Five books in, A Song of Ice and Fire stands at roughly 1.74 million words. That's around twenty standard novels, and it's the clearest working example in modern publishing of what happens when a series outgrows the plan that started it.
The Count, Book by Book
- A Game of Thrones (1996): about 292,727 words
- A Clash of Kings (1998): about 318,903 words
- A Storm of Swords (2000): about 414,604 words
- A Feast for Crows (2005): about 295,032 words
- A Dance with Dragons (2011): about 414,788 words
Those are WordsRated's figures and they total 1,736,054 words. Adam Whitehead's long-running statistics work on the series uses Martin's own manuscript page counts and lands slightly higher, near 1.77 million, because Martin has drafted on WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine since the late 1980s and thinks in manuscript pages rather than published ones. Either set puts the series comfortably past 1.7 million.
A Storm of Swords and A Dance with Dragons are the two giants at just over 414,000 words apiece, each within striking distance of Stephen King's It at around 445,000. Both of them are single volumes in a series that isn't finished.
Why the Books Got Slower as They Got Longer
Martin began A Game of Thrones in the summer of 1991 and had a finished manuscript by late 1995 or early 1996. Bantam published it in August 1996. Roughly five years for 292,000 words, which for a first volume of an epic series is unremarkable.
The trouble started with book four. The manuscript grew past the point where a printer could bind it, so Martin and his publishers split it by geography and cast instead of by chronology. A Feast for Crows took King's Landing, the Iron Islands and Dorne. A Dance with Dragons took the North and the eastern continent, running through the same span of story time. Two books, one timeline.
A Dance with Dragons then ran nearly five years past the date Martin had promised. He said late 2006 and finished the manuscript in April 2011. Along the way the draft passed 1,600 manuscript pages, the longest in the series, and editing brought it back to 1,510. The published book came out at 1,056 pages and roughly 415,000 words. Six years separated it from A Feast for Crows.
The method explains the arithmetic. Martin describes himself as a gardener rather than an architect: he plants and follows what grows instead of working from an outline. That approach produces the unpredictability the series is famous for, and at 1.7 million words with multiple continents in play it also produces chapters that resist being finished, because there's no outline to consult when one stops working.
What This Means If You're Writing a Series
First volumes in epic fantasy sell today at 120,000 to 180,000 words. Martin's 292,000 word opener was possible in 1996 because he had been publishing since the 1970s and had a decade of television writing behind him. A debut at that length now would be read as a writer who can't self-edit.
The lesson worth taking is scope control per volume. A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons exist as two books because one manuscript got past the physical limits of binding, and the split cost Martin readers, momentum and six years. If you work without an outline, set a ceiling for each book and hold it, then let the story find its shape inside that box.
For the DOS machine, the office and the working method behind the series, see the full George R.R. Martin writing routine page.
Reading how George R.R. Martin worked is the easy part. The Writer's Daily Practice gives you a page for every morning of the year, and each one ends with a prompt to get you writing.
Get the Book on Amazon →365 mornings, in paperback and Kindle.
What You Can Steal
- Set a word ceiling per volume before you draft. Book four grew past what a printer could bind, and the fix cost six years.
- Gardening scales badly. Working without an outline is fine at 100,000 words. At 1.7 million with four continents it starts eating years.
- Split by story, not by page count, if you have to split. Martin divided book four by geography and cast so each half held together, which is why both books still read as books.
- Track your manuscript pages, not your published ones. Martin has used the same measure since the 1980s, which is why his own numbers stay comparable across thirty years of work.