Tad Williams - The Witchwood Crown / Empire of Grass spoiler thread

[HexMachina]

Sanderson usually takes a pretty hefty chunk of the Waterstones SF/F sections over here in my experience at least. Waterstones are surprisingly good at keeping a large and varied stock though i have found and don’t seem to go too far in allowing one author to dominate the section.

[SeanF]

2 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Sanderson usually takes a pretty hefty chunk of the Waterstones SF/F sections over here in my experience at least. Waterstones are surprisingly good at keeping a large and varied stock though i have found and don’t seem to go too far in allowing one author to dominate the section.

The selection at their flagship store in Piccadilly is awesome.

Very naughtily, they sell books several days before publication date.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

 

Edited July 14, 2019 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[Ran]

12 hours ago, Lord Patrek said:

Gail Z. Martin's first year sales truly did blow Scott Lynch's sales out of the water. I do remember that. But you have to keep in mind that hers was a mass market paperback release and it was hence a lot cheaper to buy. Down the line, Lynch's numbers probably crush her in such a way that it's almost laughable.

Yeah, the apples-to-oranges of it strikes me a bit. I did find evidence from a page from 2017 that her first book sold 30,000 copies across 3 print runs in 6 months (also claims that as of 2017 she's sold more than 600,000 books -- IIRC, TLoLL alone is over the 1 million mark these days). The overall point that she seemed to be achieving that without most of the common Internet sites taking note of her back then (Westeros, SFFWorld, etc.) is interesting. But it's not just even that -- per search trends there was never a point where people were searching more often for Martin than Lynch (there was one or two months where it was close, but most of the time there was a lot more interest in Lynch.) And Martin's book never made bestseller lists, whereas in paperback at least TLoLL appeared several times on Locus's aggregated bestseller list....

I admit, something feels a trifle odd about it all, looking more into her career and her output. Are we certain there weren't some shenanigans involved in those figures? Heard plenty of stories of calculated buys to get on bestseller lists, deliberate lowballing of author copies in bulk to pad sales, etc. in the past to make me wonder just a little bit. That, or they just had some kind of genius marketing plan that pushed a lot of them out early and under the radar? A promotion giving away or selling a lot of copies very cheap...

 

Anyways, all a bit off topic. 

Edited July 14, 2019 by Ran

[Derfel Cadarn]

I've got but not yet read the novella and latest two books. I'll do a re-read of the first trilogy first before reading them (so reading this thread cautiously).  Do the recent books answer the speculation about the Sithi actually coming from space? An interesting theory which I considered during my last re-read, and after weighing it up decided to come down on the side that the Garden was on the same world.

 

I'm surprised that the books haven't sold as well as hoped, given that years between books isn't unknown in the genre, and readers are generally loyal. Raymond E Feist managed to keep selling books despite the drop in quality. Though I'm curious if his new series set apart from the Riftwar books has sold well?

 

As a newly published author, the discussion in the thread regarding sales is very interesting. From what my publisher says, small independent publishers in general are struggling at the moment. While the emergence of digital reading and social media should be a boon to small presses lacking advertising budgets or the pull to get their books in actual bookstores, I think their place in the market has been saturated by self-publishing. Getting 'noticed' is a struggle; in the ten months since my first book was published, I've sold about 100 books (mix of paperback and ebook), and that's after a lot of time working Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads. At least five boarders here have bought the book, the four who've read it so far giving it positive reviews (thanks!) but with so much coming out, and so much 'old stock' (Eddings etc) still occupying a lot of the marketplace, it's a struggle.

There are two Waterstones in Glasgow city centre (plus a further three in the Greater Glasgow area), and while GRRM and Tolkien have a massive space, the stock can be fairly varied. I was lucky in that I managed to convince the two city centre branches to each stock a copy of my book, which was a buzz seeing it in the shelves. On the other hand, they never replaced the copies after they were sold. 

 

Back on topic, I was looking forward to re-reading MTS, the novella, and then LKoOA, but the lukewarm response in this forum has put me off a little.

 

Edited July 14, 2019 by Derfel Cadarn

[Lord Patrek]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

Yeah, the apples-to-oranges of it strikes me a bit. I did find evidence from a page from 2017 that her first book sold 30,000 copies across 3 print runs in 6 months (also claims that as of 2017 she's sold more than 600,000 books -- IIRC, TLoLL alone is over the 1 million mark these days). The overall point that she seemed to be achieving that without most of the common Internet sites taking note of her back then (Westeros, SFFWorld, etc.) is interesting. But it's not just even that -- per search trends there was never a point where people were searching more often for Martin than Lynch (there was one or two months where it was close, but most of the time there was a lot more interest in Lynch.) And Martin's book never made bestseller lists, whereas in paperback at least TLoLL appeared several times on Locus's aggregated bestseller list....

