Publishing, Gatekeeping, and Industry

Introduction

The Malazan Book of the Fallen took eight years to find a publisher. Its author was told, repeatedly, that there was no audience for the kind of fiction he was writing, that the book was "too complicated" and had "too many characters," that it was the kind of project the contemporary publishing industry could not and should not support. When it finally found a home, it did so in the United Kingdom rather than the United States, because Steven Erikson had moved to England on the explicit theory that the British audience was "more sophisticated" than the American one. The United States eventually came around, and Erikson's biggest royalty cheques now come from American readers. But the delay — eight years during which the first volume of what would become a three-million-word series sat unsold — shaped Erikson's relationship to the publishing industry in a way that remains visible in his public discussion of writing and the market.

This essay examines the publishing history of the series and the broader industry context within which it was produced under seven headings: the eight-year journey to publication and the specific rejections that shaped Erikson's strategic decisions; the transatlantic move to England and its underlying theory of audience; the pen name "Erikson" and its function as a brand-separation device between literary fiction and fantasy; the distinction between "speculative fiction" and "science fiction / fantasy" as a genre-gatekeeping instrument; the epic-fantasy-as-trunk-of-literature thesis Erikson uses to push back against contemporary fiction's elevation over genre work; the Harvey Weinstein near-option and the specific contingencies of how fantasy fiction reaches film adaptation; and Erikson's account of the creative-commercial compromise he has consistently refused to make.

The Eight-Year Delay

Erikson has discussed the publication history of Gardens of the Moon in interviews with unusual directness. The first version of the manuscript was written quickly — "in four and a half months" — and submitted to American publishers who held it for extended periods before rejecting it. The details of the delay are specific:

"It took eight years to find a publisher for Gardens of the Moon. So everything was held in check, and that eight years was not me constantly flogging the manuscript. It went out once, it stayed with a publisher in the States for two years before it showed up in the mail. And this is long before electronic stuff — so the actual copy shows up in the mail. And then 18 months at another US publisher, at which point I shelved it, I just put it away." (An Evening with Steven Erikson transcript)

Two features of this account are worth extracting. First, the delays at individual publishers were extraordinary by industry standards. A two-year hold on a manuscript is far beyond the normal response time, which is typically measured in months; an eighteen-month hold at a second publisher extends the delay further. The cumulative effect is that the manuscript was in the hands of publishers who had the power to either accept it or release it back into circulation, and their failure to do either — keeping it for extended periods without publishing it — effectively removed it from the market during the years when Erikson could most have used its publication to establish his career.

Second, the rejection rationales Erikson received were consistent and specific. Editors told him the book had "too many characters," was "too complicated," and had "no audience." These are not generic rejections of quality; they are specific diagnoses of the kind of fiction the book represented and of the commercial marketplace it was being judged against. The editors were, in their own terms, correct: the book did have too many characters and was complicated by the standards of what the contemporary fantasy marketplace was absorbing at the time. What the editors missed was that the marketplace itself was about to change — that readers in the late 1990s and early 2000s were ready for exactly the kind of density and ambition the book offered, and that publishers willing to bet on that readiness would be richly rewarded. Erikson's British publisher (Bantam, via Transworld) made that bet and profited; the American publishers who had held the manuscript and released it had, in effect, passed on a franchise whose eventual value exceeded anything they could have projected at the time of rejection.

The lesson Erikson takes from this history is explicit:

"If there are any beginning writers out there and they've just turned you down — fuck them." (An Evening with Steven Erikson transcript)

The obscene energy of this advice is analytically significant. Erikson is not recommending that writers take rejection personally; he is recommending that they not take rejection as information about their own work. Rejection is information about what the publisher thinks will sell, and publishers are routinely wrong about what will sell. A writer who treats rejection as verdict on quality is absorbing a signal whose relationship to quality is distant and indirect. A writer who treats rejection as information about a specific publisher's taste at a specific time is absorbing a more accurate signal and can calibrate their strategy accordingly.

