The Doors of Stone is the third and final volume in Patrick Rothfuss’ , a trilogy of books about a magical prodigy and bard named Kvothe, who is telling the story of how he became the most famous person in the world only to lose it all.
How he does that is something we might learn in The Doors of Stone, which fans have been waiting to read for a long time. The second book in the series, The Wise Man’s Fear, was released back in 2011; since then the updates have been few and far between. The Doors of Stone is often mentioned in the same breath as George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter when it comes to long-awaited fantasy novels.
We’re not here to rag on Rothfuss for taking his time with the book. I firmly believe that an author should take the time they need for the book they want to write. And while I definitely think Rothfuss owes fans some kind of update after he used the release of a new Doors of Stone chapter as a donor incentive for his Worldbuilders Charity (a chapter that has yet to materialize), we’re not here to talk about that either. Because just this week, fans got a glimmer of hope.
A new Kingkiller Chronicle novella, The Narrow Road Between Desires, is coming out on November 14, 2023.
While this is extremely exciting news, some readers have greeted it with exhaustion, since there’s still no word on the book they’ve been waiting over a decade to read. Where exactly did The Narrow Road Between Desires come from? And what exactly is going on with The Doors of Stone?
Today, we’re here to discuss some changes that have happened behind the scenes at Kingkiller Chronicle publisher DAW Books, and what they might mean for the release of The Doors of Stone. Art isn’t created in a vacuum, and industry-level changes can have an effect on the production of a book.
A brief timeline of The Doors of Stone publication history
Before we dive in, let’s briefly recap the history of this book series. The Kingkiller Chronicle is published by DAW Books, a science fiction and fantasy publisher founded by Donald A. Wollheim and Elsie B. Wollheim which is responsible for publishing more than 2,000 books from numerous authors, including Tad Williams, Mercedes Lackey, Nnedi Okorafor, C.J. Cherryh and Seanen McGuire. DAW has been around since the 1970s and has developed a great reputation among readers and authors alike.
The first book in Rothfuss’ series, The Name of the Wind, was published by DAW in 2007. The series was announced as a trilogy, and since Rothfuss had already written an initial draft of the whole story, all the books were expected to release in relatively quick succession. Obviously that didn’t happen.
The second book, The Wise Man’s Fear, followed in 2011. Shortly after that, DAW bought another fantasy trilogy from Rothfuss, which the author has hinted would continue the tale of Kvothe. According to Rothfuss, The Kingkiller Chronicle is a “million word prologue” to Kvothe’s real story. Following that sale, the long wait for book three began, and we’re still here to this day.
When The Doors of Stone publisher was acquired by another company
For decades, DAW Books was an independently owned publisher that nonetheless had the resources and distribution of a major publishing house, thanks mainly to its close relationship with major publisher Penguin Random House. DAW itself was primarily owned by the Wollheim family, but Penguin Random House helped with book production. The two publishers were separate but linked.
In 2021, reports started surfacing about how changes within Penguin Random House were affecting DAW authors, some of whom were let go. While DAW runs its editorial operations in-house, they are beholden to a distribution agreement that was renegotiated in 2021. Under the new agreement, books were dropped from print for a variety of reasons, including being too long or not selling enough copies. That wouldn’t have affected authors like Rothfuss, whose books have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, but it’s important to keep in mind.
In July 2022, DAW Books was acquired by Astra Publishing House, a subsidiary of a Beijing-based publishing conglomerate called Thinkingdom Media Group. Founded in 2020, Astra had only been around for a couple of years at that point, and DAW was the first and only adult sci-fi and fantasy publishing imprint in their portfolio.
Coming under new corporate ownership can be scary, but according to DAW, they were still going to be able to run their own operation, much as they had done when they were working with Penguin Random House. Here’s what DAW co-owners Elizabeth R. Wollheim and Sheila E. Gilbert said at the time:
"We are extremely pleased by Astra’s enthusiasm, and thrilled that we will be the sole SFF imprint of their company (a first for DAW). We think this is the perfect fit for us, and it’s exciting and refreshing to be an integral part of a new and growing company. It speaks volumes about Astra’s respect for our company that they have included our entire staff. We’re very happy."
