for the first Chronicles which needed to be split into three books.