The Tragedy of George R. R. Martin

... and Why Traditional Publishing Is At Fault

George R. R. Martin didn’t become a world-famous fantasy author to disappoint people. No one does. I also don’t find it fair to blame the calamitous failure of HBO’s Game of Thrones on him. It was evident by the fifth season that the showrunners cared more about “you need the bad pussy” than continuity. The results were infamous. As for Martin, I believe he deeply wants to finish the sixth, seventh, and (if needed) eighth books of A Song of Ice and Fire. I don’t think he can do it, though. Why not? Sit down for this one.

There are probably still more than a million fans who would love to see Martin retire to a cabin in Vermont with no television and a slow internet connection (sufficient for research, no streaming) so he can “just write” until the sixth book is done. Two thousand words per day, twenty days per month, is a reasonable clip for a full-time author. This gets a first draft done in eight months. Martin’s writing is well above average for commercial prose, but he’s not one of those literary writers who does seven drafts; revision intensity of 2-2.5x, plus the work of hired editors, should suffice. All-in, this pace should allow him to finish the series in a few years. This is not going to happen, though. He loves his side projects, and it isn’t my place to tell a 76-year-old man what to do with his one life.

George R. R. Martin is, compared to most writers capable at book length, an extrovert. This can be an asset. It helps him write characters readers love in spite of the awful things they do. It made him flexible enough to write for TV when his publishing career stalled out. Most importantly, it’s why we’ve heard of him in the first place.

Outsiders to publishing complain about their favorite authors being “slow,” as if the writing were the hardest or most time-consuming part of the job. Sadly, it’s not. In the 1990s, authors had to attend conventions and conduct book tours (usually, self-funded and desperate pilgrimages to half-empty bookstores, not at all glamorous) to stay alive. In today’s world, the requirement is social media—authors who aren’t reliable bestsellers will typically have to spend six hours per day, minimum, online to do the marketing that their publishers won’t. Selling five thousand copies without support is far harder than selling a quarter million with a traditional publisher’s genuine backing, and “five thousand without support” is what it takes for a midlist author to stay published. A podcast interview might drive fifteen sales. Publishing a short story might drive ten. A viral tweet might bring thirty, or cancellation, or both. That’s the grind, and it’s as dismal as it sounds.

George R. R. Martin isn’t doing anything wrong. The behaviors that infuriate his fans are things he’s doing because he enjoys them, but that other authors have to do, usually with less support and therefore less efficiently, to stay afloat. Martin’s temperament will not change. He will remain an extrovert (by writers’ standards) and we should not expect anything else from him. This would not be an issue—a slowdown, but not a stopper—if he were still in his fifties; the problem is that context switching becomes harder with age. I’m only 42, and I feel it. Writers are ferocious in their later years if they can stay at speed, but distractions are harder to recover from. This means he’s unlikely to finish Ice and Fire, even if he lives to be ninety-nine.

What if Martin were the sort of introvert who could finish, in his seventies, a 2,500,000-word saga? Then… you and I would never have heard of him. He never would have gotten far enough in publishing to get a lead-title deal in the first place, and his work is too intensive to survive the word-count cutting that ordinary authors are expected to put up with, so he might not even have survived the midlist. There are writers out there who really do want to complete ambitious projects, but they’re not the ones who get through today’s system.

In the context of traditional publishing, this has gotten worse every year. A Game of Thrones is just under 297,000 words. Andrew Wylie himself would struggle to place a novel of that length in today’s risk-averse climate. The only people who get to write anything long, experimental, genre-bending, or ambitious in today’s publishing climate are those who already have. You’re not imagining a paucity of genuine literature from people under forty-five, but it’s not because the young lack talent or have nothing to say.

Fifteen years ago, I would have told you that self-publishing would solve this problem. It was easy to hold blind faith in technological solutions because we were not yet familiar with the tendency toward an equilibrium far worse (“enshiffitication”) than legacy conditions. We now live in a world controlled by venal, corrupt, bot-ridden platforms that have made promotion so noisy and inefficient, it only takes up more time.

A Song of Ice and Fire is… hear me out… not the only epic fantasy series out there. There are others that are finished, and there are new ones that could be. For the latter, though, how the hell are we going to find them? We’re pissed off, but we’re pissed off at the wrong people—a 76-year-old author, rather than the publishers who refuse to find new ones—and, because we’re not being heard, we’re not pissed off enough.