Knife of Dreams Press Release

This is an excerpt from Robert Jordan's Knife of Dreams press release:

«With over 12 million copies of The Wheel of Time series sold in North America, Tor will be publishing Knife of Dreams with an announced first printing of a million copies. As part of its $750,000 National marketing campaign (more details below), Tor will be promoting the Knife of Dreams with an Internet Hunt where participants will have the opportunity to navigate through twelve sites by solving a series of riddles. The solution to each riddle will lead to the URL of the next site.»

In all honesty, Jordan has little need of such an enormous marketing campaign. And that internet hunt is ridiculous. Jordan possesses the biggest cult following in the genre. The last 3 volumes of The Wheel of Time made their debut at number 1 on the NYT list, and New Spring: The Novel made its debut at number 3 and remained on the prestigious list for 20 weeks. With performances such as these, investing 750, 000$ in a marketing campaign is too much. Knife of Dreams will be an international bestseller regardless of such a vast campaign.

I believe that Tor Books (and the fantasy genre, for that matter) would be better served if the publisher had decided to use a portion of that money to market other authors in its already impressive roster. Writers such as L. E. Modesitt, Jr., David Farland, David Drake, David B. Coe, Charles De Lint, Jacqueline Carey, Elizabeth Haydon are just a few of the names that come to mind. They don't benefit from immense marketing campaigns, and some of them definitely deserve much more exposure than they are getting.

In the long run, it would have been a better investment to put a little of that money to support the work of many other Tor authors. . .