J.R.R. Tolkien novel sales pass 600 million

HarperCollins has released updated sales figures for J.R.R. Tolkien's books, acquired by Tolkien fansite TheOneRing. These sales figures have been unified in English for the first time because News Corp., which already owns HarperCollins (Tolkien's British publishers), has also acquired Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien's American publishers.

The figures indicate that sales of Tolkien's books have surpassed 600 million. Counting Tolkien's book sales have been notoriously difficult due to poor accounting, legions of unauthorised overseas editions and even pirate editions of the book being sold in the United States (most famously the Ace Books edition of 1965, which sparked an international outcry and helped catapult Tolkien to greater fame and success in the States), so even this is a conservative figure.

Sales of 600 million would put Tolkien comfortably in the top ten selling authors of fiction of all time, although (contrary to some reports) nowhere near the top. William Shakespeare's plays have sold over 4 billion copies, whilst Agatha Christie's novels have sold at least 2 billion and possibly closer to 4 billion copies. From there it's a steeper drop to Barbara Cartland, who has sold around 750 million copies of her romance novels, just ahead of Danielle Steel on an estimated 700 million. Harold Robbins and Georges Simenon are around 700 million apiece as well.

Tolkien's sales put him at approximate parity with Enid Blyton, Sidney Sheldon and J.K. Rowling, who are all between 500 and 700 million in sales, and comfortably ahead of the likes of Dr. Seuss, Leo Tolstoy, Jackie Collins, Dean Koontz and Stephen King. Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis can only muster 200 million sales of his books.

However, although Tolkien may not be the biggest-selling novelist of all time, he may have the biggest-selling individual novel. The overwhelming majority of Tolkien's book sales come from The Lord of the Rings, which across all editions and both the three and one-volume versions of the text has sold almost half a billion copies. The Hobbit has sold over 100 million copies. The combined sales of all of Tolkien's other books, although still respectable, fall well short of those figures.

Among contemporary and recent fantasy authors, George R.R. Martin, Sir Terry Pratchett and Robert Jordan have achieved just short of 100 million sales apiece.

ETA: The One Ring has clarified their report as an "April Fool's" gag, a bit of a non-sequitur one since the figures are actually fully credible (if anything, on the conservative) side of things: Tolkien had sold over 400 million books by 2001, so an additional 200 million sales in twenty years, a period when Tolkien's popularity exploded beyond all recognition due to the success of the films (and HarperCollins were attributing a 50 million boost in sales as early as 2003), is pretty easy to believe.

Leaving Money on the Table: Why is There No New D&D Fiction Being Published?

A shelf of books from the Forgotten Realms line. 292 books in the setting have been published between 1987 and 2020.

Dungeons and Dragons is bigger than it has ever been. 2019 was the biggest and most profitable year in the game’s near half-century history, building on the massive success of the several preceding years where each year saw greater success than the one before. The 5th edition of the game, launched in 2014, has been the best-selling ever. Celebrity gamers, YouTube video series and a starring role on Stranger Things have helped propel D&D to a level of popularity unthinkable a decade ago, when the game’s fourth edition was attracting a lukewarm reception and gamers were flocking to competing products, such as Pathfinder.

A new, big-budget D&D movie is in development and a high-profile video game, Baldur’s Gate III, is set for release early next year. But there seems to be a glaring and baffling omission when it comes to the popularity of the game at present: the total dearth of tie-in, written fiction. Since 2018, a grand total of three novels based on the Dungeons and Dragons brand have been published: Timeless, Boundless and Relentless, all by R.A. Salvatore. 2017 was the first year since 1983 in which no D&D fiction was published at all. There are currently no scheduled D&D novels for 2021 or onwards.

This state of affairs is bizarre, all the moreso because it wasn’t too long ago that D&D fiction was being produced and selling at a rate completely at odds with the game’s then low-profile.

The cover art for Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984), the very first novel published by TSR, Inc.

As of next month, 623 novels and anthologies* will have been published with the Dungeons and Dragons logo on it or set in one of the D&D worlds. The first, Andre Norton’s Quag Keep (1978), was published by DAW, but almost all of the rest were published by the D&D game creators themselves, TSR from 1984 to 1997 and then Wizards of the Coast from 1997 to 2016. The last three books by RA Salvatore have been published by HarperCollins, under licence from Wizards (and their parent company, Hasbro).

The D&D line’s biggest performer is easily R.A. “Bob” Salvatore, who started writing for the line with his Forgotten Realms novel The Crystal Shard, published in January 1988 as just the second book in that franchise. Salvatore’s signature character, the honourable dark elf ranger Drizzt Do’Urden, has gone on to become arguably the single most famous and popular Dungeons and Dragons character of them all, and the books starring Drizzt or spinning off from them (now totalling 38) have sold over 30 million copies worldwide. That’s more than every single D&D sourcebook, campaign setting and adventure since 1978, combined (estimated by WotC at around 20 million). Salvatore’s sales performance makes him one of the biggest-selling living fantasy authors, behind only Terry Brooks, George R.R. Martin and J.K. Rowling (add J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Robert Jordan and Terry Pratchett for deceased fantasy authors, and the still-living Stephen King if you count his brand of horror-fantasy) and ahead of the likes of Raymond E. Feist, Terry Goodkind and, at this time of writing, Brandon Sanderson (although Sanderson is catching up like a freight train).

Salvatore’s success puts him in a different league to any of the other authors in the same line. The second-biggest-selling Forgotten Realms novelist seems to be the creator of the setting himself, Ed Greenwood, who had definitively sold 3 million books by a decade or so ago (including a million of his debut, Spellfire, by itself) and probably a couple of million more since then. Paul S. Kemp, Elaine Cunningham and Troy Denning all seem to have sold at least a million books apiece in the setting as well. But, although strong, that’s in a completely different league to Salvatore, who remains the outlier.

In the wider world of Dungeons and Dragons fiction, Salvatore’s only competition comes from the team of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the co-authors and co-creators (with several others) of the Dragonlance Saga. Weis and Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles Trilogy had sold 4 million copies before the end of the 1980s, making it one of the most successful epic fantasy series of the decade, and their total sales since then (including a dozen or so additional books) are on the order of 25 million.

The non-Weis and Hickman Dragonlance books have not sold anywhere near as many copies, but they have done cumulatively quite well. In total, it is estimated that approximately 100 million Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels have been sold since the lines began in 1984 and 1987 respectively.

These aren’t chump figures, and they compare very well to, say, Star Wars tie-in fiction (which has sold an estimated 120 million copies or so, in a vastly better-known franchise) and may even rival Star Trek novel sales, and are certainly far ahead of the sales of the likes of, say, Doctor Who. It’s an impressive achievement which brings us back to our original question: why isn’t more Dungeons and Dragons fiction being created?

