George R.R. Martin’s publisher reminisces about the early days of A Song of Ice And Fire

(Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

On Monday, August 1, A Song of Ice and Fire celebrated its 20-year anniversary—the first book in the series, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996. Looking back on that in a blog post, author George R.R. Martin described its reception as “Solid. But nothing spectacular. No bestseller lists.”

According to a recent article by The Guardian, 20 years later, more than 70 million copies of A Song of Ice and Fire books have been sold in 40 languages, far more than the modest initial projections.

The Guardian also has quotes from George R.R. Martin’s longtime publisher at HarperCollins in the UK, Jane Johnson. Although she wouldn’t provide guesses as to when the next book would be done, she reminisced about about the humble beginnings of A Song and Ice and Fire.

"The writing was sharp and witty and immediate; the range of characters – all full of life – was breathtaking, the world-building impressive, with all the dirty, gritty details that made you feel you were reading well-researched historical fiction rather than a made-up fantasy world. But most of all was that intoxicating tangle of sex and power."

Here, Johnson is describing how she felt when she read the first chapters of A Game of Thrones to her boss back in 1993. According to Johnson, the fantasy genre wasn’t as popular in the 90s as it is today, and readers had to go to the darkest corners of the book stores to find what they were looking for, even from an established fantasy author like Martin.

"We costed our offer on modest sales in our territories – expecting, or should I say, hoping for, something like 5,000 hardbacks and 50,000 paperbacks: at the time ambitious numbers for genre fiction. And it didn’t immediately look as if we’d achieve that. Initial sales were only moderately encouraging."

But word of mouth soon spread, and according to Johnson, it wasn’t long before A Game of Thrones had exceeded all of its original sales expectations. Martin wrote more books in the series, and they began to land on bestseller lists. Still, no one at HarperCollins expected A Song of Ice and Fire to become as big as it did.

Johnson also addressed the oft-discussed topic of Martin’s writing pace, and explained the series grew in size during the writing process. In the beginning, A Song of Ice and Fire was supposed to be a trilogy, but it’s not projected to end with seven books. “As Tolkien said about Lord of the Rings, ‘the tale grew in the telling.’”

"We were very happy when at that point George said he thought it would need to be four books instead of three. Around the time of writing [the fourth book] A Feast for Crows, when it was clear that the world and characters were going to need a lot more space for this hugely epic story to do itself justice, we realised it would need to be six, then seven books. George said that he feels seven’s a good number, and the right place to stop."

Seven is an especially appropriate number given the series’ mythology. There’s the Seven Kingdoms, the Faith of the Seven Gods…you get the idea. Johnson thinks that George R.R. Martin has written more than 1.8 million words in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, which she believes works out to around 18 ordinary books’ worth of published content. “Not bad going in 23 years of working on this series.” No, Jane Johnson, that’s not bad at all. Now we just need The Winds of Winter to be finished, and George can add to that total.