[Peregrine]

I am baffled.

I am very, very baffled.

Hundreds of fantasy books are printed each year. Hundreds, upon hundreds. Many are undoubtably very good. But what is it exactly that makes a fantasy book into one of the BIG ones. I am sure that you all know what I mean by the BIG ones. Eddings, and Jordan, and Goodkind, and Gordon and so forth. But what makes them so much more popular than John Doe? Never heard of John Doe? Neither have I - but I am sure somewhere sometime he had a perfectly readable fantasy book published - but it never flew. But that is not my point.

My point is - why? And more importantly why do we then complain ad nausem about the popular ones?

Kind of baffled and confused

Peregrine

[matthewajg]

Good writing...marketing...souls sold to the Dark One?

[Rob B]

Good conversation...

I think part of it is with Jordan, Goodkind, et al. These writers have hit upon very common themes and are exploring them in comfortable way. When you trim the fat, so to speak, and get down to the meat and bones of it, the "Big" writers are telling VERY similar stories.

As much as people like to "escape" when they read, they want to escape to someplace comfortable.

There is more to it than that, but I'll let somebody else pick up the "hot potato"

[Bardos]

The Hard Truth: simplistic reads for the mindless masses.

[ChrisW]

umm erm snob!

[estranghero]

(de-lurks)

Good question. I think the one about selling your soul to the dark ones is on target. =)

I believe Fitzflagg and Bardos have it right. Some people over the Fantastic Metropolis forum believe that fiction nowadays are more or less the same, that only a few want to dance on the cliff's edge anymore when writing fantasy (pardon the word).

Writers write, publishers publish, and readers read the same thing because that's what EVERYONE wants: the comfortable stories. Everyone just passes the blame to everyone else about the same-ness of stories because who wants to be uncomfortable?

Since the fantasy books are written with the common denominator in mind, you get simplistic reads because you have to please everybody when you write.

The ones that make it are the ones that have the most common denominators but are accepted by a lot of people. Of course, there are still dissenters in the pot. As an example, look at all the arguments in this forum over Brooks, Jordan, Goodkind, etc. And of course, there are the people at the Fantastic Forum... http://www.sffworld.com/ubb/wink.gif

Anyway, I'm not saying this is wrong. I enjoy reading these books after all. But that's the way it is.

Hmmm... am I making sense?

(turns into right angles and phases back into the 8th dimension)

[Shehzad]

The fantasy equivalent of Britney Spears??

[Cygnus]

I hate to be hypocritical, but I think that the above posts have got it right. I have gotten angry about others who post that the big sellers are just for the mindless fantasy fans, but that has a grain of truth to it. The big sellers write along plot lines that fantasy fans really like, and they don't make their style or language difficult to understand. They are easy to get into without having to think too much about it.

There are times that this is exactly what I want, but it does get old. I've just started Perdido Street Station, and I cringed when the author cited Mervyn Peake as one of his main inspirations. Peake is hard to get into, and hard to understand, but it is unconventional and it really makes you think. Perdido is not a huge seller, but it was critically acclaimed. I have yet to see if it's as challenging as the Gormenghast books.

My theory is that sometimes the masses don't want great writing, they just want something they can lose themselves in. After a semester of reading mind-numbing intellectual mumbo-jumbo, I can relate!

[Alucard]

In some ways, it seems to me that popularity is very hit or miss. I have read plenty of books that were easy to get into and had great stories, but no one's ever heard of them. On the other hand, I've read some big ol' best sellers whose books were terribly paced poorly written, and people eat them up.

And I think some of this is because of the snowball effect. A book starts to sell, people start getting the book to see why it's selling, which ends up selling more copies, and then those sales will entice more people to see what all the hub-bub is about, and so on a so forth. I have certainly done it before. I'll pick a book because i want to see why it's making waves; sometimes it's great, sometimes its crap. The only way to tell is to read it. Because it seems to me that popularity and quality are two folks who have never met before, but sometimes they'll end up at the same party.

[StoneBurner]

I judge a book by its cover.