The success of D&D fiction is not particularly tied to that of the roleplaying game; the majority of people who’ve read a Salvatore novel have probably never played a game of Dungeons and Dragons in their life, and the books all stand alone with no knowledge of the game needed to enjoy them. That in itself may be part of the problem: relatively few people are reading Star Wars novels or Star Trek books who don’t also watch the films or TV shows, but the same is not true of D&D. The cross-pollination between the novels and the game is, at least historically, limited. We can see that when D&D was selling very poorly in the late 1990s, shifting only a few hundred copies of the latest sourcebook, but the latest R.A. Salvatore hardcover was debuting on the New York Times bestseller list. Similarly, when the 4th Edition of D&D crashed and burned in sales (after a successful initial launch in 2008, but then a swift and ignominious outclassing by the rival Pathfinder RPG, which launched with a D&D-compatible and more popular rules set), the novels continued to sell quite well for years afterwards.

When the 5th Edition of D&D launched in 2014, the fiction lines were still running. There was a cross-brand, multimedia story event called The Sundering, which spanned several ongoing Forgotten Realms series with several of the setting’s most popular authors (including Salvatore, Greenwood, Kemp, Denning and successful relative newcomer Erin M. Evans), which seemed to do well. However, immediately after the Sundering concluded, the previous high output of the Wizards of the Coast fiction department seemed to drop. R.A. Salvatore published five more books, Ed Greenwood two and Erin Evans three, and absolutely none of the enormous battery of other authors on hand released any more books. All of the published books were additions to ongoing series, indicating that they were being released to fulfil contracts and run those contracts out. The low print runs for Erin Evans’ Brimstone Angels novels (hence the insane prices they are currently commanding on eBay) seems to indicate that this was the case.

With the release of Erin Evans’ The Devil You Know in December 2016, Wizards of the Coast shut down its book imprint, at least for new submissions. In fact, Hasbro terminated its entire fiction acquiring role outright. Other book lines, such as the perennially popular Magic: The Gathering novel series, were also shut down for new authors. The divisions would still exist, but only to reprint and pump out legacy sales (such as the excellently-performing omnibuses of Drizzt Do’Urden adventures).

This seemed counter-intuitive and baffling, but some logic soon emerged. The Dungeons & Dragons and Magic lines had not been discontinued, but they’d been moved to other publishing houses: HarperCollins picked up the Dungeons and Dragons/Forgotten Realms licence and announced a new trilogy contract with R.A. Salvatore. Del Rey announced a licencing deal for Magic: The Gathering. Interestingly, Wizards of the Coast and Del Rey had also lined up well-known, more mainstream fantasy authors to continue the Magic line: Brandon Sanderson, Kate Elliott, Django Wexler and Greg Weisman (although several of these would be online-only publications).

HarperCollins has so far not announced any plans for additional D&D or Forgotten Realms novels beyond Relentless by Salvatore (which is released at the end of July), which given the nuclear-hot status of D&D at the moment feels weird. I do think it’s likely that there will be more books from Salvatore and probably a new trilogy is deal is being discussed now. Certainly, many of the other, well-established D&D authors stand ready to write more fiction but they haven’t even had meetings with HarperCollins to that end.

I suspect the main problem here is licensing: Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast in 1999 and let them do their own thing for quite some time, but around a decade ago, in the wake of the mega-success of the Transformers movies, instituted a new corporate policy which insisted on maximum return on any deal. In particular, all Hasbro-owned properties would be required to generate a rock bottom amount (rumoured to be $15 million) in profit in any given year, otherwise they would be temporarily retired for several years before being brought back in a blaze of publicity. This meant that a product line could be successful at what Hasbro would consider a low level – generating several million in profits per year – but still not be doing enough for Hasbro to consider it worthwhile. Hasbro also wanted to make its own operations leaner and more efficient, focusing on its core brands of toys and games. Publishing was a tangent and they decided to shut it down so they didn’t have to bother with it and could just outsource licences to third party publishers.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but it does create a significant entry barrier. If the licencing fee is high enough, then the publisher will become increasingly risk-averse. For an author like R.A. Salvatore, who is guaranteed to sell at least a million copies of their latest novel no matter what, that’s not a problem as their sales will easily make up for the lost revenue to the licence fee. For even a very solid performer like Ed Greenwood or Paul Kemp, whose latest book is still guaranteed to sell at least a couple of hundred thousand, the fee might make the prospect of publishing the book riskier. For authors further down the sales hierarchy, it actually becomes prohibitive.

If these books were still being published in-house, then the licencing fee wouldn’t exist: the profits would go to Wizards and thus Hasbro regardless, so even relatively low-selling authors who were still breaking even were still worth publishing, because it puts books on the shelves, keeps the brand visible etc, and that mass accumulation of sales can drive an overall strong sales performance. But since Wizards and Hasbro can’t be bothered with that approach, it’s not happening.

The Grand History of the Realms details some 38,000 years of history of the Forgotten Realms setting, highlighting its immense attention to detail and the size of its background lore, seen as both a benefit and a drawback.

I Fought the Lore and the Lore Won

I suspect there is another problem, much more specific to the Forgotten Realms setting. Created by Ed Greenwood in 1967, converted for use for his home Dungeons & Dragons campaign in 1976, converted as a background to Dragon magazine articles in 1978 and finally officially published in 1987, the Forgotten Realms holds a strong claim to being the most detailed, continuously-in-print and popular shared fantasy world ever created. This has manifested through approximately 243 dedicated gaming products (boxed sets, supplements, adventures, sourcebooks and adventure paths), 292 books, 53 video games and thousands of magazine and online articles and in-depth discussions on dedicated message boards.

This has resulted in a robustly-detailed world. The Forgotten Realms Wiki has 32,000 entries and is not still not remotely complete. Although the central tenet of Forgotten Realms has always been "make the world your own," including or ignoring elements of the canon as you choose, the setting did gain a - somewhat unfair - reputation for being impenetrable to newcomers or casual fans by the end of D&D's third edition in 2008.

This resulted in the highly controversial decision to nuke the setting. The version of Forgotten Realms that was released for the 4th Edition of D&D in 2008 moved the timeline one hundred years into the future - promptly killing every single human, non-magically-enhanced character in the setting - and saw the Realms effectively destroyed by a magical cataclysm known as the Spellplague, with the setting now adopting a post-apocalyptic tone. Needless to say, fans were utterly furious and most pointblank ignored the changes. The hope that the "factory reset" of the setting would bring in new fans also failed to materialise. The rival Pathfinder game stole D&D's thunder and its own setting of Golarion became an effective replacement for the Realms as the "default" D&D-style fantasy world for several years.

The success of D&D 5th Edition helped save the Realms. The Sundering event saw a second "factory reset" of the Realms, restoring the pre-Spellplague (and in fact pre-3rd Edition, in several key respects) version of the setting whilst maintaining the time jump. The 5th Edition of the setting thus maintains the rich backstory of the setting whilst not alienating the fans who came on board in more recent years. The absence of new novels is also helpful in not adding to the mountain of lore the setting has built up, allowing fans to get a better handle on the settle over a wider period of time.

