Five books, about 1.74 million words, and no daily word count from the man who wrote them. Martin has never told anyone how much he writes in a day. What he does publish, on his blog, is a running manuscript page total, and the way that number moves explains more about the delay than any word count could.
The Five Books, Counted
The figures most often cited come from the Accelerated Reader database, which counts the text of a specific edition to assign school reading levels. A Game of Thrones comes in at 292,727 words across 73 chapters, A Clash of Kings at 318,903, A Storm of Swords at 414,604, A Feast for Crows at 295,032, and A Dance with Dragons at 414,788. That totals 1,736,054 words and 344 chapters.
Fan tallies derived from manuscript page counts run a little higher, putting the series near 1.77 million. Both sets agree on the shape. A Storm of Swords and A Dance with Dragons are the giants at roughly 415,000 apiece, and A Feast for Crows looks short only because Martin split one oversized book by point of view instead of by chronology.
For scale, War and Peace lands somewhere in the 560,000 to 590,000 range depending on the translation. The published Ice and Fire books run about three times that. A Storm of Swords on its own is roughly three quarters of Tolstoy.
Martin Counts Pages, Not Words
His writing machine runs WordStar 4.0 on a DOS box, so his native unit is the manuscript page, and every public progress report he has given uses it. A Storm of Swords came in at 1,521 manuscript pages, a figure he posted himself in 2009. A Dance with Dragons passed 1,600 before trimming. In May 2019 he said the last two volumes of the series would each run more than 1,500.
Fire and Blood came in at 989 manuscript pages, which he reported in April 2018 with characteristic precision, noting it was almost a thousand pages and then giving the exact figure anyway. Set that against A Game of Thrones at 1,088 pages and 292,727 words and you get a conversion rate: roughly 270 words to a manuscript page.
Why the Winds of Winter Number Keeps Moving
In December 2022 Martin said on Tooning Out the News that he had around 1,100 to 1,200 pages written with another 400 or 500 to go. In November 2023, speaking to a Portuguese podcast, he said he had about 1,100 pages written and hundreds more still to write. Eleven months, no net gain.
Rewriting explains it. In a 2022 publisher Q and A he said he had gone back over chapters written earlier, disliked them, and pulled them apart. A manuscript page total is a snapshot of what currently exists, and for a writer who discards, the number can go backwards while the book gets better.
He has been blunt about the pace for years. In January 2016 he posted about missing two publisher deadlines in a row and said he would stop setting new ones.
I tried, I promise you. I failed. I blew the Halloween deadline, and I've now blown the end of the year deadline.
George R.R. Martin, Not A Blog, January 2016
By one count he has published more than 500,000 words of blog posts, comments, introductions, and scripts since finishing A Dance with Dragons in 2011. Output and progress are separate things, which is the real lesson buried in his numbers.
For the full picture of how he works, including the two-computer setup and the gardener's method, see the complete 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
- Pick the unit your tool actually shows you. Martin reports manuscript pages because that is what WordStar puts on screen. A number you can read without doing arithmetic is a number you will keep tracking.
- Expect the count to go backwards. Throwing out two hundred pages you no longer believe in is the job. A progress bar that only rises will eventually make you lie to yourself.
- Stop announcing deadlines you cannot control. Martin blew two in a row and then said publicly that he would not set another. That is a reasonable response to a decade of evidence.
- Writing a lot and finishing are different skills. Half a million words of blog posts since 2011 is real writing that moved the novel nowhere.