funsun wrote:I thought it was a marketing mistake to make the quest so dark and ominous with fairies and dungeons and dragons and occult laden type of imagery. The whole dungeons/ fairy market in the 80's was in style and underground for a flash. But the pictures and book itself being mildly occult, not what some people want in their houses. He should have just lightened it up for the masses and made the casks easier to find. Every time the casks were found, they got lots of free publicity, some national. As a result new people were interested. Otherwise the book had no on-going major market publicity. He should have let them be found and then done a series of "The Secret" treasure hunts. The first series (this one) could have been a bit easier, to gain public interest. The harry potter market was more kid friendly. Thus it was only slightly dark, but took off to a wider audience.
"The masses" would probably have not been interested. Fantasy and science fiction had not yet gone mainstream, and geekiness was not yet cool. BP knew how to market to the comic book and fantasy/science fiction markets, and that's where his successes were, especially with Dragonworld. As a geeky young teen in the early 1980's, I was square in the demographic for The Secret, which probably ranged from age 14 to 28 or so.
Another big change has been a huge upswing in hand-wringing over anything deemed occult -- not that there wasn't any in the early 1980s, but there seems to be a much bigger and more vocal group worried about that sort of thing these days, amplified by the Internet.
Harry Potter started off light and kid-friendly in the first book, but really didn't stay that way through the series.
