The "choose your own adventure" books worked to the extent that they did because their target audience was players of fantasy games (generally male), and the books were essentially single-player RPG adventures in book form (some even required dice). The successful ones stuck to that format.
The unsuccessful ones tried to get more literary (there was a series based off popular fantasy/SF -- I think I even have a Pern-themed one stored away somewhere). Then there was TSR's rather bizarre attempt at using the format for romance novels. Yeah, they worked as well as you might expect for a romance novel in choose-your-adventure format written by a game company. The last I saw of them, back in the day, my then-local Waldenbooks had a full display of them with maybe one or two of each missing, and a big sign "10 cents each" stuck to it.
The reason the books like the "Fighting Fantasy" and "Lone Wolf" series sold, while the "Heart Quest" ones didn't, is that they worked moderately well as games. Frankly, even the best of them sucked royally as books. That opinion, by the way, is from my days as a young gamer, their exact target audience; I doubt if I could even make it through one today. The game aspects didn't enhance the book aspects; instead, the book aspects were to be endured as part of the game mechanics. I've always been a bookaholic; I would (and still will) read pretty much anything with words on it. But I never really saw ones I read as
books; they were games with explanatory text. (and no, I never actually owned one of the Heart Quest ones; I have
some standards!)
[gamegeek]Am I weird because I think of "moooks" as something Tauren would read?[/gamegeek]
Aside from book-shaped games, I think it's almost inevitable that a multi-path book in any format is going to have to struggle just to be mediocre, and in all but the most skilled of hands is probably going to utterly suck. It's hard enough to get a single plot thread working optimally. Trying to write what is essentially multiple versions of the same story, all but one of which, by definition, are following sub-optimal versions of the plot, would tax the best of authors. And the best of authors have other things to write than cell-phone equivalents of "choose your own adventure" books.
Besides, I never trust a publisher whose press release is filled with punctuation errors.
