Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-9062114-20140217190926/@comment-1600847-20140805162318

King in the North wrote: The latter, predominantly. Greg Keyes confirmed that Bethesda did indeed make sure that the novel was lore friendly, and that he was constrained by needing to stick to the lore, but obviously some of his own flavour was present in the novel. In case you are interested, the interview is here: http://www.imperial-library.info/interviews-greg-keyes

Besides, some of those ideas were made by others, anyway, like (as I think I may have mentioned before) the Third Aldmeri Dominion (Second, at the time, as this was before TESO) was envisioned by MK. Would you look at that. It says he wrote several storyline ideas and sent them to Bethesda for approval, and once they agreed on one then he started writing the novels. They're definitely canon if Bethesda had the final say in which storyline was written and Keyes was having it approved by Bethesda every so often during the writting process.

Thanks for the link :D