After much speculation about the release date of “Winds of Winter”, many fans of George R.R. Martin were convinced that the book was coming next month with WorldCon 2016. However, despite the fact that those rumors were being repeated quite often in recent times, it looks like this is not actually going to happen. Needless to say, some fans of the author are disappointed, but most were already convinced that this would be the case.
Martin already told his fans that his schedule is quite tightly pressed at the moment, and that the likelihood of seeing the next book in his “A Song of Ice and Fire” series this year is pretty slim. Still, some have not given up hope, and there are still expectations that Martin might be trying to mislead everyone so he could surprise us. Of course, that’s more wishful thinking than anything else, especially knowing the author’s notoriously slow working pace.
Some fans took their hopes one step further and even expected to see two books instead of one. But finishing the sixth book in the series has already proven to be a challenge for Martin, it would be pretty strange to assume that he has been working on the seventh all this time in secret as well.
We would expect the release of the book to be spearheaded by a massive marketing campaign. After so much waiting, it’s going to be a huge event, and the publisher is definitely going to want to realize its full potential. Because of this, we will probably start hearing about the book some time before it’s actually released. While Martin and his publisher will surely try to keep things under wraps for as long as possible, it’s not very easy to keep something like this a secret, especially with so many eyes firmly focused on the project.
We’re now at a point where the TV show based on the books, “Game of Thrones”, has managed to overtake the book series and is now further ahead in the storyline. Some fans who follow both works have expressed their disappointment over this development, as it’s now difficult to avoid spoilers about the next book. “Game of Thrones” is all over the web, and there is only so much a fan can do to prevent spoiler from finding their way onto their screen.
At least the sixth season of the show is now over, so there are not that many discussions about it on the Internet on a regular basis. But most fans now know the conclusions to some important story arcs, such as the fate of Jon Snow, and this could spoil the book to some extent for those people. It’s possible that George R.R. Martin has some surprises up his sleeve to compensate for the long writing cycle of this book, but at this point he’s probably concentrated on just getting it done as quickly as possible.
Hopefully the writer is not going to rush his work towards the end just to get the book out more quickly, as this is definitely a risk at this point, and some fans have been discussing it quite actively. It wouldn’t be the first time we’re seeing a successful author compromising their values just to meet a release deadline or to milk a cash cow, but so far we are not seeing any such tendencies from Martin. We never know where things might end up if his work continues to be so slow, however.