Anne Rice does nothing to make the vampire folk richer but what she merely does is showing the human side of vampires and the way they handle their emotions, makes them more human till you occasionaly remember ow, yeah, he's a blood- sucking daemon.
I absolutely hate the way Anne Rice talked and talked and talked about every slight detail in her first books of the Vampire Chronicles. I'm actually reading
Armand the Vampire and I must say that I ended loving it: so you hate
Interview with a Vampire and
Lestat the Vampire, skip til the most recent, it's gone loads better and you don't miss the big deal (any way, this last book is not for homofobic people of you'll vomit with the first mention of Marius-Armand relation)
It's a matter of likes and dislikes; as for me Anne Rice's

Halt mich, mein Leben, halt mich....ich verlasse heut 'Dein Herz.