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| The one time a Goodkind book topped the list. |
Before we begin, a hat-tip to Werthead of The Wertzone, a fantasy/sci-fi blogger who has done a great deal for the promotion of fantasy lit. I got my sales numbers from his website. Granted, it's from last year and even he admits they're only as up to date as he could get them right now, but this is the hardest data on sales figures you're likely to find, and it matches up pretty well, give or take, with what Wikipedia tells us. Sales figures are never 100% accurate because the data comes from multiple sources, usually few of which are the actual publishing companies themselves.
There's absolutely no denying that Terry Goodkind is a best-selling novelist. Only an idiot would say otherwise. Currently, his total sales equal somewhere around 26 million dollars. That's...phenomenal. It's certainly higher numbers than most fantasy writers see. This is an astounding achievement and I have no desire to take that away from him.
But even where he has unquestionable success, Goodkind just can't resist being a douchnozzle about it. While he's given lip service to the idea of valuing his fans (you know, the sole reason why he can claim such high numbers), he spends far more time blathering about how his sales figures prove his own brilliance, and give credence to his claims that he can't merely be a fantasy writer. If he were, his figures would be lower.
He also greatly exaggerates just how great his figures are, but we'll get to that in a bit.
Let's first of all talk about Goodkind's path to publishing.
According to the man himself, it happened this way:
“After I finished WIZARD’S FIRST RULE I wrote to the best agent in the country. My query letter aroused his curiosity and he asked to see the manuscript. He thought it was the most remarkable manuscript of the decade and at once accepted me as a client.“
I have little doubt that the agent, Russell Galen, thought he could sell the book. I also highly doubt he deserves the title "best agent in the country" but I'm willing to let that slide since for once Goodkind is bragging on someone besides himself. However, I strongly doubt he really thought it was the most remarkable manuscript of the decade. Either he was just trying to win Goodkind's business or Goodkind is overblowing what he really said. Considering Goodkind's tendency toward hyperbole, I'm betting the latter. Besides, it was 1993. The decade wasn't even halfway over!
“An agent’s professional career is in some ways a journey searching for that one remarkable discovery, like a miner searching for that one big ore strike. Agents see endless tons of worthless rock. If you are that writer a good agent will spot you like a shimmering gold nugget on barren ground. However, a piece of plastic polished to a high luster will never be worth a diamond in the rough. Any publisher would take the diamond in the rough because they know that with a little work a rough diamond can be made into something extremely valuable, while a hunk of plastic will always be a hunk of plastic, no matter how shiny it is; it can never be more than an imitation diamond.”
Goodkind seems to think books are chosen to be published because of how great they are. If that was the case, there wouldn't be so much crap out there, some of which sells well. Agents are not concerned with finding the next Tolstoi or Hemingway. They're concerned with making money. And due to the market of that time, Galen knew he could sell Goodkind's book. I've already talked about how the major best-seller in the genre was Robert Jordan, and how Goodkind was one of the first beneficiaries of the search for the next Jordan. I don't have to talk to Galen to know that's what he was thinking. And he was right. He might have enjoyed reading Wizard's or he might have just saw a potential money-maker but either way, I strongly doubt he read this book thinking to himself "Wow, this man is the smartest man I've ever seen! I love how he uses fantasy to communicate important themes. This is so brilliant it's not even really fantasy. He's another Jonathan Swift! Nay, another Ayn Rand! I must sign this man. I'll go down in history as the agent to the greatest writer in the world!"
Goodkind has also claimed that his book was sold to TOR only after a "bidding war" between three publishing houses, and was sold at a "record price". We covered that in the post about his most infamous quotes. While I don't doubt that three publishing houses expressed interest, I not only don't think it was a true "bidding war", I also don't think it was unprecedented. I have a feeling the "bidding war" consisted of talks with three publishers, with an offer put on the table by each, and the publisher just picked the highest offer, which was TOR, the biggest name in the business at the time, and the publisher of The Wheel of Time. They likely figured lightning would strike twice, and they were right. Mostly. A true bidding war is when the three bidders all keep offering escalating amounts, and while the search might have been on for the next Robert Jordan, I highly doubt that their negotiations went that far. Also, the term "record price", which again, I've only heard from Goodkind himself, could mean anything. For all we know, it was maybe a buck more than they offered the last guy. There was little question they were willing to pay a bit more than they had for other books they were less convinced would sell, but I don't doubt that it's been surpassed multiple times since then.