The Transatlantic Move

Erikson's strategic response to the American rejections was to physically relocate to England on a five-year plan to find a publisher there. The move is worth recording in his own terms because the underlying theory is explicit:

"I ended up moving to the UK — moving to England — because I thought the audience in the UK, Great Britain, whatever, is going to be more sophisticated than the American audience. Because the American publishers were all turning this down. And I had a five-year plan to find a publisher and get the first book published, and I managed that in three years. So it took us another three years after that to finally twist the arms of a publisher in the US. And to this day my biggest royalty cheques come from the States." (An Evening with Steven Erikson transcript)

The theory being tested by this move is specific. Erikson is not claiming that the UK audience was inherently better than the US audience, or that the UK publishing industry was more enlightened. He is claiming that the UK market, at the moment he was entering it, had a different relationship to epic fantasy than the US market did — one that was more receptive to the kind of density and complexity his novel offered. The claim is testable: if the theory was right, a UK publisher would have picked the book up; if the theory was wrong, the book would have languished in British offices as well. The theory was right.

The subsequent fact — that American royalties became the largest revenue stream despite the American industry's initial rejection — is the series' internal proof that the rejecting publishers had been wrong about the underlying audience. The American readers existed; they were willing to buy the book in large numbers; the publishers had simply been unable to recognise them as a market. The delay, in effect, cost the original rejecting publishers the opportunity to share in a franchise that eventually earned substantial revenue, and the revenue went instead to the publisher that eventually took the risk. This is how publishing markets work in the long run: correct editorial judgment is rewarded and incorrect judgment is punished, but the punishments and rewards are distributed across such long time horizons that they rarely shape editors' in-the-moment decisions.

The UK-first strategy has a further significance for the series' prose character. Because Erikson found his first publisher in the UK, his prose was edited according to British conventions rather than American ones. He has discussed specific mechanical consequences of this — the "towards" vs. "toward" debate with his English editor, the spelling of "colour" rather than "color," the use of "breaths" rather than "breath" in certain passages — and the British editorial register persists across the whole series regardless of which edition a reader is holding. American readers of the series are therefore reading a text that has been mechanically calibrated to UK expectations rather than to the conventions of their own market, and the slight mechanical foreignness is part of what gives the series its distinctive tonal character for North American readers.

The Pen Name: "Erikson" as Brand Separation

"Steven Erikson" is a pen name. The author's legal name is Steve Rune Lundin, and his literary-fiction career had already begun under that name before the Malazan series was drafted. The decision to publish the Malazan series under a different name was not Erikson's preference but a requirement imposed by his literary-fiction publisher, who did not want the "lowbrow" fantasy work contaminating the brand under which the literary-fiction career had been built.

The pen-name decision has a specific symbolic significance. The author chose "Erikson" as a homage to his mother's maiden name, so that the fantasy work he was forced to brand-separate from his literary career would still carry a personal-family signature legible to those close to him. The choice is worth noting because it inverts the usual logic of pen names: pen names are typically chosen to conceal personal identity, whereas this one was chosen to preserve family identity in a context where the publishing industry was forcing the author to separate his careers. The author could not use his actual name; he used his mother's name instead; the resulting author-function is therefore a kind of matrilineal signature preserved against the industry's preference for brand-cleanliness.

The broader significance is that the pen-name requirement reveals the publishing industry's commitment to genre-policing at the level of authorial identity. A writer who has established a literary-fiction career is not supposed to publish fantasy under the same name, because fantasy is understood as a lower form whose association with the literary-fiction brand would damage the literary work's standing with the critics, reviewers, and prize committees on whose approval the literary work depends. The genre hierarchy is thus enforced not only at the level of which books get reviewed in which venues but at the level of whose name can appear on which covers, and writers who want to work in multiple genres must either accept the brand-separation (as Erikson did) or risk being downgraded in the literary registers they would otherwise occupy.

"Speculative Fiction" as Euphemism

Erikson's sharpest public criticism of contemporary publishing's genre-gatekeeping concerns the term "speculative fiction" and its function as a euphemistic instrument used by literary writers to separate themselves from science fiction and fantasy writers whose reputations would drag their own down:

"Speculative fiction became, at least in my experience, euphemistic terminology for serious writers venturing into things like science fiction and fantasy. I remember Margaret Atwood saying she doesn't write science fiction, she writes speculative fiction. And I just roll my eyes at that, because in a sense she's attempting to separate herself from other science fiction writers — which, because she's such a good writer, in a sense it ghettoises the science fiction writers. She just said, I'm writing science fiction that elevates the other writers of science fiction. Yes. So I always found it very self-serving." (A Conversation with Steven Erikson transcript)

The critique is precise. Atwood's invocation of "speculative fiction" is not a neutral genre-category choice; it is a specific move by a literary writer to claim that her own work in science-fictional territory is different from the work of other writers in the same territory. The claim's function is to protect Atwood's standing with the literary audience that would otherwise downgrade her for having engaged with science fiction. The cost of the claim is that it implicitly concedes that the other writers in the same territory are writing something lower — that "science fiction" is a label whose association damages reputation, and that serious writers need a different label to escape the damage.

