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The SFF All-Time Sale List (vol 2) (updated Dec 2018)


Werthead
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52 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Interesting, because ICE's Path of Ascendancy series has reportedly done extremely well in the UK but very badly in the USA, to the point where it took forever for Book 3 to come out in paperback and I don't think Book 4 even has a local release date.

9 January 2024 is the confirmed North American release date. I spent some time researching this with the brilliant booksellers at Galaxy (aka Abbey's) here in Sydney, as we were trying to make sense of the conflicting information being reported online. 

But as one of them pointed out yesterday - this is the 25th book in the series, and at this point, it's not going to necessarily feel like prerequisite reading, and the series might have simply lost steam - a situation made worse by manufacturing delays and Covid.

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On 4/28/2023 at 1:23 AM, IlyaP said:

9 January 2024 is the confirmed North American release date. I spent some time researching this with the brilliant booksellers at Galaxy (aka Abbey's) here in Sydney, as we were trying to make sense of the conflicting information being reported online. 

But as one of them pointed out yesterday - this is the 25th book in the series, and at this point, it's not going to necessarily feel like prerequisite reading, and the series might have simply lost steam - a situation made worse by manufacturing delays and Covid.

Doesn’t help that there are so many discrepancies between the Paths of Ascendency series and the other books that it almost feels like an alternate history.

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42 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Doesn’t help that there are so many discrepancies between the Paths of Ascendency series and the other books that it almost feels like an alternate history.

As far as I know, Erikson said all known discrepancies were intentional, to evade a unified sense of truth, to convey the feeling of the messiness of history and all the gaps, quirks, inconsistencies, uncertainties, etc., that come with that. Which is fine by me. 

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Also, ICE created a lot of the characters, storylines and ideas in the setting and Erikson "messed them up" deliberately in his books by having people misremember them, and then ICE went back to write an account of events that deliberately varies from SE's in some areas.

Both have admitted they also made mistakes, mislaid notes etc, and that cool stuff that two twenty-somethings came up with for an AD&D campaign in 1982 did not necessary translate to being sixty-somethings writing novels in the 2020s.

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What doesn't help is that Esslemont is a decidedly inferior writer compared to Erikson. And though he had some cool books like Return of the Crimson Guard and Stonewielder, the majority of what he has written is extremely subpar. When he was filling in the blanks left by Erikson, many readers (me included) could live with that and still enjoy the stories. But his original material turned out to be so subpar that I no longer read his works.

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ICE definitely had a boost from Dancer's Lament and Deadhouse Landing, which were excellent, sharp and focused, and came out after Erikson had nosedived into his own posterior with the much-unloved Kharkanas books (particularly the ponderous second volume). He was building up momentum there, and those two books sold extremely well and much better than expected (whilst Fall of Light bombed really hard, after Forge of Darkness had already underperformed significantly compared to the main series).

I think they made a mistake by not giving him the contract extension earlier, so he thought he had to finish the entire series in Kellanved's Reach, which was rushed to hell and felt pretty unsatisfying. In the meantime Erikson had a reasonably strong bounceback with The God is Not Willing, both critically and commercially.

It does look like Malazan is past its peak in terms of popularity, though. It looks like both authors are now under much stricter word counts than in the past (though Forge of the High Mage does look like it wasn't under quite as strict a word count as the first three books), the print runs appear to be smaller than in the past, and for all the extreme volubility of Malazan fans online, that hasn't translated into sustained, higher sales. It also looks like Erikson was told to basically stop working on Walk in Shadow to focus on the sequel to The God is Not Willing, making me wonder if Bantam would publish it even if it was finished (and Erikson has indicated it would have to be at least 2 books if it was published, presumably again because they can't justify the page counts that he enjoyed in the past).

Edited by Werthead
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4 hours ago, Werthead said:

It does look like Malazan is past its peak in terms of popularity, though.

I'm inclined to concur. It makes me wonder why they haven't staretd a new series in a new setting, much like Cook did (who they famously adore) with the Black Company Books after (mostly) wrapping up his Dread Empire books. 

At this point, 25 or so books in (not counting limited edition short stories, that were all published in collected editions later anyway), it's just kind of hard to commit to this series, given its scope. And to compound that, not every bookstore, no matter how big, is going to have all of the books in stock. Even the big book retailers, like Dymocks and QBD, are unlikely to have all of their books, which means the kinds of people who are likely to go out and get the rest of their books (i.e. geeks like yours truly) are going to in all likelihood be in the statistical minority. 

It's a series that either needs to launch a second sub-series (a la Book of the Fallen), much like Daniel Abraham did with his Kithamar books, which are set in the same world as Dagger & Coin, or they need to work in a brand new setting, to "capture" new fans.  

Edited by IlyaP
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7 hours ago, IlyaP said:

I'm inclined to concur. It makes me wonder why they haven't staretd a new series in a new setting, much like Cook did (who they famously adore) with the Black Company Books after (mostly) wrapping up his Dread Empire books. 

At this point, 25 or so books in (not counting limited edition short stories, that were all published in collected editions later anyway), it's just kind of hard to commit to this series, given its scope. And to compound that, not every bookstore, no matter how big, is going to have all of the books in stock. Even the big book retailers, like Dymocks and QBD, are unlikely to have all of their books, which means the kinds of people who are likely to go out and get the rest of their books (i.e. geeks like yours truly) are going to in all likelihood be in the statistical minority. 

