George R.R. Martin’s publisher defends the long wait for The Winds of Winter

(Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

With the news that Game of Thrones will be ending in a couple of years with Season 8, there’s been renewed attention paid to author George R.R. Martin, as fans wonder if he’ll finish The Winds of Winter, the next book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, before then, or even before the upcoming seventh season of the show.

The last word from the man himself came on Monday, when he wrote a post on his Not a Blog about the upcoming illustrated edition of A Game of Thrones, the first book in his series. “[H]ere I am, twenty years later… still working on book six,” he wrote. “[A]nd no, sorry, I have no announcement to make on that front.” According to a new interview with Jane Johnson, the U.K. editor at HarperCollins’ Voyager division, Martin’s publishers don’t know any different. “I’m like Jon Snow,” she said. “I know nothing.”

Johnson did, however, try to put the wait in context, offering a few words of defense for the author. “It’s worth saying he’s written the best part of two million words of this series in the past 20 years,” she said. “So given the average length of a novel is around 100,000 words, that’s 20 novels in most writers’ worlds.”

At 1056 pages, the most recent book in Martin’s saga—A Dance with Dragons—was the longest one yet. If The Winds of Winter is going to be of similar or longer length, it could help explain the wait. Also, as long as it’s been since the last book was published back in July of 2011, we still haven’t waited as long as we did between the release of A Feast for Crows, which came out in November 2005, and that of Dance. If The Winds of Winter still isn’t out by March of 2017, then we can start to panic.

And so our watch continues.

h/t Newsweek, Independent