Still, there were signs that not all was well. Preorders for a number of DAW titles were dropped due to a technical issue resulting from the acquisition; preorders are a critically important metric for book releases, so this hurt. It was also unusual for something like this to happen so publicly.
Some authors have discussed issues they’ve had with shifts in policy and communication, with several leaving the publisher. Things seem to have quieted down on that front recently, but the point is that the transition wasn’t entirely smooth.
So what does that mean for The Doors of Stone? Read on:
What does the DAW acquisition mean for The Doors of Stone?
One claim I’ve seen online is that by failing to turn in The Doors of Stone sooner, Rothfuss is responsible for DAW’s financial woes in the first place, which is what inspired them to sell themselves to Astra. That’s likely an exaggeration, or at the very least, not the full picture.
However, DAW editor and owner Betsy Wollheim did say that major authors failing to produce can have an impact on their publishers, speaking out in an unusually candid Facebook thread. “Book publishing is not as lucrative as many other professions, and publishers rely on their strongest sellers to keep their companies (especially small companies like DAW) afloat,” she wrote. “When authors don’t produce, it basically fucks their publishers.”
DAW has a huge backlist of titles from a wide range of authors, and despite everyone still waiting for The Doors of Stone, the first two books in Rothfuss’ trilogy still sell copies to this day. So while the long wait for The Doors of Stone did have a negative impact on DAW and could have been part of what inspired them to sell, laying the blame for a corporate acquisition of this scale solely at Rothfuss’ feet doesn’t feel like a reasonable conclusion.
But let’s get back to the original question: how did Astra acquiring DAW affect The Doors of Stone? Corporate acquisitions of this kind can create complications for authors and their work. For instance, when Disney bought 20th Century Fox, some authors working under Fox’s publishing arm had issues with contractual obligations being ignored (#DisneyMustPay). But it’s unlikely that that sort of thing happened with Astra and DAW, since publishing is their entire business. Instead, it’s more likely that contracts had to be renegotiated during the transition. That’s especially true of someone like Rothfuss, who had presumably gone into breach of contract after blowing past whatever deadline was originally set out for The Doors of Stone. And even if he didn’t do that, it may have been time to renegotiate a new contract with different due dates anyway.
There are signs that something might have been amiss with the release of Rothfuss’ work. The biggest is that no 10-year anniversary edition of The Wise Man’s Fear was published in 2021, the same year that DAW was acquired by Astra. Rothfuss had said multiple times during his Twitch livestreams that he expected there would be an anniversary edition of the book, but for some reason it never materialized.
This is more than a little curious, since a 10-year anniversary edition would likely have sold well; it’s very hard to imagine DAW not wanting to capitalize on demand for this series. And The Wise Man’s Fear is an already finished book, meaning it could have been republished without significantly interrupting Rothfuss’ work on The Doors of Stone.
So what happened here? Most likely the acquisition threw up some kind of hurdle — either contractual or related to production — that the publisher has yet to clear, resulting in a delay for a tenth anniversary edition of The Wise Man’s Fear. In July 2021, four months after the 10th anniversary of the book, Rothfuss weighed in on whether such an edition was coming. “Eventually, but no news yet.”
Since then, there’s been no word about when or even if a 10th anniversary of The Wise Man’s Fear will be released.
Patrick Rothfuss started his own small publishing company, but it’s probably not cause for alarm
Then there’s the fact that Rothfuss has started his own publishing house, Underthing Press. Some have looked at this and concluded that Rothfuss plans to publish The Doors of Stone through Underthing rather than DAW, but this doesn’t seem likely. Rothfuss has described Underthing Press as a small publisher that will allow him to put out books by other authors or side projects that he feels passionate about, not a way to publish his own full-length novels.
“It’s something I’ve kinda wanted to do for a decade,” Rothfuss wrote on his blog. “A place where I can bring books I love back into print. A way to maybe revive series that have been canceled or abandoned by other publishers. And, of course, a place where I can publish some of my own odd little projects without having to worry about making the project appealing to a publisher. I want to do my own weird shit in my own weird way.”
