Originally Posted by Mechalich
Smaller stories, very much including the Han Solo adventures, sold poorly and were difficult to get published.
I’d be interested in seeing more numbers and background on this.

If there were troubles with selling these, they weren’t enough to prevent the Lando trilogy from being published, and they may have been due more to broader issues in the SF/F market. CJ Cherryh had trouble with some of her smaller experimental novels in roughly the same timeframe—little gems like Wave Without A Shore that were a bit more nuanced and thinky than the typical pulp SF. They were much better novels than most of what was being published, but they had difficulty competing with overstuffed epics.

It’s also a little difficult to compare sales for the Han Solo books compared with the second flowering of the EU that brought Thrawn and Mara Jade. The Solo novels were clustered around 1979-1980, whereas the main pulse of EU novels began to expand in the mid-90s. That’s a fifteen-year difference in the markets, so that may well have had more of an effect on overall sales than what the characters could do inside those novels.