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collections of SF, fantasy, and mystery stories; 105 anthologies, almost all in collaboration with Martin H. Greenberg (and a combination of other editors); two collections of SF essays (from his magazine editorials); 86 books on science; two on history, one on the Bible, three on literature, three humor and satire collections, three volumes of autobiography; and eleven miscellaneous books. |
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How can the autumnal success of Asimov's SF novels be explained? Many theories have been advanced, among them the possibility that Asimov's readership (from his more than 200 non-SF books as well as his still-in-print SF titles) had built itself to the point where the pent-up desire for his novels coincided with a mature audience that could afford to purchase hard-cover editions and was too impatient to wait for the paperback. The same thing happened to Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, the other two of what Asimov liked to call ''the Big Three." Indeed, in 1982 Heinlein produced Friday and Clarke produced 2010: Odyssey Two and both appeared on the best-seller lists at the same time as Foundation's Edge. For a time more than half the top ten titles were science-fiction or fantasy titles. |
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Doubleday's sense of the marketplace was better than Asimov's. Asimov never concerned himself about the marketplace. He preferred low advances so that publishers would allow him to write whatever he wanted. Doubleday, which had been one of the pioneers of SF in hardcovers, also had helped for some 20 years to put a ceiling on sales of SF hardcovers; now, through Asimov, it was reinforcing the concept of the SF bestseller. |
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When SF novels began to be published following World War II, publishers' expectations placed a cap on their sales. Publishers expected novels to have a top sale of about 5,000 copies, and printed no more. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. But sales of SF began picking up in the 1970s. All through the 1970s and early 1980s the number of titles had escalated from a few hundred a year to more than a thousand by 1982 (six years later they would reach almost two thousand a year), Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and Frank Herbert's Dune (1965) had sold with remarkable persistence in paperback as well as the phenomenal The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, and some hard-cover titles, particularly The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in 1974 and Herbert's Children of Dune in 1976, had demonstrated that SF novels could actually become best sellers. Authors such as Heinlein, Clarke, and Herbert were commanding advances (of a half-million dollars to a million and a half) that made Asimov's advance seem minuscule by comparison. |
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