Martinology update: When will The Winds of Winter hit store shelves?

Martinology [Mar-tin-ol-uh-jee]. Noun (also made up). 1. The pseudoscientific process by which fans attempt to predict the release date for the forthcoming The Winds of Winter.

Writer Walt Hickey came up with that definition when writing about The Winds of Winter for FiveThirtyEight back in June of 2014, but the word is just as useful now, as Game of Thrones Season 6 approaches without a release date for Winds yet set.

By this point, fans know that there’s little hope that George R.R. Martin can finish his Song of Ice and Fire series before the Game of Thrones TV show wraps up. The math on that one isn’t hard. Emilia Clarke has said that the show won’t last longer than eight seasons, so barring a break, it should wrap up in 2018. Meanwhile, Martin still has at least two more books in his series to go (The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring), and the gaps between publication dates have been getting progressively longer (five years between A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, and six years between Feast and A Dance with Dragons). Even if Winds is released next year, it’s very hard to imagine that Dream will take only two years to write, which is how fast Martin would have to work to get it out ahead of Game of Thrones Season 8.

He’s a writer, not a miracle worker.

Still, fans are holding out hope that The Winds of Winter may get released before Season 6, so book-readers will have some inkling of what’s coming. Martin has said he wants to hit this window, but he’s also admitted to blowing pretty much every deadline he’s ever been given when it comes to this series, so that’s nothing to guide your ship by.

Do we have any proof that The Winds of the Winter is headed for an early 2016 release? The sad answer is no, but we do have educated guesses. One of the best comes from Jeff, aka BryndenBFish. He maintains Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire, an excellent blog that analyzes the books from a military and strategic perspective. Before Season 5 began, he wrote a thorough post that used statistics, comments from Martin and his editors, and an exhaustive understanding of the way Martin writes his books to predict the release date for Winds. The whole post is well worth a read, but here are his conclusions:

If you cornered me, put a gun to my head and told me to tell you how many completed manuscript pages are done for The Winds of Winter, I’d probably say that George is just north of 1000 manuscript pages with an expected completion date of late 2016 to early 2017.

In the wake of yesterday’s reveal that Season 6 will be debuting in April (probably April 24, since Game of Thrones will have to wait for new HBO show Vinyl to wrap up its inaugural season before premiering), Walt Hickey caught back up with Jeff to see if he’d adjusted his prediction. Jeff explained that the question is more complicated than just figuring out if Martin can finish the final chapter in Winds before April—there’s also the publishing process to consider.

While the average turnaround time for a book to go from ‘manuscript submission’ to ‘published and on the shelves’ usually ranges from 4-6 months, Random House hustled and published ‘A Dance with Dragons’ seven weeks after they received the final manuscript.

It makes sense for the publisher to want to get a major book from its star author out as soon as possible, and we can probably assume that it’ll give the same treatment to The Winds of Winter. Still, that doesn’t give Martin a ton of time. Assuming an accelerated publishing schedule, Jeff estimates that Martin will have to turn in a completed manuscript by February 23 if he wants it to be on shelves ahead of the premiere. In other words: “He’s going to have to submit something in 90 days or it’s likely he won’t publish in time.”

Easy? Impossible? It’s hard to say—Martinology is anything but an exact science.

• Published on 11/24/2015 at 4:46 PM CDT
• Last updated on 11/25/2015 at 11:40 AM CDT