Tom Doherty
- In 1984, Jim came to Tom and said, “I’ve got a great idea for an epic fantasy, and it’s going to be 6 books.” Tom says that book one was 5 years late [it came out in 1989]. Tom describes first reading the manuscript for
- The Eye of the World
- “Oh God, I fell in love with it.” He knew it would be the greatest epic fantasy since Tolkien. Tor prepared a marketing campaign unprecedented in those days of 5,000 Advance Reader Copies to send one to every bookstore in the country and a combined hardcover/trade paperback first printing. 40,000 books sold out almost immediately, and when the second book came out, the sales of
The Eye of the World
shot up again, doubling what it had sold the first time. After that, Tor stopped the trade paperback part of the release and just pushed the hardcover.
Jim always said he knew the ending of the series, Tom says. And when he was working on
A Memory of Light
, he wrote the ending. That plus the prologue and the rest of what he wrote totaled 200 manuscript pages [that’s about 50,000 words].
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