Crippled God Hits NY Times Bestseller List

There's a particular kind of celebration that you only experience if you work at a publishing company -- it comes in the middle of a week, when you hear from the New York Times (or, back in the day, Publishers Weekly) that a book you published has just hit their list.

Tor Books had that celebration earlier today, when they learned that The Crippled God, tenth and last in Steven Erikson's massive decadent-epic fantasy series "The Malazan Book of the Fallen," would be #12 on this weekend's fiction bestseller list in the Times. Tor sent out a press release to continue the celebration, and they mentioned the hard work of editor Eric Raab, who shepherded that massive series for Tor for most of the past decade. But its success relied on the hard work of a few dozen other people, too -- Justin Golenbock, Tor's Senior Publicist, Tom Doherty, their Publisher and founder, and a host of sales reps, marketers, and others.

(And I'm personally happy to see Erikson's series hit that peak of success; I bought the first four in the series for the SF Book Club, and I've long been an admirer of the work Erikson is doing.)

But the person I'd like to honor is the editor who first brought Erikson to the US -- after years when every New York publishing house said he was "too British" and "too big" and "too convoluted" -- the editor who read the whole series to date quickly, fell in love with it, and succeeded in an editor's most central job: making his enthusiasm contagious until an entire publishing house goes along with him.

Wherever you are, Jim Minz, take a bow: you were right. And it only took seven years.