Writing an epic series over many years will surely gather you many fans and many haters. In the case of Robert Jordan, it seems like bad reviews and fan backlash mounted up with each new volume as the series went on. Is that something you are concerned about? Do you try to figure out why people responded that way to that series and work to avoid a similar situation with your own, or do you just disregard the naysayers in general?
Of these things that you’ve asked me questions on, this is the one that I’ve spent the most time thinking about. It is an interesting phenomenon. Each Wheel of Time book sold more copies than the one before it, yet each one up through book ten got more and more negative reviews. They start out strong, then a few of the books have balanced numbers of reviews, and then they start to take a nosedive—even as the sales of the books go up and up.
The same thing has happened with my own books—as they have grown more popular, they’ve gotten worse and worse reviews. It’s very interesting. You can watch a book like Elantris , which when it came out had more or less universal acclaim, partially I think based on expectations. People read it thinking, hey, there’s this brand new author, it probably isn’t that good—hey, this book isn’t half bad! And then they go and write reviews on Amazon. There are a number of early reviews there that say, wow, this wasn’t half bad! This new guy is someone to watch!
As you gain a reputation, more and more people pick you up by reputation—simply hearing “This is a great book” and picking it up, rather than looking into the book and deciding it’s a book they will like. That’s going to lead to more people picking up the book who it’s just not a good match for. I think that certainly is part of it.
I do also think that there is epic series sprawl; there’s a legitimate complaint against these series like the Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire. I think the fans still like the books, but they have complaints about how they’re happening. George R. R. Martin and Robert Jordan are really doing some new and unique things. Robert Jordan didn’t get to read any ten-book epic fantasy series of that nature; he had to do it on his own without a model to follow. I think that as we go forward in the genre, hopefully we’re picking up on things—we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, and hopefully we will figure out how we can do this without necessarily sprawling quite so much, which I think is part of the problem. There’s this push and pull in epic fantasy where we read epic fantasy because we love the depth of characterization and world building, and yet if the author does too much of that in every book, then we lose the ability to move forward in a central plot. That can be very frustrating.
I will say that when I was able to read the Wheel of Time from start to finish, having the complete story, that feeling that it wasn’t going anywhere in places just wasn’t there. That feeling came because you would wait two years for a book, and then when you finished it you’d have to wait two more years for the next book, and because of the nature of the epic series you’re just getting a little tiny sliver of the story. So that part of it is just the nature of the beast, but I think we can do things to mitigate that, and I will certainly try.
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