Erikson's objection is that this concession is exactly backwards. Science fiction and fantasy are not inherently lower forms that serious writers need to distance themselves from; they are the forms in which some of the most serious writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been done. The gatekeeping that treats them as lower is a historical artefact of literary-critical tastes developed in the early and mid twentieth century, and those tastes have no necessary relation to the actual literary quality of the work being gatekept. A literary writer who accepts the gatekeeping is collaborating with a hierarchy whose empirical basis is thin; a literary writer who rejects it — who simply calls their work fantasy or science fiction and lets it be judged on its merits — is doing the work the gatekeeping has failed to do.

Epic Fantasy as Trunk, Contemporary Fiction as Twig

Erikson's positive counter-claim to the genre hierarchy is an ambitious one: that epic fantasy is not a marginal genre but the trunk of Western literature, and that contemporary literary fiction is by contrast a recent and narrow offshoot. The argument is articulated most fully in the same conversation:

"Contemporary fiction, so-called literary fiction, is a genre. Although my experience certainly at University of Victoria and University of Iowa — there was always this sense of elevating contemporary fiction above other genres. Personally I see it as the smallest. It's a tiny twig on a branch, and the branch goes back to the tree. And the tree is epic fantasy, because the origins of literature — the Iliad, Gilgamesh, all the rest — that's the trunk of the tree. And its roots go down through the earth into mythology and legend. So the trunk of the tree is the core genre, if you want to call it a genre. It's the core. Science fiction is a branch off of that. Contemporary fiction is a twig. And it may have one leaf on it that says 'I'm the greatest thing in the universe,' but that doesn't necessarily mean anything." (A Conversation with Steven Erikson transcript)

The historical claim underlying the metaphor is straightforward. The earliest surviving works of literature in the Western tradition — the Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, Gilgamesh, the various Norse sagas — are all works whose content would, in contemporary publishing categories, be classified as fantasy. They contain gods, monsters, magical weapons, prophetic dreams, talking animals, and cosmological settings that violate the constraints of contemporary realism. If the literary tradition is to be taken seriously as a single continuous phenomenon, then the default mode of literature across most of its history has been what contemporary publishing now calls fantasy, and contemporary realistic literary fiction is a specific, recent, and minority deviation from the default.

Erikson's argument is that this historical observation should reorder the contemporary genre hierarchy. If fantasy is the trunk and contemporary fiction is the twig, then the contemporary critical habit of treating contemporary fiction as the baseline against which fantasy must justify itself is exactly backwards. Fantasy should be treated as the baseline, and contemporary fiction should be understood as the specific narrow form that has temporarily dominated literary-critical attention but whose historical standing within the tradition is marginal. The argument will not convince critics committed to the existing hierarchy, but it has the virtue of being empirically defensible — the historical facts about what the earliest major works of literature look like are on Erikson's side, even if the contemporary critical consensus is not.

The Weinstein Near-Miss

A specific episode in the series' industry history is the near-deal with Harvey Weinstein for the film rights, which Erikson has discussed in An Evening with Steven Erikson:

"We got as close as you can get, but at the same time we dodged a bullet. We had signed a contract with a major producer and we were waiting on the option cheque to be signed by that producer. Sat on his desk for about six months, and then area was cancelled — and that was Harvey Weinstein. That was right before the shit hit the fan and the Weinstein Company went under. Had we sold the rights, we would still be in a legal nightmare now, because that property then would have been picked up by the nearest debt collector you could think of." (An Evening with Steven Erikson transcript)

The episode is instructive about the specific contingencies by which fantasy fiction reaches (or fails to reach) film adaptation. The option cheque was sitting on Weinstein's desk, unsigned, for six months — six months during which Erikson and Esslemont could not sell the rights to any other producer because the contract was technically pending, and during which the project's fate was entirely in Weinstein's hands. The scandal that destroyed the Weinstein Company arrived before Weinstein signed the cheque, and the failure to sign — which would ordinarily have been a disappointment — turned out to be the luckiest possible outcome, because a signed deal would have locked the rights to a company whose assets were about to be dispersed through bankruptcy.

