Jumping the gun, or over-organized? Amazon France is getting fans’ hopes up with a placeholder page for The Winds of Winter, complete with release date. Over on Reddit, they’re trying to tamp down on those hopes, but it may be to no avail. Between the ISBN registration last week, and now the discovery that one of the major Amazon shops has set up a page to take orders for The Winds of Winter, hopes may have already flown too high to bring down.
Not just a page, but a date: March 9th, 2017.
Now, before anyone gets their hopes so high they become airborne, note that Amazon regularly makes pages for upcoming expected releases, even when there has not been an announcement. And they regularly use placeholder dates on those pages, which have little to no basis in reality.
Furthermore, the other three big Amazon sites (Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, and Amazon US) do not have anything of the sort on their sites. So France could be jumping the gun. They could be over-organized. Maybe someone accidentally let that page go live, placeholder dates and all.
March 9th, 2017 is a very sensible placeholder date, too, assuming an end-of-2016 delivery date to the publishers. (Three months from delivery to press is about standard.) But that does not mean it’s happening. But if it were my job to build a placeholder page, that’s about when I guess. Early 2017 is the date being thrown around by a lot of people lately.
Once again, we must sit and remember this: until George R.R. Martin Announces on his Not A Blog that The Winds of Winter is complete and the publication date, *EVERYTHING YOU HEAR* about The Winds of Winter is to be taken with very large boulders of salt. And the current Not A Blog entry is talking about Wild Cards. So.