Personally, I've liked about 2-3 or the SR novels, and the rest are just kinda meh. But, like movies, I tend to be harsh on books, and only really like a small portion of the many I read.

I'm all for pushing novels to help sell a RPG, but I don't know that I've ever seen it work, outside of AD&D book lines such as Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms.

It's a fine a line, to write a novel that stands on it's own, and keeping faithful to the spirit of the RPG. Especially when alot of your readers are going to be thinking..wow, that's not possible in the rules, etc etc.

While SR books might be better then most "game" novels, I think they are typicallly lumped into the same pile of crap like Magic novels, or Doom novels.