[Greg Anos]

Ok all, here we go. If my memory is bad and some of this is garbled, please correct me, but please don't be snarky about it. I'm doing the best I can...

First, prior to the early 1970's, genre fiction was <not> long. Publishers were tied to the 170-300 page length, or else it just didn't get published. The only S/F writer who had done anything at greater length was Heinlein, with Stranger. And if you read his letters (Grumbles From the Grave), he sweated bullets worrying that the publisher wouldn't get their money back. (He even agreed to a S/F bookclub arrangement, just to help the publisher recoup their initial costs. He (like all other S/F writers) got paid peanuts on the bookclub edition.) And Stranger was only 407 pages, and Heinlein was hands-down the best selling S/F writer at the time.

Dune couldn't get published at all in the early 60's, That's the gospel truth! The only reason anybody ever heard of it was that 1. John W. Campbell liked it, and ran it as a serial for 12 months(!). and 2. an editor at a car repair manual was a huge S/F fan, and managed to sweet-talk the firm into publishing it (Chilton - 1966, more commonly know for such scintillating titles as Fix Your Chevrolet or Fix Your Volkswagon) (Sidebar - early paperbacks had trouble holding together if they were too long - glue limitations, which nobody wanted fixed (throwaways, remember?))

Still, in paperback, it sold and sold, and sold. Add in LOTR in fantasy (at long length), and Stranger, there seem to be a market for longer length paperback books. So various authors, wrote BIG books, and most of them sold. (Examples - Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar 1968 and The Sheep Look Up 1970, Heinlein's Moon 1965, I Will Fear No Evil 1970, and Time Enough For Love 1973, Niven and Pournelle's A Mote In God's Eye 1974, and Delaney's Dhalgren 1975)

But these were still treated as second class citizens, like all genre fiction. They made the publishers money, but they weren't literature...

In and around 1975, some publisher wondered what would happen if they gave one of these long books (which seemed to sell, if they were any good at all) the "Blockbuster" treatment, just like they did for the general bestsellers. Why? Because, somebody said, if they could get people to buy them as first run hardcovers, they'd made a <lot> more money. So the green-light was given to do one book that way. If it failed, they could survive the write-off, and if it succeeded, they would be head-and-shoulder ahead of their competition.

Well, as they said in Blazing Saddles - "Who'se it gonna be?" First choice would have been Heinlein. He had the best commercial track record. But Heinlein was gravely ill, and couldn't write. Asimov was doing non-fiction, mostly, and his style made a poor bet at the time. Same for Clarke. Brunner was too British for blockbuster American tastes. What were you left with? Hmmm... Herbert had done well with Dune, and was writing sequels, how about one of those? It would have the advantage of a built-in audience (just like Hollywood sequels), and if non-fans got lost, shrug, they had bought the book...

(Please note - this was done a couple of years before Star Wars came out...)

The one-armed bandit paid off - big time! And ever big name science fiction writer started getting the "Best Seller" treatment. Some sold, some didn't, but the publishers kept at it for decades.

And that's how genre became big time. Even Louis L'Amour got to do blockbuster sized books at the end of his career...