I admit, something feels a trifle odd about it all, looking more into her career and her output. Are we certain there weren't some shenanigans involved in those figures? Heard plenty of stories of calculated buys to get on bestseller lists, deliberate lowballing of author copies in bulk to pad sales, etc. in the past to make me wonder just a little bit. That, or they just had some kind of genius marketing plan that pushed a lot of them out early and under the radar? A promotion giving away or selling a lot of copies very cheap...

 

Anyways, all a bit off topic. 

Well, Gail Z. Martin did a lot of legwork back then. She got in touch with ALL the SFF bloggers and sent them a press kit and a copy of the book. She probably invented what became blog tours. When her novel came out, pretty much all the important online venues were talking about it, positively or negatively. I guess that all that publicity, with all the reviews, interviews, giveaways, yada yada yada, turned into a lot of sales. The cover by Komarck was awesome, too. It didn't last and she was overtaken by Lynch soon afterward, but I have no problem believeing that her first year sales were that good.

[Ran]

Ah-ha. I had taken the argument to be that she went entirely unnoticed on the internet while racking up these sales. But if she was being heavily covered by the review sites and other online venues, then I guess it's more that the internet did notice her, she just didn't get much traction after the early push. Fair enough.

[Lord Patrek]

She went entirely unnoticed on certain online venues like here on Westeros, but she got lots of coverage elsewhere. And the reviews weren't necessarily that good. This is a case in point that all publicity, even bad publicity, is good. 

[Werthead]

Quote

 

I'm surprised that the books haven't sold as well as hoped, given that years between books isn't unknown in the genre, and readers are generally loyal. Raymond E Feist managed to keep selling books despite the drop in quality. Though I'm curious if his new series set apart from the Riftwar books has sold well?

 

Feist is an interesting one. My understanding is that Magician is, quite comfortably, one of the biggest-selling individual epic fantasy novels of all time. I believe it was HarperCollins' biggest-selling individual epic fantasy novel (bar only The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit) of all time until it was overtaken by A Game of Thrones in the late 2000s. It has equalled or outsold all the rest of Feist's output combined, which is quite unusual for a series (although Magician is, to all intents and purposes, a stand-alone novel). The only other series I've seen that happen with is Dune, where Dune by itself has sold over half of all of Frank Herbert's novels (including its five sequels).

The later Feist novels still did well, of course, but not as well as Magician, and there was barely much traction or coverage for the later novels, and that coverage was almost uniformly negative. How his new series is doing, I have no idea.

[Lord Patrek]

I may be mistaken, but I think that all Riftwar books other than those few that were collaborations ended up on the NYT bestseller list in hardcover. That is impressive and means that he has a very dedicated readership.

[Darth Richard II]

I wonder how much region has to do with book store selection too. I know you UK bastards get all kinds of cool stuff we don’t get or get years later.

[Ran]

43 minutes ago, Lord Patrek said:

I may be mistaken, but I think that all Riftwar books other than those few that were collaborations ended up on the NYT bestseller list in hardcover. That is impressive and means that he has a very dedicated readership.

There's some print-run figures at Publisher's Weekly that are interesting.  2005's Flight of the Nighthawks and 2013's Magician's End were at 75k first print runs each, 1997's Rage of the Demon King had a 100k first print, 1988's Faerie Tale was at 150k (very different industry then). He seems to have held on to a pretty solid, steady readership.

His last appearance on the NYT list appears to be 2008 and 2009 for the last and first entries in the Darkwar and Demonwar series respecively, however. He's written 5 Midkemia books since then that appaently have not cracked it.

[Lord Patrek]

Just checked and every book he published by himself until 2012 (A Crown Imperiled) appeared on the hardcover bestselling list of the NYT. Not sure how many novels he released since then, but that's still quite impressive for an author whose quality and originality has dropped over the years.

Then again, the same can be said of Terry Brooks and the guy still sells a lot of books with each new release.

[Ran]

 

19 minutes ago, Lord Patrek said:

Just checked and every book he published by himself until 2012 (A Crown Imperiled) appeared on the hardcover bestselling list of the NYT. Not sure how many novels he released since then, but that's still quite impressive for an author whose quality and originality has dropped over the years.

Then again, the same can be said of Terry Brooks and the guy still sells a lot of books with each new release.

Hmm! Couldn't find the 2010 book when I looked, but maybe I had the wrong pub date for it. 

[Lord Patrek]

At the Gates of Darkness debuted at number 21 in April 2010.

See, posting a weekly roundup of SFF bestsellers for years and years can come in handy!  

