The Wheel of Time series is a huge achievement, running somewhere in the vicinity of eight thousand pages. What were your thoughts when you began this epic?
Well, I thought, ‘I’m starting something rather large here, and I hope it works.’ It was not, when I began, as large as it is now—that is, I didn’t think it was going to be as many pages. I believed, at the start, that I could tell this story perhaps five volumes, maybe six…but I thought five. And I had worked very hard to talk my publisher into letting me do that. He was willing to accept it, but five volumes…that’s unusual; you don’t do that. It was a single volume, or a trilogy, was the acceptable thing. And I was also afraid that once I got into it that the earlier books would go out of print, because that happens. Hardcover goes out of print normally when the paperback comes out, and then after a few years the paperback goes out of print, and since I knew I was writing something that you had to start reading at the beginning—you must start this with The Eye of the World ; you cannot begin with the new book, with this latest book—I was afraid in the beginning that The Eye of the World would be out of print by the time the last book came out. But I managed to luck out. The Eye of the World has been in print continuously in hardcover for thirteen years now.
That in itself is certainly a huge achievement!
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