How long will it take to publish Winds of Winter after it’s finished?

Eventually, George R.R. Martin will finish writing The Winds of Winter…we hope. After that, how long do we wait before its in our hands?

The Winds of Winter, the long-in-coming sixth book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, could release years from now…or just a handful of months. If history is any guide, the former is more likely, but Martin at least seems to be making more progress lately, re are factors that may be contributing to a release date somewhere in the near future, what with Martin locking himself in an undisclosed location and writing.

One thing is for sure: when Martin is finally done with Winds, he will announce it on his personal blog, which he calls his Not A Blog. He’s made that very clear:

"Look, I’ve said before, and I will say again, I don’t play games with news about the books.  I know how many people are waiting, how long they have been waiting, how anxious they are.   I am still working on WINDS.  When it’s done, I will announce it here.  There won’t be any clues to decipher, any codes or hidden meanings, the announcement will be straightforward and to the point.  I won’t time it to coincide with Xmas or Valentine’s Day or Lincoln’s Birthday, the book will not rise from the dead with Jesus on Easter Sunday.  When it is done, I will say that’s it is done, on whatever day I happen to finish."

It’s futile to try and predict an exact release date — many have tried and many have failed. For now, we’ll settle for a publishing window. Eventually, the final manuscript will be completed, and when that happens, how long will fans have to reread their favorite series before the new book lands in stores and spoilers plague the internet?

In the past, Martin’s books have gone through the editing and publication process quickly. He finished writing the last book in the series, A Dance with Dragons, on April 27th, 2011, and it released on July 12 of the same year. Meanwhile, the book before that — A Feast for Crows — was near completion in May of 2005, and was published on October 17.

So that’s a turnaround time of just a few months in both cases. And once Winds is completed, it may come out even faster. Here’s what Martin wrote about the potential turnaround time for Winds at the end of 2016, when he was giving fans another update announcing that it was not yet complete:

"We all wanted book six of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE to come out before season six of the HBO show aired. Assuming the show would return in early April, that meant THE WINDS OF WINTER had to be published before the end of March, at the latest. For that to happen, my publishers told me, they would need the completed manuscript before the end of October."

As we know, Martin didn’t finish by the end of 2016, but if he’d been able to, his publishers were ready to supercharge the process of getting the book onto shelves: “They already had contingencies in place. They had made plans to speed up production. If I could deliver WINDS OF WINTER by the end of the year, they told me, they could still get it our before the end of March.”

Here, Martin is talking about a 2-3 month turnaround from finished manuscript to publication, which is very fast. However, now that the pressure isn’t on to get the book out before the newest season of Game of Thrones, it may take longer. But then again, they’ll probably want to get the book out before the premiere of House of the Dragon…

Back in 2016, Chris Lough wrote an excellent article for Tor detailing all of the factors that contribute to the speedy publication of a book. There are a lot of things to pull together, from editing to cover art to printing to distribution and more.

The editing starts as soon as the author hands in their completed manuscript. Luckily for his editors, Martin does much of the heavy lifting himself. He’s constantly writing and rewriting chapters, tweaking the structure to maintain consistency and remove plot holes. “I always do a lot of rewriting, sometimes just polishing, sometimes pretty major restructures,” he said in the same blog post from above. “I worked on the book a couple of days ago, revising a Theon chapter and adding some new material, and I will be writing on it again tomorrow.”

Considering how potentially popular the book will be, editors will no doubt be working weekends when the manuscript comes in. And they will have already done a lot of work, as pages are sent in as Martin finishes them. In February of 2013, Martin’s editor received a batch of 168 manuscript pages, and in January of 2016, Martin wrote that he had hundred’s of pages complete. When Winds comes in, it’s likely his editors will pretty much drop everything to turn around the rest and send it out to the printers.

The next thing you need is a cover. Yet whenever you search “The Winds of Winter” on the internet, one always pops up: a horn set against a simple black background. Although we can’t know if that will be the final cover, Martin confirmed that it is indeed the working cover, although he also noted that “these things have been known to change.”

Even if that’s not the final cover, the covers for the Song of Ice and Fire books are all similar, with the same font and color codes scheme with minimal design elements, so it likely won’t take long in any case.

Then we move on to the marketing, although a hugely anticipated book from a series this famous won’t need much. The Winds of Winter will sell itself, no matter what time of the year it comes out or what other books are coming out around the same time.

The Tor article concludes with a comprehensive graphic laying out the possible publishing cycle for Winds, mapped out over three months:

Chris Lough 2016 Tor

Lough speculates that the final manuscript will take around 11 weeks to release, which is probably enough time to reread the first five books. For now, fans watch the Not a Blog.

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