Long-term fans of the setting note that the rich depth of the setting in terms of backstory and characters is one of its key appeals, and not developing that further through fiction is doing far more to damage the setting's appeal than inaction is in making it more popular.

The cover of Relentless, only the third D&D novel published since the end of 2016.

So, what does the future hold for D&D novels?

I suspect in the near future we will see confirmation of a new R.A. Salvatore deal. I also suspect that there are negotiations going on for relatively “big name” fantasy authors to perhaps line up a D&D novel or three (Brandon Sanderson would be a shoe-in, especially after his recent Magic: The Gathering novella, but he’s way too busy with his own Cosmere setting). One of the biggest factors in D&D’s current success has been the success of YouTube web series like Critical Role, and I suspect if Matt Mercer and a novelist teamed up to write a novel set in the world of Exandria, that deal would be done pretty quickly. I also suspect that if Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman came to Wizards of the Coast with a new Dragonlance proposal, that would also be snapped up pretty quickly.

Otherwise I think we’ll be seeing the licence-holder being quite cautious going forwards. There could be a tie-in novel for the D&D movie due in 2022, but beyond that things may depend on the success of the film. If it is huge, that could propel things forward on other fronts. I suspect, though, the days of 15-20 novels being published a year may be in the past, with a much higher barrier for entry in the future, unless Wizards of the Coast take the publishing arm back in-house. Given that D&D is, at heart, a series of rulebooks, it’s a bit weird that the fiction publishing arm was shuttered anyway.

What is clear is that there is an enormous audience out there for Dungeons and Dragons-branded fiction, whether set in one of the established worlds or a new one, and the current D&D licence-holders are leaving a lot of money on the table by continuing to ignore them.


* The count is currently 292 books in the Forgotten Realms line, 203 in the Dragonlance franchise, 40 in Eberron, 24 in Ravenloft, 16 in Dark Sun, 13 in Greyhawk, 10 in Mystara, 7 in Nentir Vale and 6 apiece for Birthright, Planescape and Spelljammer.

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More WILD CARDS

Tor.com has started a reread of the Wild Cards book series created by George R.R. Martin. The reread is being handled and written by a friend of mine and long-term fan of the series, Katie, and promises to be an excellent recap of the series and a way for new readers to jump on board. Some of the Wild Cards writing team, such as Walter Jon Williams and Jon J. Miller, are also jumping on board in the comments.

Meanwhile, Martin has confirmed that Tor Books have picked up the rights for additional books in the series. The next three books in the series proper, Mississippi Roll, Low Chicago and Texas Hold 'Em, will be released over the next year or two. At the same time Tor Books will re-release Books 8 through 12 of the original series (One-Eyed Jacks, Jokertown Shuffle, Double Solitaire, Dealer's Choice and Turn of the Cards). Significantly, this will bring the entire twelve-volume Bantam Books stretch of the series back in publication for the first time in almost thirty years.

There will be also be four brand-new books. Full House will be a full-on short story collection, collecting together short fiction that has been published on the Tor website over the previous few years along with some original stories. Following on from this will be three new books, comprising an original full-length novel, a new book set in space and another set in Britain.

Unfortunately, it appears that British fans may be out of luck in hoping for a complete reprint of the series. Gollancz have apparently declined to buy the rights to any of the new books or reprint any more of the original series, leaving it incomplete after the first seven volumes and then the later six (18-23). HarperCollins Voyager (who publish A Song of Ice and Fire) will instead publish the six new books (and perhaps Full House). The fate of the intervening volumes of the series in the UK remains unclear.

But back to the good news, Wild Cards co-editor Melinda Snodgrass has provided a detailed update on where she and the team at Universal are at with their planned TV adaptation of the franchise. Good progress has been made and hopefully we'll see a greenlight on that soon.

GRRM on THE WINDS OF WINTER

George R.R. Martin has broken his year-long radio silence on The Winds of Winter to confirm that he hopes to release the book in 2017.

Martin cautions that he had hoped to release the book in 2016, prior to Season 6 of Game of Thrones debuting in April and clearly failed to hit that deadline, and makes no guarantees that the book will be out this year. However, it is his current aspiration.

The previous book in the series, A Dance with Dragons, was released in July 2011, itself five years and nine months after the previous volume, A Feast for Crows. The Winds of Winter will break this record if it is not released by April, which does not seem likely at this stage. Publication before Game of Thrones begins its seventh and penultimate season in late June 2017 also seems a little ambitious (but not completely impossible).

The turn-around from hand-in to publication for the novel will be around three months. To get the book out before 2017 ends, Martin will have to turn the manuscript in around August of this year.

Martin declined to provide a page count update for the novel. However, in January 2016 he confirmed that he had completed hundreds of manuscript pages and dozens of chapters. The Winds of Winter is expected to approach the size of A Dance with Dragons and A Storm of Swords, which both had over 70 chapters and 1,500 manuscript pages.

A Song of Ice and Frustration: Fictitious Release Dates & Non-linear Writing for THE WINDS OF WINTER

Amazon France have caused consternation by giving their pre-order page for The Winds of Winter a new release date: 9 March 2017. As is predictable, the fans have gone wild and George R.R. Martin's publishers have issued a statement shooting down the date as fictitious.

This isn't the first time this has happened. When A Feast for Crows was published in 2005 and Martin (highly erroneously) announced that A Dance with Dragons would follow a year later, Amazon.com put a placeholder date for the latter book as 2008. The idea was that the publisher would unveil the real date and they'd bring the date up to the correct one. They weren't expecting the book to be that late and forgot to change it, resulting in confusion and then anger in less net-savvy fans when 2008 came and went without the book being released. Responding to fan anger and complaints from the publishers Amazon changed the release date...to 2032, suggesting either a great sense of humour or perhaps going overboard on contingency planning (the book was eventually released in 2011).

These issues could be avoided if Amazon could have simply put a "TBC" release date on books, but for some reason back then they couldn't. Learning their lesson, neither Amazon US nor UK has a page for The Winds of Winter at all. Obviously Amazon France hasn't learned from their example.

At this point it may be of value to look into why it takes such an immense amount of time for Martin to write these novels.

What the manuscript of A Dance with Dragons looked like in its raw form, all 1,520 A4 pages of it.

These are big books

The average novel, when we consider all genres, is between 80,000 and 100,000 words in length (which translates to roughly 300-350 pages in paperback, depending on formatting) and takes about a year to write. Science fiction and fantasy novels are usually longer, with 200,000 words (600-700 pages in paperback) taking two to three years not being unusual. The shortest novel in A Song of Ice and Fire is 300,000 words long with the longest - A Storm of Swords and A Dance with Dragons - both being around 420,000 words each. Those novels come in at well north of 1,200 pages in paperback.

