manuscript was given to a ghostwriter who actually created the finished product. The master stroke in getting the leverage the Paolini's had was that they owned their own publishing/printing company and used it to publish these books in the beginning. They bought an RV and would travel around the country contacting grade schools, jr highs and even high schools to work with faculty to do assemblies where their kid would read from his "own" book as an inspiration that kids could be writers. He along with his parents would promote the fantasy story line hard and then they would contact a book store or two where he would be signing his books. The books would not even be in the stores, but it would bring parents and kids in which made good business sense for the store owners.

Now a little secret. It doesn't take much for a book to show up on the lead sheets that book stores receive as far as which books are moving up the rankings in sales nationally. If you own the ISBN number on a book, and you can in a month visit two schools a day and do one book store signing with an RV and Trailer full of books, you can sell thousands of volumes in three months. Now suddenly when you come into town with your spiel, the local book stores are checked out to see who is carrying your book. That becomes the store where you do the signings and you have lift off.

I heard about them from my sister whose kids were reading them. My kids were the same age, but they were reading Tad Williams and Robert Jordan in terms of fantasy authors. I never was interested until my two oldest boys who were in high school at the time brought one home and began reading it and laughing at just how poorly written the book was. So I began to delve into the books and research the author and when I discovered how this all went down I understood how bad the series was in terms of authorship, but I was impressed with the Paolini's in terms of executing their plan.

Knopf purchased the rights to continue publishing. They like to sell the story of some nephew or grandson of one of Knopf's stable of authors found the book in a store and loved it and that spurred a publishing giant to make their move vs the reality that the Paolini's had created a marketing stir and sold enough volumes that Knopf easily took over with bird in the hand money.

All in all his writing has improved over time, but Christopher Paolini is not a good writer.