Brandon Sanderson to Complete Wheel of Time

[alguien]

I hope that Sanderson can bring the series to a satisfying conclusion but I'm preparing myself to be disappointed. Nevertheless, I'll buy the books just because I'm so bloody curious to see how they end, and have been that way since 7th grade.

On a sidenote, has anyone read Sanderson's blog? It was interesting to read about his experiences re-reading the books and writing the last one, but there were definitely times where I felt annoyed with his review of latter books.

It just felt as though he was blindly defending Crossroads, etc for professional reasons, not because he felt they were good. I mean, its one thing to say that you enjoyed the book, but not admit to any flaws? C'mon. His defence that it works as part of the whole just seems off to me.

[Shryke]

What I want to find out most of all, is exactly why the Dark One wanted Rand kept alive (most of the time, anyway). It seems he can't win through brute force, but why is that? Where's the potential benefit for him in keeping Rand alive? Seems turning him is more important than killing him, allthough the latter would at first sight mean a victory of the dark one becomes inevitable.

There's a scene in book 8 or 9, can't remember which, where Moridin talks about a game from the Age of Legends, and basically lays out the Dark Ones overall goals.

There's 2 ways to win: convert Rand to their side or completely destroy everything. With the second one being seen as the inferior way to win.

I'm not sure for the exact reasons conversion is preferable, but I think it's got something to do with the Dark Ones real goals. Remember, it's not enough to conquer the world. That's meaningless, because the wheel will weave his desctruction into the future and leave him imprisoned again. He needs to actually break the Wheel of Time, and destroy the cycle of time, thereby freeing himself forever. And I don't think he can do that without Rand on his side.

[Gerold Hightower]

On Demandred: There are two groups in Randland that haven't had a Forsaken attached to them as far as we know and that's the Borderlanders and the Whitecloaks. Keeping in mind Sammael's remark about "events in t he south" I'd say he is probably with the Whitecloaks. They are the ideal tool for the kind of disruptive work the Shadow has been doing since the beginning of the series.

[delete this account pls]

I never really bought into the whole Taim is Demandred thing. I thought Demandred might be the Prophet, whathisname, the Shienaran guy, or someone close to him. One of the Whitecloaks seems a good possibility as well.

[cseresz]

I suppose Crossroads of Twilight sold close to that figure as well. Are you suggesting that sales = quality?

No, the point I am trying to make is that book 8-10 (1998-2003) were so terrible then the sales should have been decreased not increased.

[Gerold Hightower]

No, the point I am trying to make is that book 8-10 (1998-2003) were so terrible then the sales should have been decreased not increased.

Just shows that once people are hooked up it takes a lot to make them drop a series. New Spring doesn't seem to have sold as well as they had expected, though. GRRM's most successful book is AFFC, BTW, which certainly isn't the one people like most.

[Inkdaub]

"I want to know where Demandred has been this time and what he's been up to (though I really am hoping to see that or find it out)."

I thought we already knew this one via the comments at the end of KoD? Why would the comments have been uttered if not to show Demandred's placement? Are people discounting this because it's almost too obvious?

[Gerold Hightower]

"I want to know where Demandred has been this time and what he's been up to (though I really am hoping to see that or find it out)."

I thought we already knew this one via the comments at the end of KoD? Why would the comments have been uttered if not to show Demandred's placement? Are people discounting this because it's almost too obvious?

All that tells us is that Taim is a Darkfriend and somebody has passed that part of the Dark One's order to him. Osan'gar was created to be the Forsaken at the Black Tower. Why would the Dark One do that if he already had Demandred in place? Besides, there is the issue of the triple order to the Ashaman who tried to kill Rand, Demandred not knowing Damer Flinn, and RJ calling the Taimandred theory "bogus."

[cseresz]

Just shows that once people are hooked up it takes a lot to make them drop a series. New Spring doesn't seem to have sold as well as they had expected, though. GRRM's most successful book is AFFC, BTW, which certainly isn't the one people like most.

I think this was a response: we do not want a prequel but we want to finish the main story. If NS turns out a success, there's no chance that we are talking now about outline, almost finished chapters etc.