I also maintain that the entire thing felt like a rush job. I've already talked about how Wizard's feels like it was written in a hurry, and how it's filled with poor grammar (it's shocking what slipped by the editor), awkward sentence structure, repetitiveness and contradictory information that shows Goodkind didn't go back and re-read or edit (and he admits he doesn't do this). Everything I know about this book's path to publishing says that TOR was trying to get this thing on shelves while Jordanesque fat fantasy was still the order of the day.
Goodkind admits he wrote this quickly, and I don't doubt he was able to as it doesn't sound like he had a 9 to 5 job even before he became a best-selling author. If I had the ability to be utterly flexible with what hours I worked at my job and when, I could get a book out that big, or bigger, in about a month or two. It might not be of high quality, but neither was this book.
Listen to what Goodkind says about the editing, or lack thereof, that went into his first book:
“With my first book there was more initial editing than there is today simply because it was the first book I’d ever written. Still, that editing only consisted of untangling sentences for clarity. The story itself was sound, it simply needed housekeeping. My copy editor (the editor who edits for all the technical aspects) tells me that my manuscripts are now some of the cleanest she has ever seen.“
In other words, the editor didn't really do her job. She might not even have had time to, as TOR likely had a firm deadline in place.
I understand that the first two books in this series sold well, but not phenomenally. The thing no one had realized yet was that fat fantasy was there to stay, at least for the 90's and early 2000's. A couple of years after Wizard's, George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones was published and saw the same sort of success almost immediately. Robin Hobb, JV Jones and David B. Coe came shortly after and by then the market was flooded with fat fantasy, so the biggest names continued to sell the best while the others duked it out among themselves, jockeying for the position of fourth. Jordan continued to dominate, while Goodkind was doing about half as well, Martin was slowly climbing and established writers like Guy Gavriel Kay, Tad Williams and Elizabeth Moon were seeing boosts to their sales as well. It was likely the rise of fat fantasy that propelled Blood of the Fold onto the New York Times Bestseller list, but in all fairness, Jordan and made that list with his entry that year as well, and Martin started making the list with A Clash of Kings, the second volume of A Song of Ice and Fire.
We don't know for sure how they all were doing compared to each other at the time, or how well they kept pace with each other. And again, the data isn't always 100% accurate. But I hardly think there was a time when Goodkind was head and shoulders above Jordan, and I'm all but certain there were points where one of Martin's books was higher on the best-seller list than Goodkind's were. JK Rowling's Harry Potter franchise and Stephen King's The Dark Tower series both sold far better than Goodkind's books ever did, and both of them had volumes released either before or shortly after Wizard's First Rule.
But when Goodkind started talking up his sales as objective proof that no mere fantasy writer could hold a candle to him, it was 2003. He still hadn't outsold Jordan. Rowling was killing them both. Many other established fantasy authors were doing nearly as well as Goodkind and Martin was catching up rapidly with Goodkind. But listen to Goodkind talking and you'd think no one in the genre was doing anywhere near as good as he was: "...any one of my backlist sells more copies in a month than most fantasy authors' books sell in their entire run." There's that weasel word "most" again, but regardless, this claim simply cannot be true, as this would mean Goodkind was selling in the hundreds of millions by then, and that's not even true today. He also claims that he sells well in Japan "where fantasy just doesn't sell", and that claim seems silly on its face. Japan is where anime comes from, after all.
It wasn't enough for Goodkind that he be selling well. He had to be selling better than anyone else, and even though that wasn't true, he did his best to make it seem like that was so. And his followers, sorry, his "true fans" have continually shown up on fantasy message boards to inform us in no uncertain terms that Goodkind has sales that all other fantasy writers can only dream of. It's another Goebbels thing; repeat a lie loudly and often until it becomes the truth. Even today you'll find people who genuinely believe that no fantasy writer with the possible exception of Tolkien has ever sold as well as Terry Goodkind.
It wasn't true then, and it's definitely not true now.
Has Goodkind done very well? Yes. Has he reached such heights that fantasy has never seen such a feat? Absolutely not.
The Wertzone's figures are clear; in the speculative fiction market total, there are 33 authors doing better than Goodkind. I was a bit kinder, and made a list specifically of authors where there would likely be some cross-interest, you know, like if you like these guys, you might like Terry Goodkind. Mostly epic fantasy writers.
