Terry Goodkind Hits the Kindle

By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 8/21/2008 7:41:00 AM

In an exclusive deal with Kindle, Terry Goodkind's first novel, Wizard's First Rule, was released this week as a RosettaBooks e-book, available for purchase on the Amazon device only. Goodkind, who is published by Tor, has held onto his digital rights up until now; Rule, first released in print in 1994, marks the first of Goodkind's titles to appear in e-book.

Arthur Klebanoff, CEO of RosettaBooks, said the fact that Goodkind's work has never been published in e-book format is less surprising than one might assume. "A range of 'A' list commercial authors--Dean Koontz until recently, J.K. Rowling--have either held back or frozen their e-book rights," he said. Now, with the growing popularity of digital reading devices like the Kinde, Klebanoff thinks industry players are seeing, for the first time, the market viability of e-books. "Slowly but surely Kindle, Sony Reader and other [devices] are convincing publishers, and publishers are in turn convincing their bestselling authors, to release e-books." 

When asked why Goodkind opted to be published in e-book by an independent, in Rosetta, Goodkind's agent, Russell Galen, said Rosetta "offered us much better terms." Klebanoff, who negotiated the Goodkind deal with Galen, added that he thinks the size of a publisher is also less important in e-book publishing. "Obviously Random House has a compelling argument when it comes to what it can do [in publishing] a phsycial book," he told PW. "But in e-book [publishing] the people selling the books are Kindle, Sony Reader and various other e-tailers. So, whether the title is fed by Rosetta or Random House makes no difference."