Author Brandon Sanderson is finishing up the popular Wheel of Time series, created and kept on life-support by the late Robert Jordan, and he has submitted 300,000 words to his publisher for the final book. The publisher said that’s too big for a fantasy book and booksellers will complain, so let’s split the book into three books released over the next two years.
Scott Esposito states, “So somebody explain to me how this isn’t about the money.” Brandon Sanderson talks about it at length here.
I really tried to like The Wheel of Time but couldn’t get into it. Maybe it was because I knew I had some ten-thousand-or-so pages of the series to stagger through after the first book.
Of course it’s all about the money. Authors might be willing to write part time for free – but they need to either be paid or spend most of their energy on their day job. Publishers are in the money making business, or else they are out of business. The same goes for book stores.
If you want people to go through the effort needed to give you what you want (in this case, a supply of books good books), they need to be paid to do it. Duh!
Yes, very good point, Ori. I should have thought of that immediately. Still, the rationale given in the posts to which I linked seems convoluted to me. I don’t care about the series anyway.
I tried to read the first Wheel of Time book and found myself profoundly uninterested in finding out what happened next. During the years that followed, I heard repeated complaints that Jordan was padding the series out–writing long books in which little of significance happened–purely to milk the market (doubtless on the publisher’s instructions).
So it sounds as if Sanderson is continuing in the true spirit of the project.
Some people have the time and patience to read long, padded books. Fine of them.
I have four kids under the age of seven, a job, and I’m working on a Master’s degree. 19th century style pacing just doesn’t work with my lifestyle.
Fact check: the *first volume* will be 300,000 words. The total wordcount will be about 800K or 900K.
Having actually READ the series, I get the feeling not that Jordan was padding out his books but that he writes long-winded, and spent time making new books rather than editing his existing books. (In that sense he’s the opposite of Patrick Rothfuss, whose long-but-very-lean-and-edited The Name of the Wind is immensely popular, but who has aroused ire by refusing to publish the sequel until it is equally good.)
Jordan is good, but I wouldn’t put him in my top 10 list of fantasy authors to read, and he does take a lot of reading.
As far as the project goes–I’ve long thought it strange that these enormous fantasy books, which cost more to print, ship and store, didn’t somehow cost more than others. Splitting them into multiple volumes to decrease the cost of publication is a very reasonable counter to their massive size, as long as authors are willing to make each volume interesting enough that people will buy the sequel.
This same process, incidentally, happened with Tolkien. Only then the publisher was convinced that he would loose 1,000 pounds on the printing, and just wanted to keep it from being 10,000 pounds and bankrupting the company.
Personally, I don’t see why this is controversial. If splitting fantasy books (which are more than three times the size of the average book) into three allows them to be printed and their fans to purchase them, publishers should be allowed to do so. Are there really that many people outraged that a novel which is 9X the size of a normal book is split into three novels, each 3X the size of a normal book?
Slight apologies; reading the first of your linked stories again, I realize that the error is Scott Esposito’s, and you just repeated it.
On the other hand, Esposito has just lost all credibility as a journalist. The blockquote he uses directly contradicts the one errant fact upon which he builds his entire argument.
Well, I don’t guess I have much credibility either b/c I was unwilling to read Sanderson’s long post on it or notice the contradiction in Esposito’s post.
Sometimes I fancy I’m a strong thinker, then things like this happen.
Now that I’m reading the long post, here’s a good quote from it. Sanderson writes:
Large novels may be an American thing. Jim Wight, in his memoir about his father James Herriot, wrote that his father’s American publisher said that Herriot’s works were too short for the American market, so they combined his first two British novels into one, producing All Creatures Great and Small, which went on to sell a gazillion copies. Most of the cost of a book is not in the printing, but in the marketing. Therefore, it doesn’t cost the publisher that much more to put out a thick book than a thin book. But buyers feel much more inclined to shell out the same bucks for a thick book as for a thin book.