Obviously some writers can churn out big books very quickly: Brandon Sanderson writes his Stormlight Archive novels (which clock in at around 400,000 words exactly) in three to three and a half years each, Peter F. Hamilton produced the 450,000-word The Naked God in two years and Steven Erikson produced 3,116,000 words of The Malazan Book of the Fallen (not including the first novel, which he wrote many years earlier) in just over eleven years, averaging 283,000 words a year during that time. On the flipside some authors are considerably slower: Suzanna Clarke took ten years to write the 308,931 words of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell and J.R.R. Tolkien took ten years to write the 455,125 words of The Lord of the Rings (and, arguably, sixty years to produce the 130,000 words of The Silmarillion, although that was only a summary of the much greater amount of work he produced in that time).

Writing without an outline can result in marvellously naturalistic and unforced character arcs and plot turns. On the other hand, it can also result in...less serendipitous writing events.

They are not written in a linear fashion

Martin's writing process is non-linear and unplanned. He writes several chapters in a row from one character, switches to another, writes several chapters from them, switches to a third and so on. At certain points he'll switch back to a previously-written character, but will then realise that new story points he has created elsewhere will now require a thorough rewriting of previously-drafted chapters to reflect these changes. As the novel continues and gets larger, this butterfly effect can be considerable: a late plot decision executed in what ends up as Chapter 48 may entail the complete page-one rewrite of Chapters 3, 6 and 12, the partial rewriting of Chapters 18, 23 and 32, and the re-ordering of several other chapters.

The writing process for A Song of Ice and Fire bears more than a passing similarity to chaos theory. However, it is not unprecedented. J.R.R. Tolkien executed The Lord of the Rings in a similar fashion, describing it as "waves coming up the beach...each time the waves reach a little higher" after rewriting the opening four or five chapters of the novel at least four times to accommodate tonal changes (from something closer to The Hobbit to something darker) and character shifts (from using Bilbo's son "Bingo" as the protagonist to junking him and bringing in a new character called "Frodo").

Martin's non-linear writing style has been criticised and it has been suggested that he employ an outline. However, Martin has famously said that he distrusts outlines, feeling that they sap the narrative energy from writing. Stephen King, Tolkien and Robert Jordan have also disdained outlines and produced, between them, several of the biggest-selling, popular and enduring works of fantasy ever written, so he may be onto something.

That said, Robert Jordan did produce an outline whilst planning the final Wheel of Time novel to help focus him on bringing the story to a conclusion (which proved tragically beneficial when he was later diagnosed with a fatal blood disease), indicating that other fantasy authors have seen some value in changing up even their long-standing writing habits to increase writing efficiency and speed as their series reaches the wrapping-up phase.

In addition, Stephen King once experimented with using an outline in response to fan criticism that his improvised writing style often resulted in subpar endings. The result was The Dead Zone, a reasonably well-regarded book which has been adapted for the screen twice. However, King said he hated the experience and has never used an outline again.

George writing on The Machine.

Martin's computer is steam-powered

Okay, it isn't. But it is pretty old. George R.R. Martin writes his novels on WordStar 4.0, a word processing programme released in 1987. The PC he uses is of similar vintage. WordStar is a non-WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programme, like Microsoft Word, and requires the author to move around the cursor using the keyboard and enter lines of code to enact formatting such as bold or italics.

Martin has used this stuff to write all of his short stories and novels on since the late 1980s and is at this point institutionalised to its use. Still, although it's perhaps a little more labour-intensive to use such a system it's not that much slower. It's still a way of getting words on the screen. What might be a bit more work is outputting the chapters in a format that can be emailed so George's editor can read them on her more up-to-date computer in New York City. And of course there's what happens when a 30+ year old computer stops working, as happened during the writing of A Feast for Crows: a legacy PC engineer named Stephen Boucher saved the day and the novel was dedicated to him.

Update: At some point in the recent past, Martin stopped using his old 1980s vintage machine and switched to a modern PC running WordStar 4.0 in a DOS emulator.

Writing white-on-black is something that would drive me crazy, making me want to murder every single character I was writing...wait a sec.

To summarise, Martin's writing style does not permit easy estimations of when he will be finished, especially given the heavy overlap where chapters are moved from the end of one book into the start of the next. Given the numerous missed dates on A Dance with Dragons and the resulting insane levels of vitriol, Martin has decided not to issue any predictions for Winter at all. He's also, unlike during his work on Dragons, not issued any page or word counts, perhaps feeling that this could also be misleading and people would be reaching all sorts of wrong conclusions.

The Winds of Winter is not done as of today. Martin and his publishers will confirm when it is, and when the book will be published. Based on precedent, this will be between 3 and 5 months after its completion is confirmed.

Sales of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE pass 70 million on its 20th birthday

Worldwide sales of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series on which the Game of Thrones TV series is based, have passed 70 million.

Sales of A Song of Ice and Fire hit 58 million in April 2015, indicating that the series has sold an additional 12 million copies in just the last year. With no new novel released in that time, that is a remarkable achievement and a reflection of the success of both the books and the TV show helping drive sales.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of A Game of Thrones. It is also approximately 25 years since George R.R. Martin started writing the series and the sixteenth anniversary of the publication of A Storm of Swords (which I read on release, something I will forever be grateful for). I will be writing a more in-depth article on the anniversary shortly.

How do Martin's sales compare to other SF and fantasy authors? Quite favourably*:

JK Rowling: 450 million
Stephen King: 300 million
JRR Tolkien: 300 million
Stephanie Meyer: 250 million
Anne Rice: 136 million
CS Lewis: 120 million
Edgar Rice Burroughs: 100 million
Sir Arthur C. Clarke: 100 million
Suzanne Collins: 100 million
Andre Norton: 90 million
Sir Terry Pratchett: 85 million
Robert Jordan: 80 million
George R.R. Martin: 70 million


* Yes, this list is out of date. An update is in the planning.

Happy 20th Anniversary to A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE (more or less)

This year marks two important milestones for George R.R. Martin fans: the 20th anniversary of A Song of Ice and Fire appearing in print and the 25th anniversay of George starting to write the first book.

George started writing A Game of Thrones in the summer of 1991. The novel was published on 6 August 1996. However, that wasn't the first time any Song of Ice and Fire material appeared in print. That honour came three months earlier when his publishers started rolling out various excerpts and outtakes from the novel.

The first thing to appear was a sample booklet from HarperCollins Voyager, George's UK publishers. This booklet contained the first 124 pages from the novel (running up roughly to the end of the chapter where Robert tells Eddard about Daenerys's wedding) and was published separately in the UK for 99p (but now retails online for £150!). It was sold at bookstores across the country as a way of whetting the appetite for the book. My three local bookshops cunningly positioned the booklets next to the hardcover displays for the seventh Wheel of Time novel, which was released on 15 May 1996, to get some cross-series fantasy promotion going on.

In the United States, Bantam ran an excerpt in Asimov's Science Fiction in July 1996 (published in June). This excerpt was huge. Dubbed Blood of the Dragon, it contained all of the Daenerys chapters from A Game of Thrones assembled into one self-contained novella. Blood of the Dragon went on to win the Best Novella prize at the 1997 Hugo Awards, making this the only literary Hugo the series has received so far (Game of Thrones has won three for Best Dramatic Presentation, however). A Storm of Swords got the same treatment in 2000 when the Daenerys chapters were pulled out to form a novella called Path of the Dragon, although this didn't win a Hugo.