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Lord Patrek said:

I may be mistaken, but I think that all Riftwar books other than those few that were collaborations ended up on the NYT bestseller list in hardcover. That is impressive and means that he has a very dedicated readership.

Oh yeah, but that's just a sign of the absolutely titanic level of success of Magician, that it can sell ~15 million copies, far more than the later ones, but the later ones are still big sellers by any metric. Of course, Magician may get a boost from the fact that it's a single novel split - still, bizarrely - into two volumes for paperback in the North American market, which means those double dips get counted as well (LotR has the same issue where the omnibuses are counted as one sale and someone buying all three volumes of the split edition get counted as three).

Interestingly, that puts The Name of the Wind right on Magician's heels, which is eye-opening given that NotW has been out for 12 years and Magician for 37.

[HexMachina]

9 hours ago, SeanF said:

The selection at their flagship store in Piccadilly is awesome.

Very naughtily, they sell books several days before publication date.

It really does! I can comfortably spend a good hour browsing SF/F alone, before i even venture into other genres.

I wonder if that is just Waterstones in general though, or a few of their stores at least. The one on Trafalgar Square stocked and sold all of the Shattered Sea trilogy before publication date i know, and i noticed the same with other titles too

[Lord Varys]

Are we to take the fact that pretty much nobody in this thread actually wants to discuss Tad Williams' The Last King of Osten Ard as meta-commentary that the series isn't worth reading/discussing ;-)?

Because you are all way off-topic here.

For what it's worth I definitely find the structure of the books not particularly good. Pretty much all characters have grown on me in EoG, but there was pretty much no plot development in either of them - the best example for that would be Morgan's plot who spends literally a third of the novel in the woods all by himself (accompanied by some quasi-animals). That is just a waste of pages - as is, for the most part, Tzoja's story (until she becomes a handmaiden of Utuk'ku).

And while I think Miri had some good scenes in the Nabban story - the story itself is pretty much a joke. It moves painstakingly slow, we get so many ominous signs that something bad is going to happen that everything is repetitive (just count how often the point is raised that the duchess should leave the city!).

Williams always had the problem of deliberately writing from the point of view of characters who don't know what's going on - and that means the actual narrative basically takes place off-page. The best hint here is that we get essentially no-name Norns as POV rather than, you know, Queen Utuk'ku herself (who was a POV back in the first trilogy!), Akhenabi or even that weirdo Jijibo. But even the newly created characters - Viyeki, Tzoja, Nezeru - could have been characters with closer ties to the queen.

How slowly the story goes can, perhaps, also be illustrated by the grand finale of EoG - it took two full novels to introduce a guy who is likely going to be a major big bad. And that in a setting where said big bad could have been introduced rather easily in the first novel because 

Spoiler

there was actually no reason to believe that Hakatri was dead - thus no need to resurrect him.

There are also characters that could and should have been utilized much more - the Hernystiri plot didn't continue at all in EoG. The Rimmersmen are not even part of the story anymore (very odd considering how close their lands are to Nakkiga) and the treatment of established Sithi characters like Jiriki and Aditu is basically a joke.

The fact that 'the grand plan' seems to involve another attack on the Hayholt (if we assume Utuk'ku really wants the witchwood seeds there to unleash/summon Unbeing) is also a rather cheap repetition of the plot of the last trilogy. And I at least don't understand why the hell the Norns didn't do that last time around - Utuk'ku's people were at the Hayholt for quite some time during the last war. Also, I really would like to know what the hell Ineluki and Utuk'ku wanted to do after messing with time and giving Ineluki a new body. What was the ultimate endgame there? That was never so much as hinted at - but it should play a role in the next round of this grand game. And it seems clear that Utuk'ku is just taking another approach at the same plan she already had back when she used Ineluki for her plans.

Edited July 15, 2019 by Lord Varys

[Lord Patrek]

For what it's worth, my review is up on the Hotlist.

Pretty much agree with everything Lord Varys said. . .

[kuenjato]

Good review, Pat. And Lord Varys made some great points as to the book's multifold issues.

I hated how the Unver as Shan thread played out. He walks into a trap just 'cause, it what might have been an interesting examination of Thrithings culture and leadership dynamics a la the Aiel in The Shadow Rising, or perhaps a psychological exploration of character under duress as in Kellhus in The Warrior Prophet. Instead, it plays out perfunctory, a paint-by-numbers... disappointing, considering his 'transformation' with the wolves, ravens etc. had been done quite effectively. Then we get some soap opera "OMG who stabbed who?" with Vorzheva in order to alienate the Thrithings and set up an invasion for the third book (which will be rerouted in some convenient fashion to fight the Norns, of course). I was almost about done with the book after that scene.