Here are the top 15, all of whom are over 26 million copies sold:
- JK Rowling
- JRR Tolkien
- CS Lewis
- Andre Norton
- Terry Pratchett
- George RR Martin
- Robert Jordan
- Terry Brooks
- Neil Gaiman
- Christopher Paolini
- RA Salvatore
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
- Tad Williams
- Mary Stewart
- Diana Gabaldon
Here are the authors doing similar business to Goodkind, anywhere from 20 to 26 million copies, including authors who would likely be doing better if we knew the exact figures for each:
- Terry Goodkind
- Marion Zimmer Bradley
- Brandon Sanderson
- Philip Pullman
- Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
- Brian Jacques
- Raymond E. Feist
- Michael Moorcock
- Mercedes Lackey
- Frank Herbert
Christopher Paolini and Brandon Sanderson, however, came much later and did much better by this point in their careers than Goodkind. It wouldn't surprise me at all if within just a couple of more years, Sanderson surpasses Goodkind. And I know that Goodkind likes to claim that it's because his brilliant work opened the door for guys like Sanderson, but we'll get to that claim shortly.
Now let's look at the authors doing very well, but nowhere near where Goodkind is yet. David Eddings and Anne McCaffrey, who have been around since the 1980's, and Roger Zelazny, who has been around since the early 70's, are in the 15-20 million sales record.
John Norman, Diana Wynne Jones, Robert E. Howard, Stephen R. Donaldson, Gordon R. Dickson and Patrick Rothfuss have each surpassed 10 million, and Rothfuss is quite the newcomer compared to the other names on this list. He also only has two full novels and one novella to his name. Once he releases the final third of his trilogy, assuming he ever does, his sales may shoot into the stratosphere. He's one of those guys who took off like a shot. He just hasn't been around very long ore released much.
Bernard Cornwell, Peter S. Beagle, Jim Butcher, Barbara Hambly, Garth Nix and Conn Iggulden are all doing reasonably well at above 5 million but below 10. Butcher, Nix and Iggulden are all names that came well after Goodkind and could some day surpass him.
The following writers have sold over 1 million copies but haven't broken 5 million:
- Markus Heitz
- Fritz Leiber
- Ursula K. LeGuin
- Robin Hobb
- Guy Gavriel Kay
- Lloyd Alexander
- Joe Abercrombie
- Robert Silverberg
- LE Modesitt, Jr.
- Brent Weeks
- Ed Greenwood
- Sarah J. Maas
- Simon R. Green
- Harry Turtledove
- SM Stirling
- Lois McMaster Bujold
- Susan Cooper
- Andrzej Sapkowski
- Katherine Kurtz
- Trudi Canavan
- Stephen Lawhead
- Robert Rankin
- Jacqueline Carey
- David Gemmell
- Dave Wolverton/David Farland
- Lev Grossman
- Sara Douglass
- Melanie Rawn
- Jennifer Roberson
- Elizabeth Moon
- Susanna Clarke
- Stan Nicholls
- Naomi Novik
- Mark Lawrence
- Paul S. Kemp
- Steven Erikson
- Ian Irvine
- Richard A. Knaak
- Katherine Kerr
- Dave Duncan
- Glen Cook
- Karen Miller
- Peter V. Brett
- Kevin Hearne
- Anne Bishop
My final list is authors that are sitting at or have yet to crack a million copies sold, yet are considered up-and-comers and have a lot of acclaim. Again, some of these names will likely equal or outpace Goodkind's figures in time, and are probably doing comparably at this point in their relative careers:
- Michael J. Sullivan
- Chris Wooding
- Alison Croggon
- Scott Lynch
- David Dalglish
- Daniel Abraham
- Anthony Ryan
- R. Scott Bakker
- Richard K. Morgan
- Brian McClellan
- Glenda Larke
- John Gwynne
- Juliet Marillier
- James Islington
- Myke Cole
- Angus Watson
- Kameron Hurley
- Miles Cameron
Let's take a closer look at Goodkind's career trajectory.
As I already stated, when Goodkind was shopping his book around, agents and publishers were looking to capitalize on Robert Jordan's popularity and Goodkind more than fit the bill. Why, you may ask, did not more professionals in the industry recognize the obvious plagiarism I pointed out in the last post? Well, for one thing, I don't know that anyone Goodkind interacted with had actually read The Wheel of Time novels that were released, or if they had, maybe just the first, and it was really the second through fourth novels in that series that Goodkind most heavily ripped off. Also, it's possible that they just didn't care. They knew it would sell, and that was the final concern.
Fantasy was experiencing another renaissance, as I already pointed out, and even before Goodkind came along, sales figures in general were on the rise, and for TOR, they were better than fantasy as a genre had ever seen. Of all the houses out there that could afford to take a risk on a first-time author, they were the ones. While not all the authors released during the 90's saw sales figures even approaching what Goodkind would climb to, the market in general was already opening up to new talent and new approaches by the time Goodkind was published.