So there you go. Although the anniversary of A Game of Thrones itself isn't until August, when we'll see some fancy new editions hit the shelves and likely some more celebration of the fact, A Song of Ice and Fire has now been in print for more than twenty years.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 20

The majority of works that caused seismic shifts in the fantasy field did so almost overnight: Terry Pratchett became a massive bestseller within just a couple of years of his first Discworld novel being published. Robert Jordan's books hit the bestseller lists almost instantly, as did Terry Brooks's. Tolkien took a decade or so, but only due to limited publicity and no paperback editions being available for The Lord of the Rings until the mid-1960s. But other works took a bit longer to really make their mark felt.

The HarperCollins Voyager preview booklet of A Game of Thrones, the first-officially available chunk of A Song of Ice and Fire. Released circa May/June 1996.

A Trilogy in [some] Parts

George Raymond Richard Martin (born in 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey) was a very well-known writer in science fiction and horror in the early 1990s. He published his first short story in 1971, won his first (of five, to date) Hugo Award in 1975 and released his first novel in 1977. His 1980 short story Sandkings and his 1982 vampire novel, Fevre Dream, were both hugely critically acclaimed and successful. However, his 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag crashed and burned spectacularly in terms of sales. He put his writing career on hold, but a meeting with a producer interested in making a film of The Armageddon Rag led to a new career in Los Angeles. He worked on the first two seasons of the relaunched Twilight Zone before switching to becoming a writer, script editor and producer on Beauty and the Beast. In 1987 his short story Nightflyers was also adapted for film.

Beauty and the Beast ended, slightly controversially, in 1990 after the writers had killed off lead character Catherine, played by Linda Hamilton. This led to the conclusion that while even the Terminator couldn't kill Linda Hamilton, George R.R. Martin could (slightly erroneously, as the show's producer actually had to make the final call on how to writer her out). Ratings dropped, the fans got angry and the show had to be shut down. Back home in Santa Fe, Martin began writing a science fiction novel called Avalon. His prose writer career had been revived by the release of several successful short fiction collections and a new "fixup" novel (several short stories combined into a cohesive narrative) called Tuf Voyaging. Starting in 1987, Martin had also begun editing the Wild Cards series of collaborative superhero anthologies, which soon proved extremely successful.

After several months of working on Avalon, in the summer of 1991, Martin suddenly got the idea for a scene in which a young boy goes with his father to watch a deserter being beheaded, after which he finds some direwolf pups in the snow. This scene led to others, and soon the SF novel was forgotten. Martin produced over 100 pages and a map into the fantasy story before he was called back to Hollywood to work on a TV project called Doorways, which never made it to the screen. Returning to the fantasy story after almost two years away, Martin realised he was still full of ideas and enthusiasm for it. He had a title in mind: A Song of Ice and Fire, a trilogy consisting of the novels A Game of Thrones, A Dance with Dragons and The Winds of Winter.

That plan didn't long survive contact with the word processor.

A first edition of A Game of Thrones on sale at the 2014 Worldcon.

A Storm of Sales

Martin sold his fantasy "trilogy" to American and British publishers in 1994, for quite impressive sums of money. Martin ending his long exile from writing novels was in itself exciting, but publishers were almost giddy at the prospect of a respected, long-standing writer trying his hand at fantasy, not to mention that the sample chapters and outline were compelling. Both sides of the Atlantic deployed similar strategies to get fantasy fans and the book-buyers for the stores excited. In the United States all of the chapters from the POV of Daenerys Targaryen were pulled out and assembled into a stand-alone novella called Blood of the Dragon. This novella won the first Hugo Award for the series in 1997. In the UK HarperCollins simply pulled out the first 100 pages or so of the novel and published them as a stand-alone novella.

A Game of Thrones was published in August 1996, but the early marketing work didn't seem to have paid off. The book sold okay, but not as much as either publisher had hoped. There had been plenty of positive reviews, but also a few that had been more mixed or negative. In the UK, the biggest genre magazine SFX published a notoriously negative review which, at a time when the Internet and its formidable powers of book recommendations were still in their infancy, seemed to drive off at least some prospective buyers. In America the problem was more down to an oversaturated market and the underwhelming (if flashy) cover design.

Fortunately, the publishers had faith in the book. In the States they relaunched it with a new cover design and pulled in some heavy-weight blurbs. Anne McCaffrey, Janny Wurts, Katharine Kerr and Raymond E. Feist (among others) gave really strong soundbites but it was the ringing endorsement of Robert Jordan which had the biggest impact. Sales rose sharply, accompanied by rapidly-spreading word of mouth and the help of the nascent Internet.

Sales improved again after Robert Silverberg published Legends, an anthology featuring new short stories set in the signature worlds of major fantasy writers. Martin contributed a story called The Hedge Knight. Readers picked up the anthology for the Terry Pratchett, Robert Jordan or Stephen King contribution, read Martin's, and then picked up the main novels as a result. Combined with growing word of mouth and stronger reviews (SFX this time gave a much most positive review), these factors helped push A Clash of Kings onto the lower rungs of the bestseller lists. In 2000 A Storm of Swords debuted at #11, before A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons nailed the top spot.

And introducing Ser Not-Appearing-In-The-Book

A Dance of Delays

The writing of the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire proceeded relatively smoothly. The publication dates (August 1996, October 1998 and July 2000) were quite reasonable, sales rose steadily and the critical acclaim only got bigger with each new novel. However, Martin was struggling with structural issues behind the scenes. He'd started the series with multiple characters in the age range of 3 to 14, planning for each novel to span months or years so they would grow up relatively quickly. But by the end of the third novel less than two years had passed and the characters were still a long way from adulthood.

Whilst writing the third volume in the series, he hit upon an alternate plan: he would bench the story for five years and pick up in Book 4 with all of the "training montages" and awkward growing up material having happened completely off-screen, allowing him to rejoin the narrative and get things moving towards a grand conclusion. In the event this proved unworkable, leading to a massive over reliance on flashbacks and exposition that bogged the novel down. Instead, he jettisoned that material and rewrote the book so it started immediately after A Storm of Swords. Pursuing this blind alley, backing up and starting again cost him over a year's work on the novel. The decision to push stories in the Iron Islands and Dorne to prominence also complicated events. In the end, the fourth book grew to such a huge size and went so far over deadline that drastic action was required.

At the suggestion of his friend (and later formidable fantasy talent in his own right) Daniel Abraham, Martin chopped the story in half by location. The characters in the south of Westeros had their stories told in A Feast for Crows, published in October 2005, and the remaining characters would appear in A Dance with Dragons, to follow, hopefully, a year later.

