This from Tad Williams on Facebook:Jell-o brain, Night Two. Just got back from New Jersey and a story conferencing day. All good work, but it's now three a.m. and my brain...well, you know. Wibble-wobble-wibble. However, one piece of news for the Tad readers. Shadowrise is definitely going to have to be two volumes, but only a few months apart.
Crap. . . Here's to hoping that splitting books into multiple volumes won't become a trend. . .
10 commentaires:
GRRM may be at the heart of the latest fad for it.
Perhaps too late to hope against such a trend.
Lol, let us just hope its not three books...
As long as people keep buying novels that are split for no reason, then more publishers/authors will continue to do it. Money talks. Definitely blame GRRM.
I would hardly call splitting a book into multiples a new trend especially in SSF. The Lord of the Rings was originally intended to be one volume. It was the publisher who decided to split it into 3. So this isn't something I would blame on GRRM. It takes an author how ever many words it takes to get the story done right.
The comparisons to GRRM are slightly (as in, 'completely') inaccurate.
First off, this has happened to Williams before. TO GREEN ANGEL TOWER was published in two volumes (although I believe there has been a US hardcover edition in one volume which was about 1300 pages of monumentally tiny type) in 1993-94. Raymond E. Feist also had this done with MAGICIAN, which was published in the USA in two volumes in 1982 for purely profit-based reasons (the complete book is only about 700 pages long and easily publishable in one volume).
The situation with AFFC/ADWD is not that the original one-volume book was completed and then split in half. If that was the case, we'd have seen ADWD three years ago. ADWD was nowhere near completion at the time of the split. In addition, since we now know that ADWD is going to be heading towards a thousand pages when published, the two books are far two large to fit into one volume, their combined size looking like being somewhere north of 1,700 pages in hardcover and likely well over 2,000 pages in paperback.
Of course, it is unclear how large SHADOWRISE is. If it's the MAGICIAN situation all over again, then fans can complain about an unnecessary and money-oriented split. However, given Williams' tendency towards gargantuam final volumes (SEA OF SILVER LIGHT in paperback is almost 1,200 pages long and wasn't far off from having to be split), I suspect in this case it will turn out to have been justified.
German publisher very often split books. Especially German version of English books.
Example: A Song of Ice and Fire
English edition = 4 books
German edition = 8 books.
And as Adam wrote this isn't the first time for Tad Williams. I own Shadowmarch and Shadowplay. I will read them when I finally receive Shadowrise.
The mansucript is at least 1200something pages long (so says his wife Deborah Beale) and was still not finished. Daw obviously want a book out in early 2010, so they split it in half ans give Tad more time to finish the second half. That way both halfs may end up as long as book one and two were (around 650 pages).
Olaf
That's somewhat worrying. ADWD is about 1200 MS pages in size as well. THAT book getting split in half would lead to wholsale insurrection by some of the fans.
Also odd that DAW would be the ones to split a book. They normally like their Big Fat Fantasy Books. 1200 MS pages is about 750-800 pages in hardcover, maybe 950-1000 pages in mmpb, well within their capabilities to print in one volume. Maybe they are anticipating the book coming in at a lot longer than even that.
What I've understood about it is that the book sellers are tiring of massive volumes eating up shelf space in the fantasy section and are pressuring the publishers for smaller releases, thus (perhaps) this trend.
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