Jordan said:

You know, the reception of New Spring: the Novel surprised me. Some people were upset or even angry that I wasn't getting on with the main story. I even heard people say there was no reason to read the novel if you had read the novella. (That, by the way, is very wrong. There is stuff in that novel that won't ever be anywhere else, including the test for Aes Sedai and the reasons why certain people have the relationships they do in the books among other things.) Anyway, given the reactions of so many people, I decided to shelve the other two prequels for a while.

Oh, and a little funny statistics. Success. What does this word mean?

from Publishers Weekly:

THE FICTION RUNNERS-UP

20. The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower. Stephen King. Scribner (#630,000)

27. New Spring. Robert Jordan. Tor (548,937)

The Two Swords: The Hunter's Blades Trilogy Book III. R.A. Salvatore. Wizards of the Coast/Forgotten Realms (151,232)

High Druid of Shannara: Tanequil. Terry Brooks. Del Rey (110,365)

Dune: The Battle of Corrin. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Tor (100,769)

The Runes of the Earth. Steven Donaldson. Putnam (100,430)

The Stakes Rise for Chart Toppers 3/22/2004

THE FICTION RUNNERS-UP

20. Crossroads of Twilight by Robert Jordan (Tor, 553,270)

Naked Empire. Terry Goodkind. Tor (185,351)

[Werthead]

That's how many copies were printed. Going by how many copies of New Spring I've seen in my local remaindered bookshop, that's not how many were sold at full price. I've seen other reports as well that the book did not sell anything approaching what they were expecting from the main series sales, the same as the world book.

[cseresz]

That's how many copies were printed. Going by how many copies of New Spring I've seen in my local remaindered bookshop, that's not how many were sold at full price.

There are other bookshops (thousands).

So you say that PW sums up a list, which is based on the printed copies not the sold copies? I have never heard such a toplist.

[Paddy]

I would also like very much to see a confrontation between Rand and his-half brother Galad - with at least one, and preferably both, realising they are closely related (I guess Morgase and co have to be thrown in here somewhere, too, to get some resolution on that front). And between Rand and Tam, too (guess that one is coming, Tam being with Perrin now). A bit of a reunion of the Two Rivers characters in general would be great - how would the folks at home view all those super-powerful characters like Rand and Egwene and Mat now?

Yeah, I always really wanted Rand and Tam to have some sort of resolution/meeting, though Rand seems to avoid the Two Rivers people completely because of the being a good leader stuff.

Also, I'm pretty sure that Rand knows that Galad is his brother.

His defence that it works as part of the whole just seems off to me.

I can accept that explanation for PoD (just about), and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but not CoT, which definitely does not work as part of the whole.

[Gerold Hightower]

There are other bookshops (thousands).

So you say that PW sums up a list, which is based on the printed copies not the sold copies? I have never heard such a toplist.

Tracking retail sales is hard. AFAIK most bestseller lists are based on wholesale figures, meaning a product can be a bestseller before a single unit has been sold to end customers. The New York Times bestseller list is retail-based, but they only give a ranking, not sales figures. New Spring didn't make #1 there and while most authors would be more then happy with number two it's possible that Tor and Jordan expected more. The main series usually makes it to number one, if only for one week.

[Werthead]

So you say that PW sums up a list, which is based on the printed copies not the sold copies? I have never heard such a toplist.

Correct. There is no publicly-available mechanism for accurately tracking book sales in existence. Individual publishers know how many copies of an individual book they have shifted but do not make that information known. The closest such tracking device is the Nielsen Bookscan, but several major retailers have refused to sign up with it, rendering its worth dubious (although it does account for about 65-70% of all sales).

The only publicly-available information is how many copies of a book are in print, which is very different from how many copies have been sold to customers.

Also note that New Spring wasn't a failure, as such, it merely failed to shift anywhere near the number of copies that were printed. It sold several hundred thousand copies, but still a long way short of the approximate 2-3 million copies each individual novel in the Wheel of Time series has shifted.

Even the value of the NYT bestseller list is dubious: they assemble their list on surveys of several hundred bookshops (out of however many tens of thousands there are across the USA) and can only draw conclusions based on what those bookshops report.

[Ran]

PW's list is indeed about how many books are moved from their warehouses and into the distribution channel. _However_, they do instruct publishers to subtract returns at the time when they're putting these lists together. So it starts to approach an actual list of how many copies are sold to readers (or libraries and so on), assuming publishers are honest (not all of them are, as PW occasionally outright says). The vast majority of these books aren't being sold at full retail price, as well.