I'm saying this to come back around to Goodkind's claims that he was the game-changer for the genre. In fact, even today he still claims that he broke records in the genre that had never been approached at the time, which isn't true because he has never equaled Robert Jordan or Terry Pratchett, and he claims that it was his books selling so well that opened the market further so that now, in the 2010's, we have newer authors doing as well as he did. Paolini, Sanderson, Abercrombie, Weeks, Lawrence, Brett? They can all thank Goodkind that they have careers, because if he hadn't opened the gates, they would still be shut.
Bullshit. The gates were open already. He was just one of the first ones through, and broke through well before the kind of standard-issue pulp that he writes had become passé. Jordan opened those gates, but even he didn't do it alone. In fairness, Goodkind has recently acknowledged that he wasn't the first major seller in fantasy, even at the time, but he does still suggest that only a few even approached his numbers, when a look at the list above shows that many writers who started at the same time that he did, or shortly before, did as good or even better. Salvatore, Kenyon, Williams and Gabaldon all started either when Goodkind did or less than a decade before. All of them are doing better today. Rowling, Martin and Paolini hit shortly after him, when he had yet to really take off, so none of them could be said to be riding his coattails, as I'm sure he would suggest Sanderson is.
In other words, while Goodkind's sales are very good, no question, they are not genre-busting or game-changing. They aren't in 2018 and they weren't in 1994. Again, he's done well. He continues to, from what I've read, but the way he talks about his success, you'd assume that no one in fantasy had ever seen anything close to it, and that's just not true. He keeps talking about "smashing records" but what records would those be? My favorite comment from him along those lines is his talking up of his first self-publishing effort, The First Confessor: The Legend of Magda Searus. Of course he smashed records in the self-publishing category! We're talking about a man that had already topped the New York Times best seller list and had all books he'd released except the first two place on it! When competing with no-names who will be lucky to sell five thousand copies let alone one million, yes, he's going to do better, especially since, unlike most self-publishers, his self-published book was sold in major retail stores.
Not only that, but Goodkind has repeatedly suggested that his sales figures are due to the high quality of his content. Read the chats again; when asked what makes him stand out or what made him so successful, he's all proud boasts about not writing fantasy, and being so much more than typical fantasy. So...how far down that path does he want to go? What does he think was the secret to Stephanie Meyer's success, or EL James (50 Shades of Grey), or, closer to home, Christopher Paolini's? RA Salvatore is the best selling Forgotten Realms author that exists. His books are crazy revered and as you see above, he's outselling Goodkind. He writes RPG-based fiction. I'll admit; I've tried to read his stuff and I don't care for it at all. But a lot of people do. Enough to put him in a sales bracket that Goodkind would be lucky to see.
I have yet to encounter a single person, in life or online or anywhere, who thinks Christopher Paolini's books are even good, let alone great, yet he's seeing more success, at a quicker rate, than Goodkind ever has. And just like Goodkind, he writes epic fantasy set in a fictional pre-industrial world, focusing on a "true hero". In fact, he employs many of the same tropes Goodkind does, such as the orphan farmboy/rustic who learns his true heritage and becomes a powerful wizard. Surely Goodkind bows to the master that is Paolini, as surely Paolini's success is due to his being even more brilliant than Goodkind?
Well, no. Goodkind likely believes Paolini's success is thanks to his own. Let's examine that claim. First of all, I have to comment on Goodkind's continuing movement of goalposts for himself. When he first made that infamous quote, "I have irrevocably changed the face of fantasy, and in doing so, I've raised the standards..." and blah, blah, blah, he was clearly saying that his work was of superior quality to anything else being produced in the genre. He did not mean, as he now claims to have been saying, that his sales changed practices within the publishing industry. But let's examine that; if this is true, then why have people who started publishing after him surpassed him, and why are several more gaining on him rapidly?
JRR Tolkien has been a published fantasy author since 1937. CS Lewis has been part of that scene almost as long. Mary Stewart has been publishing since the 50's, Andre Norton since the 60's, Terry Brooks since the 70's, Terry Pratchett, RA Salvatore and Tad Williams since the 80's. All of them are outselling Goodkind to this day, even those who are no longer with us. And, as I have repeatedly stated, Robert Jordan really was the man who kicked off the fantasy boom of the early 90's, and while all these names likely paved the way for Goodkind, he very clearly was the one who opened the very door that allowed Goodkind in. So, if they're still outselling Goodkind, surely Goodkind is still outselling the writers that followed, the ones he claims to have cleared the way for?
