A Dance With Dragons , I’m hoping for an announcement soon.
I have a feeling we waiting for all the Harry Potter Hype to die down.
The show coming out has to be putting preasure on him.
A few months ago he said he only has 5 chapters left to finish. He’s almost DONE with it!
TL;DR I’m expecting the release date to come out some time around April.
A timeline for reference:
I turned in Towers of Midnight somewhere around July First. It was done being edited by mid-August. Book was on shelves first week of November. I’d guess this speed would be similar for ADWD. On our part, we’d done some editing along the way (as I was turning in chunks to the editor all through the first half of the year.)
GRRM might have been doing the same, though I’d suspect—in all honesty—GRRM is edited less than me, and needs editing less than I do. He’s been at this much longer, and he labors over his prose long enough to get things perfect before sending it in.
So…minimum turn-in-to-shelves will be three months. I’d honestly guess it at five or six here, as Tor would have rather taken that long, but felt they really wanted TofM out for the holiday season. Without the holiday worry, they’d have taken a few more months.
Are you… Brandon Sanderson?
Yes, I am. Also, I should have mentioned why this timeline is relevant. I sometimes forget that people don’t know the insides of publishing.
Normally, turn-in to on-shelf time for a book is at least a year, usually longer. One of my books ( Warbreaker ) was turned in (first draft) in mid 2006, and came out in mid 2009. That’s not uncommon.
With a book expected to sell more copies, you can push things faster. You pay overtime at the printers, you shove other projects aside for the designers and typesetters, that sort of thing. In addition, book scheduling has to do with ‘slots.’ You don’t want to self-compete too much, or compete with other books of the same nature from other publishers, so you make a schedule where you’re trying to give each book the best fighting chance of survival.
That means for a newer author, there may not be a ‘slot’ for your type of book until months and months after you turn in the book. However, a GRRM book will set the schedule for everyone else—they can drop it where they want, and shuffle everything else. However, a GRRM book will ALSO involve a lot more publicity and marketing—which means that once you pick a month, it’s much harder to change, as you are losing marketing momentum.
It makes them a little more hesitant to name a month on a book that has been floating for a while—but once they’re confident, it’s got a very good shot of not changing months. (Unless Grisham decides to release a book the same week after you’ve slotted, which happened with us on The Gathering Storm . So we bumped back a week.)
I should probably start doing a TL;DR with these posts of mine, eh?
GRRM might have been doing the same, though I’d suspect—in all honesty—GRRM is edited less than me, and needs editing less than I do. He’s been at this much longer, and he labors over his prose long enough to get things perfect before sending it in.
Did you ever meet GRRM in person?
I have met him, actually. Several times. One of the two years I lost the Campbell award (the year I lost to Scalzi, I think) GRRM lost the Hugo. At the party, we were chatting, and he told me about how he lost the Campbell to Jerry Pournelle the first year the award was offered. Then he gave me the ‘Hugo Loser’ badge he’d been given by someone and told me to wear it with pride. Extremely awesome person.
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