Timewaster's Guide Archive
Departments => Books => Topic started by: Chaos on April 30, 2010, 12:00:25 AM
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Patrick Rothfuss's latest blog post said its March 1st, 2011. I think this is pretty exciting news.
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horray! finally.
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Exciting that it's finally announced, maybe. Not so exciting that it's so far off. Unsurprising and understandable, but not exciting. :\
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Well, it makes sense if he said he can finish it in September, that it takes so long.
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He did not say March 1st. He said March 2011.
I dare someone to update his blog to ask him whether he started working on third one yet. Just to mess with him.
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That is one book that will go on my pre-order list.
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Well, it makes sense if he said he can finish it in September, that it takes so long.
I did say it was unsurprising and understandable. That doesn't mean it has to make me happy. But, well, I'm a grownup I guess. I can deal. :P
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He did not say March 1st. He said March 2011.
No, his publishers said this.
This is truly great news. My friend nearly got a fit when I told him that Rothfuss wasn't done with the second one.
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I guess he takes his own advice from his blog "live cheaply". He doesn't work outside of writing and he publishes a book every 4 years. I am sure he sells a nice number of copies, but still. I think he is a similiar writer to George RR Martin in that he is a perfectionist and everything has to be re-written 50 times until it feels just write. I am ok with that, but I would feel the pressure to publish quicker just to have the income. I am sure the book sold well, but it was not a #1 bestseller.
I am waiting for someone to start asking the guy about the 3rd one. I have a mean streak to me.
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He did not say March 1st. He said March 2011.
I dare someone to update his blog to ask him whether he started working on third one yet. Just to mess with him.
Later in the blog post, he did say March 1st.
He said:
So that’s what happened today: I found out the publication date for The Wise Man’s Fear – March 1st 2011.
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I guess he takes his own advice from his blog "live cheaply". He doesn't work outside of writing and he publishes a book every 4 years. I am sure he sells a nice number of copies, but still. I think he is a similiar writer to George RR Martin in that he is a perfectionist and everything has to be re-written 50 times until it feels just write. I am ok with that, but I would feel the pressure to publish quicker just to have the income. I am sure the book sold well, but it was not a #1 bestseller.
I am waiting for someone to start asking the guy about the 3rd one. I have a mean streak to me.
Does anyone actually know if he's being paid per book or did he get some kind of deal for all three upfront, which seems to be the case alot of times. I'm excited about the sequel and I'm not in a way. Quite frankly I don't want to wait another 4 years for the final book. That's just too long in between sequels. Publishers really should set timeframes of 1-2 years to finish a book.
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I guess he takes his own advice from his blog "live cheaply". He doesn't work outside of writing and he publishes a book every 4 years. I am sure he sells a nice number of copies, but still. I think he is a similiar writer to George RR Martin in that he is a perfectionist and everything has to be re-written 50 times until it feels just write. I am ok with that, but I would feel the pressure to publish quicker just to have the income. I am sure the book sold well, but it was not a #1 bestseller.
I am waiting for someone to start asking the guy about the 3rd one. I have a mean streak to me.
Does anyone actually know if he's being paid per book or did he get some kind of deal for all three upfront, which seems to be the case alot of times. I'm excited about the sequel and I'm not in a way. Quite frankly I don't want to wait another 4 years for the final book. That's just too long in between sequels. Publishers really should set timeframes of 1-2 years to finish a book.
With these books, that's just unrealistic. They're big and complex beasts written by a perfectionist. If you wanted them in 1-2 years, they wouldn't be nearly the books they are, which means they wouldn't exist at all because I doubt Rothfuss would want to write them like that. Some works take time, and you can't just wave a magic deadline wand and make them go faster.
And don't bring Brandon Sanderson into this. He's at the top end of the bell curve. Very few people can write as fast as he can. :)
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given that he got a website, he probably got a 3 book deal out of it. That being said, it looks like his first book sold very well so I would assume that he made royalties so he outsold his advance. So that being said, his advance for his next two books is probably smaller than what his sales will be.
He lives in Wisconsin where it is cheap to live
He worked as a part time college instructor. They don't make much money. His girlfriend works.
He is probably ok with not having alot of money. Plus it sounds like his first book may have sold a few hundred thousand copies. At about $2-2.50/copy you can live in wisconsin pretty well off of that for a number of years.
Connie Willis does not publish very often. Dianna Gabaldon who writes very long time travel romance (they are good and I don't like romance novels) publishes about 1 every 3 years but sells so many she is fine. Then you have Georrge RR Martin who probably is a multi-millionaire so he can afford to be aperfectionist.
II canread the extra work that authors put in a book vs. a book that is punched out in a few months. I heards that Brandon Sanderson is basically taking books he worked on for years before he waspublished and making them into novels. That is probably a big part of why he is publishhing so fast he has years of pre-existing work.
I used to be a big fan of Harry Turtledove. I stopped reading his books since they becamse so formulaic. He punches out so much material that he can't come up with brand new stuff at that pace.
There are exceptions. The Road by Cormac McCary(won a pullitzer) is fantasit and he punched it out in a few weeks.
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With these books, that's just unrealistic. They're big and complex beasts written by a perfectionist. If you wanted them in 1-2 years, they wouldn't be nearly the books they are, which means they wouldn't exist at all because I doubt Rothfuss would want to write them like that. Some works take time, and you can't just wave a magic deadline wand and make them go faster.
And don't bring Brandon Sanderson into this. He's at the top end of the bell curve. Very few people can write as fast as he can. :)
Why? Because the book looks like it's going to end up being a thousand pages? You know what I say to that? Split it. I don't believe there's anything in his contract that says he can't write more than 3 books. Plenty of authors have ended up turning their trilogies into sagas. I'd rather have that by far than wait endlessly for him to finish one enormous tome after another.
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Splitting the book from one monster huge book into three books is a major part of what caused the delay in the first place. He had to rework the first book so it would have somewhat of a beginning, middle, and end, and when that was done, he had to rework the second book so it fit with the changes he made at the end of the first book.
Splitting is not something easy to do well. You can end up with two weak books instead of one great one. That's how I feel about Bujold's Sharing Knife books. And it's likely the case with Robin Hobb's newest book.
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I have not read these books, but Charlie Stross blogged that his editor made him do this with one of his series. They did it to sell more books. He saids the books ended up being much longer than they would as one book.
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Well, yeah. Once you split a book, you're changing the structure of the story--now each book needs its own arch with a climax and denoument. So you end up creating more work for yourself by splitting it, and if you designed the story to be a trilogy in the first place, you might even be artificially inflating it by adding more books to the series.
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I believe Stross wanted to write what he called a 1,000 page door stop, but his publisher wanted to sell more books so he made him do it. I would think that guys who don't have the sales don't have the power to say no. And on top of that, if you are not making alot of money, I don't really blame these guys for doing this.
I went to the library to look for the Reality Dysfunction by Peter F Hamilton. It was recommended on here. Apparently the first 2 books of his series were split into 2 and then a year later another version with both of them together were published. I don't think they were changed. My library only got part one of it. Oh well.