So on its own, Underthing Press isn’t necessarily cause for concern as far as the future of The Kingkiller Chronicle goes. It’s very difficult to imagine The Doors of Stone being released by any publisher but DAW, because regardless of the long wait, there is no doubt it will sell by the truck load whenever it releases. DAW has no incentive to abandon those publishing rights. And as it turns out, we just got a huge sign that things might be alright after all between Rothfuss and his publisher: the newly announced novella The Narrow Road Between Desires.
What can we glean about The Doors of Stone from The Narrow Road Between Desires?
Patrick Rothfuss took to his blog and Twitch channel this week to announce a new Kingkiller Chronicle novella is coming out on November 14. The Narrow Road Between Desires is the first new book set in the world of Temerant since The Slow Regard of Silent Things novella released in 2014.
It isn’t entirely new, though; The Narrow Road Between Desires is almost an anniversary edition of its own, in a way. A previous version of the story titled The Lightning Tree was published in 2014 as part of the Rogues anthology, one of the themed cross-genre short fiction anthologies edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. It follows Kvothe’s fae companion Bast over the course of a single day as he gets up to some fae mischief. The Narrow Road Between Desires is over twice the length of The Lightning Tree and will feature more than 30 illustrations from Nate Taylor, the same artist who illustrated The Slow Regard of Silent Things. So it’s a substantial expansion on the original tale, even if the core conceit remains the same.
The novella is being published by DAW Books. Rothfuss had glowing words for his editor Betsy Wollheim and DAW on his blog. “While I write the books myself, publishing them is a team effort. And as many of you already know, my publisher is DAW, and my editor is Betsy Wollheim. Without them, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” he wrote.
He also praised Wollheim for allowing him the flexibility to announce the novella first on his blog. Publishers often announce release dates for their authors, but since there are always rumors swirling about The Doors of Stone, Rothfuss has promised fans he will announce any big news first on his blog so that they know it’s legitimate. This “makes things harder” for his publisher, but they allowed him to do it anyway.
"They have to do extra work in order to keep things secret, and it ties their hands a little. Believe it or not, promoting and marketing a book is way harder when nobody knows a book is in the works. Despite all this, we’ve all been keeping news about the novella secret, and the lovely folks at DAW have done that extra work so that I can make the announcement here first."
All of this is a pretty good indicator that things have improved between Rothfuss and DAW Books since those headline-making Facebook remarks back in 2020.
Should we start getting our hopes up for The Doors of Stone?
Time has proven that there is nothing which can make Patrick Rothfuss get The Doors of Stone done faster, but it’s not unreasonable to suspect that if contracts were renegotiated during Astra’s acquisition of DAW, the publishers might have wanted to lock in some other release from him. Despite not having published a new Kingkiller book in nearly a decade, Rothfuss remains one of their biggest authors. DAW releasing a new Patrick Rothfuss book post-Astra acquisition sends a firm signal, both for their relationship with the author, and that things are stable enough at the publishing house to get one of their bestsellers back onto shelves with a major new release after a years-long absence.
Is it cause to hope that things may be getting back on track for The Doors of Stone? That perhaps The Narrow Road Between Desires might be a lead up to the third and final book of The Kingkiller Chronicle? After all, we still haven’t heard the story of how Bast and Kvothe met; that’s something we’ve long expected to see in The Doors of Stone, which could make The Narrow Road Between Desires a logical primer for it. But we’ve been burned too many times before to get our hopes up quite yet.
At the very least, this novella is the most encouraging thing to happen for The Kingkiller Chronicle in years. The Lightning Tree was a great story, and has always deserved its own standalone release to match The Slow Regard of Silent Things. That we’re getting one after all this time is a nice balm for the jilted reader, especially when it’s an entirely new version of the story.
Whenever The Doors of Stone is done, Patrick Rothfuss will let us know on his blog. Until then, we’ll be counting down the days until hits shelves. It releases on November 14 from DAW Books.
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