I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the release date timing, and how you guys decided when A Memory of Light would come out, and just all the decisions that went behind that.
The book was originally planned for November, but when we got down to it in January, when Brandon turned in first draft material, I saw to my horror that Tor was planning to publish on November 27th. Excuse me, that’s not really November—that’s after Thanksgiving—and it seemed to me kind of a not very wonderful date. We needed time for editing, and for Brandon to come to a later draft status on the book, and the more we thought about it it seemed pretty nuts to break Brandon’s back as well as ours to get a book ready for November 27th, which is sort of nothing…if if you’re looking for Christmas, you have to get the book into the stores before Thanksgiving. You really do, because things are so nuts with Black Friday that the staff isn’t actually gonna get stuff out of the back room in time, and thus we got to January, which seemed like a good bet. We would gain more time for the editing and to maintain the sanity of people at Tor Books and Peter and Maria and Alan, and moi . So somehow we arrived at January the 8th, which is a Tuesday, which it must be if you’re aiming for number one on the Times list, because of the way Times reporting happens, and it keeps it in the last month of the Year of the Dragon, which seemed like a really good thing to do.
Harriet, I think that a lot of us would agree that, take all the time you need to make us the best book possible, right? (applause)
If you reserve a copy of the book, that’s not so long to wait after Christmas day itself, and in the old way of counting, the twelve days of Christmas do exist. Christmas is the first day.
Well, I think our families probably appreciate the fact that we will not be reading this during Christmas. I for one know I’m going to have to take two weeks off.
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