Looking at PW's figures, books like Winter's Heart, Crossroads of Twilight, and Knife of Dreams showed up with ~500,000 to ~600,000 copies as shipped and billed in hardcover, the same as New Spring. While it's entirely possible the returns on New Spring were signficantly higher, I don't see where the Jordan books are shifting "2-3 million" copies each unless we're adding all sales in several markets together.

Knife of Dreams had initial print runs of 1,000,000 (trade) and 1,250,000 (paperback), so it'd be rather remarkable to imagine that they sold every single one of those.

[Werthead]

PW's list is indeed about how many books are moved from their warehouses and into the distribution channel. _However_, they do instruct publishers to subtract returns at the time when they're putting these lists together. So it starts to approach an actual list of how many copies are sold to readers (or libraries and so on), assuming publishers are honest (not all of them are, as PW occasionally outright says). The vast majority of these books aren't being sold at full retail price, as well.

Looking at PW's figures, books like Winter's Heart, Crossroads of Twilight, and Knife of Dreams showed up with ~500,000 to ~600,000 copies as shipped and billed in hardcover, the same as New Spring. While it's entirely possible the returns on New Spring were signficantly higher, I don't see where the Jordan books are shifting "2-3 million" copies each unless we're adding all sales in several markets together.

Knife of Dreams had initial print runs of 1,000,000 (trade) and 1,250,000 (paperback), so it'd be rather remarkable to imagine that they sold every single one of those.

11 books, 35 million sales + mathmatics

EDIT: I was talking worldwide figures as well. In the US alone WoT has sold about 15 million copies, so each individual book has probably shifted 750K-1 million copies in the US by itself. I would assume that Eye of the World has sold the most as a notable number of those people who bought that book wouldn't have proceeded with the rest of the series, but how many that is is unknown.

[Krafus]

Books 8-10 may have sold more than their predecessors, but that's because they were coasting off the success of those predecessors. IMO, if WoT's first books had had the (lack of) quality seen in books 8-10, the series would never have become the juggernaut it is today.

Oh, and I also don't believe that Sanderson can possibly write a truly satisfactory ending to WoT in just one novel - I don't think even GRRM could. Too many characters, too many plot threads, too many events that need to happen in just one novel.

[Ran]

Right, if you combined several markets. Which isn't necessarily fair, since not all the books are necessarily published in all the same markets. In any case, PW's list is solely concerning U.S. figures, so it gets confusing when figures provided for New Spring in the U.S. is compared to figures concerning worldwide sales of the regular series.

I've no idea what the worldwide figures for New Spring were.

[Taemlyn Blackfyre]

Speaking of Perrin, did Jordan ever clear up that broken crown comment?

My translation of the Broken Crown is that Queen Tenobia will die a spinster, therefore causing the crown to be broken, and Davram expects to be dead by this time, leaving Faile to assume the throne of Saldaea. I might be wrong.

I don't think my next theory needs a spoiler alert, as I've formed it from early on in the books. Here goes.

Rand loses his inner battle with Lews Therin during the last battle and is killed by one of the Forsaken. Mat eventually blows the Horn of Vahlere, recalling the Heroes (of which Lews Therin is a member) to fight. Elayne, who is bonded to Rand, uses the same trick she did with Birgitte to pull a Hero in the Pattern into the present. But instead of Lews Therin, it is Rand who comes back.

Cadsuane is said to "teach" Rand something in Min's viewing. If we assume this teaching, which has been alluded to many times, is how to banish voices from past lives then perhaps in death Rand achieves this.

Before anyone accuses me of crackpot madness, this is how the plot has unfolded from the start. Each book has contained certainties that Rand will die in the Last Battle. By keeping under wraps the greatest weapon he has against the Dark One (which is very similar to the 11th hour entrance of Aragorn in RotK with his ghostly horde) RJ will reach from the grave to give Randy boy a second chance at life with the Horn.

Strewth! Even Harry Potter came back fro the dead to kill the Dark Lord...

[Maltaran]

Speaking of Perrin, did Jordan ever clear up that broken crown comment?

IIRC, it's the crown of Saldaea, given that Faile is second? third? in line.