In event, Dragons was not published until July 2011 after additional structural nightmares, constant rewrites and a whole lot of complaining about it online.

"Let's get out of here."

"Where are we going?"

"Book Six."

A Feast for Viewers

By the time A Feast for Crows was published, worldwide sales of the series are guesstimated to have reached about 5 million. The series was big and the critical acclaim was strong, enough for Martin's Hollywood agent to make attempts to attract the interest of television and film producers. David Benioff, the toast of Hollywood for his fast and skilled scriptwork, was sent the novels and was hooked early on. So was his friend Dan Weiss, then working on the aborted Halo movie. They joined forces and suggested to Martin that they take the project to Martin's favourite TV network, HBO, the creators of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood and Rome.

The project was huge and ambitious, and HBO hesitated over the project, not sure if it was "them". They tentatively took it on, but then grew in confidence when another adaptation of books outside of their usual comfort zone, with the vampire drama True Blood, paid off handsomely. Even though it was almost sunk several times (by the 2007-08 Hollywood Writer's Strike and then a confusing and problematic pilot), the TV adaptation, under the title Game of Thrones finally hit the screens in April 2011 to almost-instant acclaim.

The success of the TV show boosted the sales of the novels by a staggering degree. Over nine million copies of the books were sold in 2011-12 alone. By the end of 2015, sales of the series had passed 60 million. Although still somewhat less than The Wheel of Time, the much smaller number of novels in the series meant that A Song of Ice and Fire has now beaten every other fantasy series by a living writer (bar only J.K. Rowling) in terms of actual readers. Whilst gratifying to Martin, this also meant that the number of readers excitedly waiting for the sixth and (planned) penultimate novel in the series, The Winds of Winter, had grown massively and exponentially. However, the rapid production schedule for the TV series also meant that planned plot points for later novels had to appear on TV as early as the fifth season, leading some to fear that the show would comprehensively spoil the books before the books could ever be finished.

A Song of Ice and Fire is the most popular epic fantasy series of the modern age, despite its incomplete status and lengthy between-volume gaps. But how the story affected people and the impact it had on the direction of the genre is a slightly different story.

A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS is released

Bantam (in the USA) and HarperCollins Voyager (in the UK) released A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms today.

This book is a collection of George R.R. Martin's three Dunk and Egg novellas, short novels spanning a period of time beginning eighty-nine years before the events of A Game of Thrones and expected to conclude approximately fifty years later. The series chronicles the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall, a hedge knight who rises from obscurity to great fame and high office, and his squire "Egg", who is more than he seems.

The collection consists of The Hedge Knight (1998), The Sworn Sword (2002) and The Mystery Knight (2010). Martin is working on the fourth story in the series, which has the working (but not final) title of The She-Wolves of Winterfell, but he decided some time ago to rework the story. It will not be released until after The Winds of Winter comes out. A working title of the planned fifth story in the series, The Village Hero, has also been disclosed. Martin has said there may be up to a dozen of these stories in total. Existing Song of Ice and Fire characters have appeared in the Dunk and Egg books, such as a very young Walder Frey, whilst Aemon Targaryen has been mentioned, but as the novellas progress and get closer to the present other characters are likely to appear. Fan speculation is high that the final story will take place at Summerhall on the fateful night of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen's birth.

Of course, in the meantime Martin does have two rather large novels to finish.

Half a War by Joe Abercrombie

Father Yarvi has brokered an unlikely peace between the formerly warring kingdoms of Gettland and Vansterland, bringing them together to stand against the forces of the High King. Still tremendously outnumbered, Yarvi is forced to rely on an untested young queen to help lead the way to victory and a last stand at the fortress of Bail's Point.

Half a War concludes the Shattered Sea trilogy by Joe Abercrombie, an experiment by the British author to write shorter novels aimed at a more general audience. How successful that experiment has been is quite debatable - the tone and feeling of the trilogy is really not far removed from his First Law universe novels - but it's certainly resulted in the impressive delivering of three very decent novels in less than eighteen months.

As with the previous book, Half a War revolves around three main POV characters: Skara, the young and untested queen of Throvenland; Raith, the bloodthirsty Vansterland warrior made into Skara's reluctant bodyguard; and Koll, the woodcarver turned minister-in-training who finds himself increasingly serving as Yarvi's conscience as Yarvi is forced into more and more desperate acts to try to save his people. Previous POV characters become secondary characters in this novel, which is both clever (showing how others see them) and frustrating, particularly when they don't all survive.

This is a war story, with the great fortress of Bail's Point changing hands as the fortunes of the conflict ebb and flow. Abercrombie has done big war stories and battle narratives before and does a good job of depicting the conflict here, helped by a map of Bail's Point. However, the limited POV structure means that a great deal of the details of the conflict are missing. This is effective in giving us a feel of the fog of war, with confusion and misinformation lurking everywhere, but it does occasionally make the conflict feel murkier than it should.

Abercrombie's razor-sharp characterisation is on top form here, with Skara developing believably into a ruler from humble beginnings and secondary characters like Blue Jenner and King Uthil getting outstanding and memorable moments. However, it's Father Yarvi who develops most fascinatingly in this novel. Yarvi's ruthlessness was on display in the second book, but in this one it pushes him into more and more dangerous decisions that even shock his allies. The development of Koll as his moral weathervane is nicely done; without Koll, it may be that Yarvi would have become another version of Bayaz from the First Law books (i.e. Unrepentant Amoral Bastard Gandalf). As it stands he comes pretty damn close, and it's likely any future Shattered Sea books will have to deal with the fallout from his actions.

Half a War (****) closes the Shattered Sea trilogy in style, with a war story that prioritises the characters over the action and ends well by not pulling a single punch. The novel is available in the UK and USA now.

A Song of Facts and Figures: A Dance with Dragons

A Dance with Dragons

Writing Period: Late 2000-May 2011

Originally Published: 12 July 2011

Word Count: 422,000

Manuscript Page Count: 1,510

Hardcover Page Count: 1017

Paperback Page Count: 1152 (US one-volume), 1184 (UK two-volume)

Chapters: 73

POV Characters: 16 + Prologue + Epilogue

"The last one was a bitch. This one was three bitches and a bastard."

As his afterword to A Dance with Dragons indicates, George R.R. Martin did not hugely enjoy writing this novel. Originally envisaged "merely" as the flipside of A Feast for Crows and coming out a year or so later, the novel eventually grew much larger (half again the length of Crows) and came out a lot later (five years and nine months), to the annoyance of both the author and many readers.

The writing process for Dragons was torturous. Whilst Martin had 500 manuscript pages left over from A Feast for Crows (and indeed, in a different format, the "post-gap" version of Crows/Dragons), the process of structuring the sequel so it made sense and covered all the ground it needed to proved vastly more complex than first thought. The "promotion" of the mini-POV characters from Crows meant that Martin had a much larger cast of central characters to manage. His decision to bring the novel past the timeframe of Crows and revisit some of those characters later in the novel also introduced difficulties. But most damaging of all was the so-called "Meereenese Knot", a problem caused by different characters arriving in the city of Meereen and impacting on the story of Daenerys Tagaryen in different ways. Martin tilted at this problem numerous times across many months before finally resolving it through the introduction of Ser Barristan Selmy as a POV character. At another stage a conceptual rethink meant rewriting all of Jon Snow's chapters.

