As BookRiot points out, the expectation of access to creators presented by the internet creates a “truly awful feedback loop of entitlement and agitation”.īrandon Sanderson, who is nothing if not prolific (and succeeded in finishing off another long-awaited fan favourite, Robert Jordan’s lengthy Wheel of Time series), told me last week that, on receipt of lengthy and demanding emails from fans “about how you’ve done something wrong, how you need to listen to them and do their vision for the character”, he tries not to engage. I’m a pretty big fan of both Martin and Rothfuss, but I’m not sure ramping up the pressure will help either author finish a book quicker.
In posts on Facebook that have since been deleted, she wrote that she had had enough, because “when authors don’t produce, it basically fucks their publishers”, and speculated that Rothfuss hadn’t “written anything for six years”. This time round, the impatience appears to have spread to Rothfuss’s editor Betsy Wollheim. Calls to lock him up have already (jokingly, I think) begun. If he didn’t, he told fans they had permission to imprison him “in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid”. Today, 29 July 2020, also happens to be the deadline that Martin gave himself last year to finish the sixth book, The Winds of Winter. In 2009, Neil Gaiman informed a fan that “writers and artists aren’t machines” and George RR Martin was “not your bitch” for having spent years writing the fifth Game of Thrones book, A Dance with Dragons (which wouldn’t be published for another two). Fan entitlement, particularly around fantasy authors, is nothing new.
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