Publishing in World of Warcraft

By Jason Boog 

The addictive online role-playing game World of Warcraft counts 11.5 million subscribers worldwide–unexpectedly building a dedicated group of book-readers as well. During New York City’s Comic Con, we caught up with Chris Metzen, one of the game’s creators and VP of Creative Development for the game’s parent company, Blizzard Entertainment.

Metzen explained how the video game company also created a popular series of novels at Simon & Schuster. This concludes GalleyCat’s prowl of the teeming, costumed crowd of true-believers at Comic Con this year, uncovering some vital intelligence about this flourishing corner of the publishing industry.

To see more video interviews with innovators, follow these links: a Quirk Books editor talked about zombies and Jane Austen; Eric Nylund discussed how to get video gamers to read books; comics legend Danny Fingeroth talked about graphic novel sales in the recession; Ron Fortier unveiled his pulp fiction revival; and multi-tasking author Alex Irvine talked about the 21st Century writing lifestyle.