Lord of Rhinos

That no one cares line was about old author's who are no longer popular except for their legacy series. I mean the Beachboys are still touring. People show up for the old hits. Authors that are very popular now will have a lot of interest in their other work. I'm sure back in the eighties when Brooks's was one of the top dogs in the field their was a lot of interest in Landover and similarly when Eddings switched to Sparhawk people came along. I'm sure of it. Everyone has their hidden gems they've found. I think Bakker and Erikson are going to stick around longer than most. Just because of their more ambitious take on the field. There's always going to be some young reader who is wondering what the else is out their and some veteran of the genre that cocks an eyebrow and says "Have you tried the hard stuff, man?"

They're both smart enough to know that this discussion isn't about whether or not Brooks once sold a lot of books.

The Path of Daggers was the first Wheel of Time book to hit number 1 on the New York Times bestseller lists. I remember Tor reps popping up on the old WOTism message boards to thank us. Every subsequent book was also number 1 (excluding New Spring, and Jordan was allegedly pissed off about that). The hardest thing for an author to do is get read in the first place. Once people are invested in the story they'll come back. Obviously, one of the great things Jordan did from a publishers prospective was take popular fantasy series from being a series of interlocking trilogies into being just one long mega-series which makes it harder to disengage. Most of the eighties authors are still popular when writing in their famous settings, but Sword of Shannara sold 125,000 copies in the first month. Last time I saw numbers Brooks was selling 50,000ish copies of his new books in a year, which is a great number but it shows the numbers of his fans are a fraction of what he used to have. When writing outside their famous settings no one cares. I'm guessing most people in this thread couldn't even tell me which eighties heavy weights wrote "Child of a Mad God", "Seventh Decimate", and "King of Ashes" which are all recently released first books in new series.

The popular authors of the eighties are running on fumes. They have sections of their fan bases still buying their work, but they aren't getting new blood. The fans still sticking around are the fans these authors are going to die with. New fantasy fans are not being steered towards their work. They are being recommended stuff that the current popular authors are putting out. Eddings used to be the internet's whipping boy back around 2000. People hated his books. Back when there were people that actually thought his books were good stuff and they belonged to be in the conversation when discussing the "good stuff". The push back against that was very heated. Everyone hated the Dreamers, though. That series had no fans.

To be remembered you have to write something unique or ground breaking. It also helps if you write something short and self contained. The problem for a lot of classic fantasy is that it is just to darn long. People still read classics but most of the time classics are pretty short and if they are part of a series it tends to only be the first that is really well known. The big authors of the eighties are all on the way out. Eddings, Feist, Salvatore, Weiss and Hickman, Brooks, Williams. They're populists that aren't popular any more. All of them are running on fumes.

I think we should just acknowledge that pretty much everything that was popular in the eighties and through at least the mid-nineties was YA. Trying to hold them up against adult literature is just going to make them come up short.

Thanks, been meaning to read that for a while.

Pick Up Flick Monsters Inc Toy Story - 6 A Bug's Life - 2 - Toy Story 2 - 9 Monsters, Inc - 8 Finding Nemo - 9 The Incredibles - 11 Ratatouille - 10 WALL*E - 7 Up - 11 Toy Story 3 - 7 + Inside Out - 9+ Coco - 5

I feel so lucky to be in the US. Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

So why are you claiming to have predicted anything? Maybe Trump could have won the popular vote if there'd been a terrorist attack but we don't know that because one didn't occur. And Clinton being unpopular with the white working class was well known. Like I said, "if you'd predicted that Trump was going to narrowly take several democratic leaning states and win the electorate college while losing the popular vote you'd be on to something" but you didn't predict that. So when are you going to acknowledge that your internet comments strategy didn't produce any reliable predictions?

When are you going to to acknowledge that you're reading of internet comments does not actually constitute evidence of anything? Hilary Clinton crushed Donald Trump in the popular vote. She won by three million votes. This clearly shows that you're attempts to predict election outcomes based on internet comments are worthless. If you'd predicted that Trump was going to narrowly take several democratic leaning states and win the electorate college while losing the popular vote you'd be on to something. But you predicted that Trump could win the popular vote. We've seen the results. You were wrong. The people that told you "Trump's goose is cooked" were right.

Sure, there's a lot of Republicans that don't understand macro economics. Then again, I'd say the same about Democrats. She seems happy with her health insurance and Trump promised to put something even better in place. She thought it was handled. Sure, margins definitely matter and can give groups an outsized influence on events and nominations, but that doesn't mean they're the majority. I say Republicans have definitely been drifting to the right and I attribute it almost entirely to right wing media. I have a hard time calling extreme conservatism radicalism though. After all, most of there objectives are simply to roll the clock back.

Sure, some people vote based on faulty ideas. Trump promised a better health plan and so far hasn't delivered it. However, that article never states why she voted for Trump beyond saying she thought he'd shake up Washington. It sounds like health care wasn't a big part of her reason for voting.

The "voting against their own interests!" canard is always condescending bullshit. It's a sociopathic view of the world that thinks economic interests are the only interests people should care about. It is obviously hypocritical in that people that use it never apply it to their own party. If they did we'd get think pieces about why rich people keep voting against their economic interests by voting for democrats. It's condescending to tell other people what their best interests are when clearly they are the best judge of that.

We agree that millions of Americans want radical change. We don't agree that they are any sort of majority. You're talking about margins. If Barack Obama's first election was people excited about a "radical" and Hilary was a centrist than we know the difference between the two is about 4.5 million votes. The difference between "radical" Trump and establishment Romney was 2 million. I'd say the obvious conclusion is that America has two partisan voting blocks that will vote for their party no matter what and each of them have a roughly 10% fringe that will be effected by how energizing a candidate is. Ultimately though, I don't think framing it as radical verses establishment tells as anything particularly useful about the electorate.