The book also had other issues stemming from where it fell in the storyline of the overall series. Originally, A Dance with Dragons was planned to be the middle volume of A Song of Ice and Fire when it was a trilogy and it would have focused heavily on Daenerys and her eventual invasion of the Seven Kingdoms. When the series was expanded to six volumes, Dragons became the fourth book, happening after the infamous "five year gap", and would have also covered political intrigue in Meereen. However, the introduction and expansion of numerous other storylines and characters meant that Dragons would cover less ground than originally envisaged: at the end of the novel, Daenerys's invasion of Westeros still seems a way off, with numerous plot stands in and around Slaver's Bay requiring resolution before she can move on.

A Dance with Dragons was also a book written in the full glare of public interest. Every word that Martin uttered for six years was analysed for hidden meanings or conspiracies. Every holiday or trip that Martin took away from the keyboard was carefully monitored. Each update provided by the author was used to second-guess what he was doing and how. Controversy surrounded the writing of the book to such a degree that when it was done and the author had commenced work on the sequel, The Winds of Winter, he went into lockdown and refused to even talk about its progress. A Dance with Dragons and the subsequent success of the book and TV series marked a notable change in the author's willingness to engage with his readers and provide hard updates on progress on the series.

A Surge of Sales
A Song of Ice and Fire took a while to be a success. A Game of Thrones performed disappointingly in hardcover in the States, with sales not picking up until its paperback publication a year later. The UK edition, featuring cover quotes by the likes of Robert Jordan and trailed by a preview novella released several months earlier, apparently did better. The US paperback, which also included the cover quotes, saw a marked upturn in success. Strong word-of-mouth and positive reviews helped.

A Clash of Kings did well enough to hit the lower reaches of the New York Times bestseller list on release, but it was A Storm of Swords that really stood out for the first time. It hit #11 on the NYT list and sold well enough that it took two years for the paperback to come out in the States (a phenomenon repeated with the two subsequent books). The five-year wait for A Feast for Crows did not hurt the success of the series at all and the book hit #1 on the bestseller list on the day of release.

Between the release of Crows and Dragons it was announced (in 2007) that HBO was developing a TV series based on the books. Some TV critics picked up the books and began talking about them years before the TV series hit the screens. The result of this was a minor uptick in sales. Total sales for A Song of Ice and Fire prior to the TV series airing were never revealed, but guesstimates placed them in the region of approximately 5 million.

The success of Game of Thrones has changed that. An astonishing nine million copies of the books were sold in 2012 alone. Worldwide sales of the series have now passed 60 million. This puts Martin close to the sales of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (estimated at 80-90 million sales) and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (estimated at 85 million), both series with a much larger number of volumes. How much bigger the series can get remains to be seen, but with the HBO series likely to last at least another two years, it is likely that the books will continue to benefit.

A Song of Facts and Figures: A Feast for Crows

The original cover art for A Feast for Crows, by Stephen Youll. A few copies of the novel were actually printed with this artwork in place, and can command steep prices.

A Feast for Crows

Writing Period: Summer 2001-May 2005

Originally Published: 17 October 2005 (UK), 8 November 2005 (USA)

Word Count: 300,000

Manuscript Page Count: 1,063

Hardcover Page Count: 755

Paperback Page Count: 864 (US), 852 (current UK)

Chapters: 46

POV Characters: 12 + Prologue

When George R.R. Martin sat down to start writing A Dance with Dragons, then planned to be the fourth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, he imagined it was going to be fairly straightforward. It had taken him nine years to write the first three books in the series, but having just penned the massive A Storm of Swords in record time and seen it have a rapturous critical reception, he was highly motivated to finish the series off at a fast pace. When fans asked him when he thought the book would be on the shelves, he confidently said "Late 2002".

This didn't happen.

A Dance with Dragons was supposed to start five years after the events of A Storm of Swords. The young children characters would all be older, some of the chaotic events from the previous novels would have had time to have died away and some of the more (arguably) humdrum aspects of the story - characters travelling and learning - would happen off-page. It was a nice idea and worked well for some characters (Jon, Daenerys, Arya, Bran) but for others (Cersei, Brienne, Jaime) it didn't work at all. Martin found himself having to refer to events that had happened in the interim, sometimes filling out entire chapters with flashbacks to that interim period. For over a year he struggled with making this structure work and eventually gave up.

At Worldcon in August 2001, Martin announced that he had effectively scrapped 500 pages of manuscript he had written for A Dance with Dragons. Instead, he had started writing a new fourth book that would instead start immediately after the events of Swords. This book was entitled A Feast for Crows. In the event it would take a further three and a half years to finish the book (sort of) and more than four to bring it to the shelves.

The primary problem with Crows was that Martin was now "filling in the blanks" of the previous five-year gap for some characters, but other characters were now ready to move into the next phase of the storyline. In some cases it appears new material was created for them, in others it appears Martin simply got them going to where they'd have been after the abandoned gap. He also widened the cast, bringing in new characters in Dorne and expanding the POV roster to include previously-seen characters in the Iron Islands, but now raised to much greater prominence. At one point he planned an enormous (Robert Jordan-style) mega-prologue divided between all the Dornish and ironborn characters, but then changed his mind and split this up into more traditional chapters.

The original and unused UK cover art for Crows, by Jim Burns. Note that this was prepared a long time before the split, hence the presence of Jon Snow.

Martin wrote and wrote during this period, occasionally publishing sample chapters on his website or reading them at conventions. Three Daenerys Targaryen chapters were combined into a chapbook and given away at a fantasy convention. He also started using the web more, particularly the "Update" section on his website, to talk about progress on the book. Updates were given, the book was getting larger and larger, but still with no end in site. For some fans, the fact that they'd gotten three large books within four years of one another but had now had to wait for four and more for one was incomprehensible.

In early 2005, Martin reassessed his status. The book was huge, having topped 1,600 manuscript pages and heading northwards at a rate of knots. Some characters in the book had pretty much complete story arcs, such as Jaime, Cersei and Brienne. Others were incomplete, such as Arya. Others still (including the important central trio of Daenerys, Jon and Tyrion) only had a few chapters written for them. Martin and his publishers began discussing splitting the book into two volumes, with the second volume to follow on a year or so from the first. At first they debated doing this chronologically, but Martin found this unsatisfying as there were few good places where he could end the first half of the narrative.