The structural observation is that film adaptations of long fantasy properties are subject to extraordinary contingency. The window of opportunity is small; the negotiations are long; the signatures required are at the discretion of individual executives whose circumstances can change between the negotiation and the signature; and the legal consequences of a failed deal can tie up the rights for years afterwards in ways that prevent any alternative adaptation. Erikson and Esslemont's "dodged bullet" is the concrete form this contingency takes in their specific case, and readers who have been disappointed by the absence of a Malazan film or television adaptation should understand that the absence is not a failure of interest but a consequence of the specific industry conditions under which such adaptations are negotiated.

Commercial vs. Artistic Vision

The deepest of Erikson's industry commitments is his refusal of commercial compromise. Across interviews he has consistently insisted that he cannot imagine making the kind of commercial adjustment to his work that would soften its difficulty for a larger audience — not because he has moral objections to commercial writing but because he believes his own writing cannot be produced that way. The refusal is not ideological; it is practical. Erikson writes the kind of fiction he writes because that is the kind of fiction he is capable of writing, and attempts to produce a commercially more palatable version would simply produce worse work.

This refusal interacts with one specific piece of industry advice Erikson has reported receiving: his agent told him, at the outset, "don't tell the publisher it's ten books." The advice was strategic: publishers who learn at the outset that a series is planned to run ten volumes will often refuse to commit to the first volume because the commercial risk is too large. The advice therefore was to commit the publisher to the first book without disclosing the scale of the eventual project, and to let the scale emerge through sales data over time as subsequent volumes succeeded.

The advice was followed, and it worked. By the time the publisher realised the project was ten books, the early volumes were selling sufficiently well that the commitment to the full series was commercially justified. If the advice had not been followed — if Erikson had disclosed the ten-book scale at the outset — the series might never have been contracted at all, and the publication history of the Malazan Book of the Fallen would have been entirely different.

The episode reveals a specific feature of how the contemporary publishing industry manages risk. Publishers evaluate projects at the scale of individual volumes because the commercial risk of committing to a multi-volume series at the outset is too large to absorb in a single decision. A writer whose project is honestly too big to be evaluated at the single-volume scale must either lie about its scale (as Erikson's agent effectively advised) or find a publisher willing to make the larger commitment upfront (which was available for genre heavyweights but not for unknown first-time writers). The lie is the price of producing the work, and writers who refuse to tell it are writers whose work is unlikely to be produced.

Conclusion: The Writer Against the Industry

The cumulative portrait that emerges from Erikson's discussions of publishing is of a writer whose relationship to the industry has been adversarial from the beginning. He was rejected for eight years, moved continents to find a publisher, was required to adopt a pen name by his own literary publisher, was excluded from Canadian literary festivals in his own home city, and had to have his agent lie about the scope of his project to get it contracted at all. The series that eventually emerged is one of the most successful in contemporary fantasy, but its success did not erase the pattern of industry gatekeeping that had preceded it — it simply placed Erikson in a position from which he could speak publicly about the gatekeeping without risking further damage.

The public speech is itself one of the contributions Erikson has made to the contemporary genre-fiction environment. Writers coming up through the same industry conditions — the same rejection letters, the same pen-name requirements, the same "speculative fiction" euphemisms — benefit from having an established author articulate the conditions in explicit terms rather than accepting them as the natural and inevitable shape of the industry. Erikson's insistence that fantasy is the trunk of Western literature rather than its margin, and that the gatekeeping which treats it as marginal is a historical artefact with no empirical basis, is useful to younger writers who need the argument to push back against the specific forms of dismissal they themselves are receiving.

The deeper observation is that the relationship between serious writers and the contemporary publishing industry is more fraught than the industry's own public self-presentation admits. The industry presents itself as the gatekeeper of literary quality, selecting the best work from a pool of submissions and bringing it to readers who would otherwise be unable to find it. The actual evidence — from Erikson's experience and many others' — is that the industry is a gatekeeper of commercial predictability rather than of literary quality, that its decisions are shaped by editors' guesses about what will sell rather than by any disinterested assessment of merit, and that the writers who eventually succeed despite the gatekeeping do so through combinations of strategy, persistence, luck, and geographical repositioning rather than through any mechanism the industry's self-presentation acknowledges. Erikson's eight-year journey to publication is a specific instance of this pattern, and his willingness to describe it openly is part of what makes his public discourse useful to readers and other writers who need to understand how the industry actually works.

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