It's a series that either needs to launch a second sub-series (a la Book of the Fallen), much like Daniel Abraham did with his Kithamar books, which are set in the same world as Dagger & Coin, or they need to work in a brand new setting, to "capture" new fans.  

They have done that. The core 10-volume Malazan series was completed 12 years ago. Since then we've had two volumes of Erikson's prequel trilogy, one volume of a sequel trilogy, ICE's six-volume side series and then another side-series from ICE on its fourth volume. There's also two novella collections. Path to Ascendancy was designed specifically as a new entry point to the series and actually did quite well at that, at least to start with.

Kithamar being set in the same world as Dagger and the Coin is pretty much just an Easter egg.

Edited by Werthead
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48 minutes ago, Werthead said:

They have done that. The core 10-volume Malazan series was completed 12 years ago. Since then we've had two volumes of Erikson's prequel trilogy, one volume of a sequel trilogy, ICE's six-volume side series and then another side-series from ICE on its fourth volume. There's also two novella collections. Path to Ascendancy was designed specifically as a new entry point to the series and actually did quite well at that, at least to start with.

Those are smaller, contained, almost non-obligatory books. I was thinking of something that has a ring of...mandatoriness (no, it's not a word, I know, let's just go with it). 

48 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Kithamar being set in the same world as Dagger and the Coin is pretty much just an Easter egg.

Oh really? I though there was more to it than that! 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Rothfuss' US numbers (Edelweiss entry to The Narrow Road Between Desires):

 

Quote

MORE THAN 2.3 MILLION net copies sold across editions of The Name of the Wind

MORE THAN 4.5 MILLION net copies sold across three Kingkiller Chronicle titles

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1 hour ago, Jussi said:

Rothfuss' US numbers (Edelweiss entry to The Narrow Road Between Desires):

Much lower figures than what we've seen previously, which were 10 million sales of The Name of the Wind by itself globally, and that was years ago. The estimates I saw 3-4 years ago were 20 million combined sales for Rothfuss, which for a guy with only two novels is quite something.

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It looks like Robert Jordan is more popular than GRRM. From Edelweiss catalog:

Quote

ROBERT JORDAN (1948-2007) is best known for his internationally bestselling epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time®, which has sold over 100 million copies worldwide

https://i.ibb.co/cFbmRdR/wot.jpg

 

Also:

EXPLOSIVE SALES POTENTIAL: The Wheel of Time series sold 2.5M copies in 2021, with the release of season 1 in November-December, and followed that up with 2.3M copies sold in 2022 despite a 2-year gap between seasons 1 and 2. This number compares very favorably to sales of the Witcher in a similar time period (about 15-30% higher), and we expect to see renewed sales for season 2 in 2023.

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On 5/24/2023 at 6:44 PM, Jussi said:

It looks like Robert Jordan is more popular than GRRM. From Edelweiss catalog:

https://i.ibb.co/cFbmRdR/wot.jpg

 

Also:

EXPLOSIVE SALES POTENTIAL: The Wheel of Time series sold 2.5M copies in 2021, with the release of season 1 in November-December, and followed that up with 2.3M copies sold in 2022 despite a 2-year gap between seasons 1 and 2. This number compares very favorably to sales of the Witcher in a similar time period (about 15-30% higher), and we expect to see renewed sales for season 2 in 2023.

Hard to believe since none of the WoT installments appeared on any bestseller lists in any Western countries. They didn't even top Amazon's top 100 fantasy books during that period.

Looks like a marketing lie, just like when Tor posted that TEotW was an NYT bestseller while the first season aired when in truth the novel never did. . .

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2 hours ago, Lord Patrek said:

Hard to believe since none of the WoT installments appeared on any bestseller lists in any Western countries. They didn't even top Amazon's top 100 fantasy books during that period.

Looks like a marketing lie, just like when Tor posted that TEotW was an NYT bestseller while the first season aired when in truth the novel never did. . .

Idk I remember seeing the WoT books high on Amazon during the release period, and even some discussion of it here I think. 

Some googling suggests that my memory of the period is more accurate than yours. Shown here EotW was Amazon's 5th highest selling fiction book that week, the next week it's in the #2 spot before it begins to drop back down again. 

Edited by Poobah
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4 hours ago, Lord Patrek said:

Looks like a marketing lie, just like when Tor posted that TEotW was an NYT bestseller while the first season aired when in truth the novel never did. . .

From Edelweiss catalog:

 

BESTSELLING MOMENTUM: With the release of season one of The Wheel of Time streaming series, the first book in the series, The Eye of the World, was a #1 New York Times bestseller in audio, and hit the list in MM. The boxed sets of books 1-3 were also on the USA Today bestseller list.

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TEotW never made the mm list at any time during the airing of season one, nor before or after.

It did good on the Amazon list, but not the rest of the series.

For WoT to have sold nearly 5M copies over a 24-month span, it would have appeared on every bestseller list in the world. It would have been akin to ASOIAF during the first season of GoT, with ADWD topping the NYT hardcover list and the other 4 remaining on the paperback list for months on end. The same in the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, etc.

5M copies in so short a span of time is HUGE. Even if spread across multiple installments, they would still have made the big lists for a number of weeks/months. This didn't happen. Around the same time, Dune and The Witcher both appeared on said lists for quite a few weeks.

Other than the Amazon rankings, WoT didn't make waves while the episodes aired. Then again, it was so different from the source material and this was bemoaned by many, myself included. So maybe viewers elected to forgo the books. . .

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