Martin's friend and sometimes-collaborator Daniel Abraham (more recently famous for his role as one half of James S.A. Corey, the writing machine behind The Expanse SF series, as well as his own, excellent fantasy series The Long Price Quartet and The Dagger and the Coin) suggested an alternative scheme: splitting the book by geography, as the completed characters were mostly located in the south of Westeros and the incomplete ones were either in the distant North or on the eastern continent. Martin preferred this plan, noting he'd done something similar in his Wild Cards books (where one oversized volume had been split in two, between characters in New York City and others outside the city). In May 2005 he announced that the book was done, if somewhat faster and more abruptly than expected.

George R.R. Martin also made an announcement he later ruefully regretted: he had 500 manuscript pages now complete for the fifth volume (still to be called A Dance with Dragons) and this book would follow "a year later".

 

 The final US cover art for A Feast for Crows.

Cover Art

The explosive burst of sales between A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows - despite the gap, George R.R. Martin had overtaken Robin Hobb to become HarperCollins Voyager's most popular living author by the end of 2005 - had made both the UK and US publishers decide to rejacket the entire book series. This meant that early covers prepared for Crows in the same style as the first three books were now abandoned and new covers were prepared. These were more minimalist, with icons rather than characters. Long-term fans preferred the earlier style of cover, but the new covers did seem to attract more buyers during the long drought between Crows and Dragons, even before news of the TV series broke.

Randyll Tarly, Wielder of Heartsbane, Defeater of Robert Baratheon, Driver of the Van of Victory.

What Would Randyll Tarly Do?

During the writing of the Wild Cards shard-world anthology series, a very minor character showed up at a party, said "Where is the cheese?" and then died. Years later, George R.R. Martin would get still get fans asking about the character. He called this the "Boba Fett Effect", where a small, minor character with barely any lines shows up and somehow ends up being considered a cool badass. Early volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire featured this to some extent: Bronze Yohn Royce had (bewilderingly) a few fans from the second he was mentioned, as his name sounded cool. Almost disposable characters like Bronn turned out to be far more popular than first envisaged.

For A Feast for Crows, Martin felt confident he had repeated the trick by introducing a new, lethal and enigmatically cool character who was bad, mad and dangerous to know. He may even had been right, if the character hadn't been Darkstar ("For I Am of the Night"). Darkstar turned out to be an underwhelming damp squib, represented in fan art as an edgy wannabe teenager trying to hang out with the cool crowd and not cutting it.

Instead, being contrary bastards at the best of times, Martin's fans in the Brotherhood Without Banners decided that the true hero of A Song of Ice and Fire was Randyll Tarly, "The Best Father in Westeros." It was argued that by forcing his son Samwell to go to the Wall, he had made him man up and eventually get into a position to save Westeros entirely from the Others. He was "Tough, but fair". He was described as the best general in Westeros and, commanding the "Tyrell van" had defeated Robert Baratheon at the Battle of Ashford. Cue fan art showing a Ford transit van trundling onto the battlefield and Randyll Tarly defeating Robert's entire army single-handedly. And so forth.

The Randyll Tarly meme eventually died down (to the bemused relief of George) but with news that he may appear in Season 6 of Game of Thrones spurring increasingly badass casting suggestions (James Purefoy and Ray Stevenson leading the charge), it may yet return.

A Song of Facts and Figures: A Storm of Swords

A Storm of Swords

Writing Period: 1997/98-April 2000 (very approx.)

Originally Published: 8 August 2000 (UK), November 2000 (USA)

Word Count: 424,000

Manuscript Page Count: 1,521

Hardcover Page Count: 975

Paperback Page Count: 1008 (US one-volume), 1178 (UK two-volume)

Chapters: 82

POV Characters: 10 + Prologue + Epilogue

As with A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords was not supposed to exist in George R.R. Martin's original plan for A Song of Ice and Fire. The original plan was for a trilogy consisting of the civil war-focused A Game of Thrones, the Daenerys-focused A Dance with Dragons and the North-focused The Winds of Winter. The original Game of Thrones was expected to cover not just the set-up for the War of the Five Kings, but the full struggle itself, culminating in the Red Wedding.

During the writing, Martin discovered that this wasn't really working. In the event it took three books and almost 4,000 manuscript pages (rather than the 700-800 he'd originally thought) to get through this material. Of course, this was a much-expanded version of the story he'd originally conceived with numerous differences. These included expanding the cast of POV characters in every book (Swords adds Samwell Tarly and Jaime Lannister to the roster), covering perspectives such as the ironborn in more detail than originally planned and bringing in many small-but-popular bit-part players absent from the original outline, such as Bronn.

A Storm of Swords was - and remains - the longest book in the Song of Ice and Fire sequence, but it was almost certainly the fastest-written (although it's impossible to be sure due to the heavy overlap of writing between Swords and A Clash of Kings). When A Clash of Kings was completed, hundreds of pages were left over for A Storm of Swords, including (according to some reports) Tyrion Lannister's complete story arc for the latter. Martin wrote like a man possessed through Swords, reportedly even cramming in some work over Christmas 1999 to help get the thing done as fast as possible. Martin reported that the book was completed in April 2000 and it hit the shelves in the UK in August, although it was actually on some bookshelves in the last week of July. For such a big book, this was a very rapid turn-around.

The reason for the sheer length of Swords was that Martin had made a crucial decision during the writing process. His original plan had been for weeks or even months to pass between chapters, so the characters would grow up a lot through the first book or two of the series. In the event this did not place, and between them the first three books in the series cover rather less than two years of time. Unhappy with the impact this had on some storylines (Martin, at least at one early stage, had considered a love triangle forming between a grown-up Arya, Jon and Tyrion as a plot point for the later books), Martin made a fateful and, in hindsight, unwise decision: there would be a "jump forwards" of about five years between A Storm of Swords and the fourth book in the series, A Dance with Dragons. As a result, A Storm of Swords had to conclude pretty much all of the storylines-in-progress so that Martin could pick them up again five years later, with either no cliffhangers or ones that could be easily explored later on in flashback. This required every story put in motion in A Game of Thrones to either be finished, cut off or plateaued by the end of Swords, put into stasis for five years until the next book could pick up on them.

On release, A Storm of Swords easily became the most critically-acclaimed book in the series. It was also the first volume to hit the New York Times bestseller list and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, a prize it missed out on to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. With the book completed, Martin set to work on A Dance with Dragons, unaware that this book was going to take slightly longer than its predecessors to get on the shelves.

A Plethora of Pages

A Storm of Swords is one of the largest fantasy novels ever published. The book is over 424,000 words in length and there are very few notable SF or fantasy books which are larger. Here are a few of them:

The Stand: Stephen King's apocalyptic SF/horror epic clocks in at 462,000 words.

The Naked God: The concluding volume of Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy is 469,000 words long, making it comfortably the largest space opera ever written.

The Lord of the Rings: J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy saga - the whole thing - tops out at 473,000 words.

To Green Angel Tower: The final book of Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy is a mind-boggling 520,000 words in length, making it one of the longest single novels in the English language. Memory, Sorrow and Thorn was a key influence on A Song of Ice and Fire, and several references to it can be found hidden in Martin's work.