I think that de Lint is his own brand, fwiw, which is why the marketing is -as- de Lint, rather than WHEEL OF TIME .
Absolutely true. And, now that I think about it, true for Kay as well, which may explain why you thought of them both right away.
It is why I thought of them -- but had Kay been a different author, there's a strong chance that marketing would try to push the connection between the books. In his case, given the length <sob> of time it takes him to write a novel, it wouldn't make sense to do so, imho.
With the de Lint novels, so much of the appeal is as contemporary fiction that setting it in Ottawa isn't enough to make it part of the same universe; it's part of the "real world". There's no easy way to say it's a "Charles de Lint Version of Ottawa" book and have an easy marketing category. I think it would also be hard to use "Newford" as a marketing word in any significant way; the cover of SPIRIT says absolutely nothing about any connection to any of his other books, for instance.
But yes, it's harder for me to think of standalone fantasy authors (McKillip was a great example from upstream) that stay in print and sell. I can think of a lot of them - just not those that have that kind of shelf-staying power.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-08-27 05:33 pm (UTC)Absolutely true. And, now that I think about it, true for Kay as well, which may explain why you thought of them both right away.
It is why I thought of them -- but had Kay been a different author, there's a strong chance that marketing would try to push the connection between the books. In his case, given the length <sob> of time it takes him to write a novel, it wouldn't make sense to do so, imho.
With the de Lint novels, so much of the appeal is as contemporary fiction that setting it in Ottawa isn't enough to make it part of the same universe; it's part of the "real world". There's no easy way to say it's a "Charles de Lint Version of Ottawa" book and have an easy marketing category. I think it would also be hard to use "Newford" as a marketing word in any significant way; the cover of SPIRIT says absolutely nothing about any connection to any of his other books, for instance.
But yes, it's harder for me to think of standalone fantasy authors (McKillip was a great example from upstream) that stay in print and sell. I can think of a lot of them - just not those that have that kind of shelf-staying power.