Quote from: Xenomrph on Sep 11, 2008, 06:35:31 PM
Well said, Mr. Perry. Glad to see that us fanboys didn't scare you off.
That said, I would like to see an answer to the earlier question: do fans influence your work in any way? I guess I mean in terms of fan/hate mail, or what you see tossed around on messageboards like this one, or in the "reviews" section of Amazon.com or something like that, does it influence your work at all?
I mean "influence" in terms of what you get from fan feedback, and also perhaps what FOX or Dark Horse says to you based on what they're seeing, as well.
Fanboys don't scare me. I was a fanboy, I expect, before most of the people who show up here were born. Still am.
And as to their input, the asnwer is: yes and no. With the graphic novelizations, not so much, for two reasons. First, it has been a while since I did those, and the internet was not so ubiquitous as it is now -- there weren't any fan groups in this universe that I noticed. (I did hear some stuff from Star Wars fans that I took into account when I got into that universe, but remember that the first Aliens novelization came out more than fifteen years ago, and the web was a bit sketchier then.)
Second reason is that I had the comics as a template, and what DH leased was the right to novelize those, so we had to stick close to what had already been approved. There were some name changes we had to do to keep things legal, and eventually, those got changed back to what we wanted to do in the first place. But the comics were the basis of what my daughter and I did.
For the most recent novel, which my daughter also helped on, the story was fairly straight-forward, and I knew pretty much how I wanted to play it. The main characters came into focus from the start, and I just ran with them. It was their story, not that of the Predators so much, and that's how I wrote it.
I didn't really need a whole lot of input into that, and since the Preds were not VP characters, nor really the focus, I figured I had enough to go with.
Another book, maybe I'd get some thoughts from the fan base I could use. But -- to he honest here -- probably not so much from folks who get horsey and call me names. One doesn't reward bad behavior, that will only encourage it.
The problem with fan input is that the really hardcore fans tend to not like a whole bunch of stuff that casual fans and readers enjoy, and the level of detail necessary to please the heavy duty fanboys is too much for most readers -- they don't care for it. Microscopic details can bog down the story, and spending any real amount of time getting something perfect for the three guys who might get it is not the way to go, if you have a deadline. (From the time Turnabout's outline was approved until it was due to be delivered was less than four months. My daughter was going to write most of it, but ran into some scheduling problems that made that impossible -- she was doing an Aliens novel, a Star Trek novel, and she had two small children at home, so I wound up doing most of it, and by the time I got to it, had only six weeks or so.)
If you have a hundred readers, and the choice is to please eighty of them by doing it one way, or three of them by doing it the other, which way would you go? (Keeping in mind that if the book tanks big-time, you might not get invited back, and a certain percentage of the readers aren't going to like it no matter which choice you make ...)
Two hardcore fans will argue to the death over what color lint was in the Predator's pocket last Tuesday. I can't go there -- it doesn't entertain enough readers, and whatever I might say if I did go there would piss off one of the guy arguing anyhow.
As to AvPR, I believe I have said it a time or two here and elsewhere -- yeah, it
was that bad. I don't know what they were thinking. They might not have killed the franchise, but they didn't help it any.
In my opinion.