Sebastien De Castell’s Spellslinger series is fantastic low fantasy that gave us the Argosi and murderous squirrel-cats.
Mishell Baker’s Borderline trilogy has a disabled female MC with BPD and it’s wild. The plot is basic urban fantasy fae shit but Baker turns it into gold.
Sarah Hawke’s fantasy smut series The Dragon of Highwind is maybe the ONLY series of it’s kind I’ve read where the writing and world building is equal to the sex. If that’s your kind of thing, check it out.
I just realized you meant the Robin Hobb Farseer. I was thinking of Robert J Sawyer’s Farseer / Quintaglio trilogy about talking dinosaurs doing the Galileo Affair, which is also awesome.
Timothy Zahn (and many of the Expanded Universe star wars novelists like Karen Traviss, Matt Stover and Aaron Allston). Their work, and Zahn specifically made massive contributions to how we think about star wars and the fandom. Instead Lucas disparaged them and Disney hacked out a few of the good bits like Thrawn and put them in the hands of vastly inferior writers.
The whole point of doing tie-ins (aside from the check) is that it attracts readers to your original work but I doubt that was true for many, and that’s a shame.
He got better. He corresponded with Robert E Howard (Conan) and realized what a horrendous racist that guy was.
Probably a 3 way tie between church, dysentery and alcoholism.
YA copies adult trends. If the adult trend is waning or too similar, like parallel universes (MCU has oversaturated the market), it will switch to an older trend that’s fallen out of fashion. Harry Potter wasn’t successful because of magic kid, that’s been a thing for decades, but because it’s part of the British boarding school genre popular 100 years ago. Take something forgotten, add a new spin on it, and you have your next big thing.
It’s not all recycled content. One way to make newish stories is to take a scifi idea and make it kid friendly, like posthumans or generation ships. It doesn’t matter if it’s “been done before”, it’s not about being first, it’s what captures the imagination (and sells).
It’s just habit. I used to listen to audiobooks for years while commuting. Then I switched to podcasts for awhile. Then I realized I hate most podcasts and tried switching back but it takes time to break the habit.
Possession is very romantic. I personally find Hardy to be deeply unromantic aside from Jude The Obscure and his poems.
Possession by A S Byatt
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Things Fall Apart (and Arrow of God) by Chinua Achebe
Lolita by Nabokov
We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson
I’ve also found most of Thomas Hardy’s novels to be pageturners but YMMV.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/580197