Not so for Rowling, Martin, or Paolini, definitely. Post-Goodkind novelists like Sanderson, Hambly, Butcher, Rothfuss, Abercrombie, Weeks, Maas, Carey, Grossman, Lawrence, Erikson, Brett, and Hearne, who have been around long enough that their popularity does not appear to be a fleeting thing, all seem to be doing better than Goodkind was in terms of pure numbers, and if they don't place as highly on the NYT list, it's likely an increase in competition rather than genuine lower numbers. I fully expect that most will end up doing at least as well, if not better, within a relatively short time. Sanderson in particular will outstrip Goodkind quite shortly, and he's been around just over a decade and was in his early 30's when he got into the game. Sullivan, Lynch, Dalglish, Ryan, Bakker, McClellan, Larke, Gwynne, Marillier, Islington, Hurley and Cameron, who have all been mainstream publishing for less than a decade, are doing spectacular for how shortly they've been around. If they were truly just riding Goodkind's success, he should be selling like a hundred million more copies than they are, but he hasn't even reached 30 million in total.
And even if he had, so what? Look at the names near the top of Werthead's list: Stephanie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, John Saul, Rick Riordan, Terry Brooks, Cassandra Clare, Veronica Roth, Christopher Paolini, Charlaine Harris, RA Salvatore, Sherrilyn Kenyon. All these authors have outsold Goodkind. Let's examine them a little closer. Meyer, Collins, Riordan, Clare, Roth and Paolini are marketed as young adult fiction, and I'm certain that Goodkind would dismiss the idea that young adult fiction would ever touch his brilliance, because he's already suggested that books written for adults are automatically of higher quality. That's not true, but that's what he believes. For that matter, Meyer, Collins, Clare, Roth and Paolini have significant hatedoms almost as large, if not larger, than their fandoms. I'll talk about that more in a bit. John Saul is considered by most to be a low-rent Stephen King. Terry Brooks is popular, but also widely despised as a Tolkien-cloning hack (if perhaps unfairly). Charlaine Harris writes pulpy vampire fiction, a sort of adult Twilight, if you will. Sherrilyn Kenyon's novels, while undeniably fantasy, are marketed as paranormal romance, which is a niche market of two niche markets and therefore should be selling in the high thousands at best.
And I haven't even mentioned Goodkind's sales compared to all fiction across the spectrum, and he really doesn't want me to do that. For those that don't want to click that link, you will find the top 100 best-selling authors of all time, regardless of genre. Stephanie Meyer is on that list. So is EL James. Wanna guess who isn't on it?
In other words, if we apply Goodkind's standards across the board, there is no question that Meyer, James, etc., are all of higher quality than he is. If course, he doesn't really believe that. He's said as much, recently, that selling as well as Meyer and James has clearly shows that his sales records don't mean as much as he used to claim.
Something to keep in mind is that sales figures can sometimes be inflated by such things as gift-buying, readers who bought books because the author was controversial, and readers who bought them and later soured on them. I mean, I've already said that despite their sales, it seems far more people despise Stephanie Meyer or EL James than love them.
But even if he was the best-selling author of his day, here's the thing; the authors we truly revere today were rarely best-sellers in their own time. The measure of an author's brilliance, if such a thing can be measured, must be not in how well they sell but in the response of readers and how they stack up compared to their contemporaries, those who came before, and those who followed them. We don't revere Shakespeare as the greatest playwright in history because he sold more plays than others in his time (although he has by now). Mozart was considered a flash in the pan at best, and wasn't taken seriously by serious music critics.
So, where does Goodkind fall on the critical and reader response scale? Well, he got many good reviews when he first hit the scene, and many bad ones. Probably more good than bad to start off with. His readership is a decidedly mixed bag; you've got his followers who like to think they're smarter or enlightened because they swallow his pap, you've got fanboys who love it because they love fantasy, you've got the guilty-pleasure sort of fan and you've got the fans who grew to hate his books.
But what about his claims that a majority of his readership are general fiction readers who don't read fantasy? To be blunt, I'd love to know where he's getting that, because I don't think there's a way you can accurately measure such a claim. Sure, he likely gets letters all the time saying "I don't like fantasy but I love your books", but I can guarantee that every fantasy author that has seen any success at all has seen similar letters. Every fantasy novel is someone's first, and people get into fantasy at any age. I have little doubt that most of those who discovered fantasy thanks to Goodkind have moved on to other authors since and learned that he's on the lower end of the spectrum. Unfailingly I find that most people who call Sword of Truth their favorite fantasy series are either quite young or haven't read much fantasy. I'm sure there are exceptions, but there are stupid people everywhere.
I also think a lot of the word of mouth about Goodkind has been inflated due to some of his more rabid followers repeating lies about his sales, his content and his general presentation. One such man has become infamous on his own.
Next, we're gonna talk about Mystar.
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