Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling (her books are decent kid's lit), Riordan (the original Percy Jackson series was decent), Rothfuss (who killed the Bestseller List with The Wise Man's Fear,) Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive sells gangbusters based mostly on word-of-mouth promotion)... the list goes on.
And exactly how many of those got their start in the last decade, once the cancer metastasized to SFF?
Both of the living SFF writers on it, Sanderson and Rothfuss exploded into the stratosphere during that time, and also the SFF award community was a circlejerk by the 90's so I'm afraid that fails to be a "gotcha" on two levels.
In other words they were already published authors.
And for like $200, so can you in this wonderful age of self-publishing and Kindles. Worm is an immensely-popular capeshit story that has tens of thousands of fans despite it existing as a series of Wordpress entries.
Interesting you're not too keen on elaborating on the how's and why's of that which has made them darlings of the "Bill Ayers crowd" over the past thirty-odd years. Which I'm sure has nothing at all do to with a certain Hollywood actress on the outs looking to buy her way out of recent high-profile animal rights controversies, who put the book on her reading list and gobbled up film rights to it less than a month after it went on sale.
