Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing by David Farland Read Free Book Online Page B

enjoyed before.
     
    A couple of years ago, I went out to sell books at the fair. I had dozens of books on display, and some of them have been around for years, but this was the first time that I’d ever been able to sit in front of buyers and get their reactions to the books. Frequently I had teens grab a Runelords book and say, “Oh, this is what dad likes.” Sometimes they even knew which book he’d read, but many of them would then look at the books a bit confusedly and then say, “Oh, no, this just looks like them.” Invariably the dad was either a reader of Terry Brooks or Robert Jordan, and the teen had simply recognized the style of the cover art. Yet in most cases, after realizing that I wasn’t Brooks or Jordan, the wife would pick up one of my books anyway. Why? Resonance. My book looked like the kind that her husband might like.
     
    In other cases, moms would grab book five in the series and say, “Has Jaden read this one yet?” The book pictures a young man on a graak , a dragon-like creature ; it turns out that there are a lot of Jadens out there who only like to read books about dragons. Once again, resonance.
     
    If you ask a person who describes himself as a “big science fiction and fantasy fan” what he likes to read, you will almost always find that his tastes are rather narrow. They’ll tell you, “I like J.K. Rowling” or “I love Orson Scott Card.” In short, they have a favorite author in the genre but haven’t read beyond that author. Or maybe they’ve read widely in a certain franchise— Dragonlance or Star Wars. Resonance.
     
    So the question in my mind is, just how many people buy books because they resonate with other works, and how many actually buy for novelty?
     
    Take a look at the fantasy and science fiction market. The fantasy market is much larger than the science fiction market. I can’t say how much larger for sure, but years ago I was told by industry professionals that fantasy appeared to be outselling science fiction by about six to one. In the years since, science fiction sales have dropped dramatically. I suspect that fantasy outsells science fiction by more than ten to one.
     
    But forty years ago there was no “fantasy” market. There was no section in the bookstores that said “fantasy” anywhere. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings became something of a cult hit in the 1960s and grew into the 1970s. It wasn’t until 1977, when Terry Brooks came out with The Sword of Shannara that a fantasy novel hit The Ne w York Times Bestseller list, and Brooks stayed on top of the list for five months. That is when fantasy as a “genre” was born.
     
    Sure, there had been fantasy novels before. Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories began appearing in the early 1930s, along with the work of Fritz Lieber and others, and these surely had an influence on Tolkien. But most of those early works were printed in magazines, and there were not sections yet devoted to the “fantasy” genre.
     
    But once Terry Brooks hit the big time, publishers began to respond to a perceived demand for fantasy.
     
    Of course a lot of things got shelved with the fantasy, but the most commercially successful works were those that best imitated Tolkien. These are usually stories set in 1) a medieval setting, 2) with a small cast of people traveling on a quest, 3) in a world populated by several species of intelligent humanoids, including wizards, and so on.
     
    Examples of this include works by Brooks, Jordan, Weiss and Hickman, etc.—who have been, by the way, the most commercially successful writers in the fantasy genre until just recently.
     
    One quote, from The New York Times , on Robert Jordan’s novels says “ Jordan has come to dominate the world Tolkien began to reveal.” And that is true. Of the fantasy writers of the past 15 years, Jordan has been most successful, selling literally millions of copies. But if you look closely at the first hundred pages of Eye of the World ,