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switch to:How Much Does An Artist Make From a Song on Spotify or iTunes Match?
Streaming, subscription-based music is the future. We’ve been hearing that claim for years now although it always seems to be right on the cusp of happening. It’s a dream for consumers, really, pay a single monthly fee and stream all of the music that you want, with no up-front cost to own each song.
But how does this ‘stream rental’ framework look on the other side of the coin, to the artist? Figuring out just how lucrative streaming services like Spotify or Apple’s
Match cloud feature, which streams you songs you already own from the cloud, is tough. Mostly, that’s because there is a lack of transparency from both parties. The artists are at times reluctant to share numbers and the streaming services don’t want those deals exposed either.
So here are some interesting numbers shared today by Josh Davison of Centro about streaming revenue garnered from his band
on both Spotify and iTunes Match. They shed what I feel is an interesting and harsh spotlight on just how little each song play nets him just under 1/3 of a cent when streamed from Apple’s cloud music service and slightly more than that from Spotify:
Correction: iTunes Match pays $0.10 per stream. Spotify actually pays us more, at $0.15 per stream.
— Josh Davison (@stringbot)
So Parks and Gardens would need to see over 3 plays for any song to get them a cent of revenue from a song on iTunes Match. And they already pay
a year just to get their music out there on these services. So they need over 15,127 plays of their songs to break even on distributing them alone. The number is better on Spotify, where they’d need to see 5,171 plays. TuneCore takes no slice of their sales.
The difference between iTunes Match and Spotify, of course, is that iTunes Match earnings are a bonus being earned on top of an outright purchase of the song. Once a user has purchased the song and a user subscribes to iTunes Match, they’re allowed to stream that song from the cloud.
Following Davison’s numbers, web developer
for popular services like Spotify, Spotify Free, iTunes Match and Rhapsody from his client . You can see that the numbers aren’t much better.
We talked about those numbers earlier, over 15k plays to break even on distributing via iTunes Match, a bit better at Spotify. But, at least in the case of these small artists, the streaming numbers aren’t even close to that. Davison says he gets ‘very few’ streams through any of the services and Buscemi broke it down by service, saying “I’m at 6 iTunes Match, 10 Rhapsody, 45 SpotifyFree, 150 Spotify Subscribed.”
The numbers aren’t really new. We’ve known for a while now just how bad of a deal streaming services were for artists that don’t have millions of fans to boost their numbers. Crikey did a
on the Australian launch of Spotify and called streaming services a ‘black hole’ for artists. It noted at the time that streaming accounted for about 42% of all record label revenues in Sweden last year, about the same as CDs. But as far as how much that made the artists, that’s a harder pill to swallow.
back in April of this year detailed the income from an independent catalog covering 87 albums and 1,280 songs. It’s numbers are actually a bit worse for Spotify, at about $.005 per stream, 1/140th of the revenue from 1 single iTunes song download.
That’s not to say that there isn’t growth, though. The data reported in this
notes that, as the user base of Spotify has grown, so has the percentage of revenue earned by his label. As of the September statement 57.7% of the revenue came from Spotify.
The moral of the story? If you hear a band that you love on your favorite streaming service then buy their stuff outright from wherever you can find it. Because they’re not exactly raking in the dough for streaming.
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1.76M followersFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of
novels by the American novelist and screenwriter . He began the first volume of the series, , in 1991 and had it published in 1996. Martin, who initially envisioned the series as a trilogy, has published five out of a planned seven volumes. The fifth and most recent volume of the series published in 2011, , took Martin six years to write. He is still writing the sixth novel, .
A Song of Ice and Fire takes place on the fictional continents
of each chapter in the story is a
perspective of a range of characters growing from nine, in the first novel, to thirty-one by the fifth. Three main stories interweave a dynastic war among several families for control of Westeros, the rising threat of the supernatural
in the northernmost reaches of Westeros, and the ambition of , the deposed king's exiled daughter, to assume the .
Martin's inspirations included the
and the French
by . A Song of Ice and Fire received praise for its diverse portrayal of women and religion, as well as its realism. An assortment of disparate and subjective points of view confronts the reader, and the success or survival of point of view characters is never assured. Within the often morally ambiguous world of A Song of Ice and Fire, questions concerning loyalty, pride, human sexuality, piety, and the morality of
frequently arise.
As of April 2015, the books have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide and, as of January 2017, have been translated into 47 languages. The fourth and fifth volumes reached the top of
upon their releases. Among the
are , , a , and several , , and .
A Song of Ice and Fire takes place in a fictional world in which seasons last for years and end unpredictably. Nearly three centuries before the events of the first novel (see ), the Seven Kingdoms of
were united under the
dynasty by Aegon I and his sisters Visenya and Rhaenys, with Aegon Targaryen becoming the first king of the whole of the continent of Westeros, save for the southerly Dorne. At the beginning of A Game of Thrones, 15 peaceful years have passed since the rebellion led by Lord
deposed and killed the last Targaryen king, Aerys II "the Mad King", and proclaimed Robert king of the Seven Kingdoms, with a nine year long summer coming to an end.
The principal story chronicles the power struggle for the Iron Throne among the great Houses of Westeros following the death of King Robert in A Game of Thrones. Robert's heir apparent, the 13-year old , is immediately proclaimed king through the machinations of his mother, Queen . When Lord , Robert's closest friend and chief advisor, discovers that Joffrey and his siblings are the product of incest between Cersei and her twin brother , Eddard attempts to unseat Joffrey but is betrayed and executed for treason. In response, Robert's brothers
both lay separate claims to the throne. During this period of instability, two of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros attempt to become independent from the Iron Throne: Eddard's eldest son
is proclaimed King in the North, while Lord
desires to recover the sovereignty of his region, the Iron Islands. The so-called "War of the Five Kings" is in full progress by the middle of the second book, .
The second story takes place in the far north of Westeros, where an 8,000-year-old wall of ice, simply called "", defends the Seven Kingdoms from . The Wall's sentinels, the Sworn Brotherhood of the , also protect the realm from the incursions of the "" or "Free Folk", who are humans living north of the Wall. The Night's Watch story is told primarily through the point of view of , Eddard's . Jon follows the footsteps of his uncle
and joins the Watch at a young age, rising quickly through the ranks, eventually becoming Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. In the third volume, , the Night's Watch storyline becomes increasingly entangled with the War of the Five Kings.
The third story follows , daughter of Aerys, the last Targaryen king. On the continent of Essos, east of Westeros , Daenerys is married off by her elder brother
to a powerful warlord, but slowly becomes an independent and intelligent ruler in her own right. Her rise to power is aided by the historic birth of three , hatched from eggs given to her as wedding gifts. The three dragons soon become not only a symbol of her bloodline and her legitimate claim to the throne, but also devastating weapons of war.
Books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series are first published in hardcover and are later re-released as paperback editions. In the UK,
publishes special slipcased editions. The series has also been translated into more than 30 languages. All page totals given below are for the US first editions.[]
US release
August 1996
February 1999
November 2000
November 2005
Forthcoming
A Dream of Spring
Forthcoming
at Archipelacon in , 2015.
George R. R. Martin was already a successful fantasy and sci-fi author and TV writer before writing his A Song of Ice and Fire book series. Martin had published his first short story in 1971 and his first novel in 1977. By the mid-1990s, he had won three , two , and other awards for his short fiction. Although his early books were well-received within the fantasy fiction community, his readership remained relatively small and Martin took on jobs as a writer in Hollywood in the mid-1980s. He worked principally on the
throughout 1986 and on
until 1990, but he also developed his own TV pilots and wrote feature film scripts. He grew frustrated that his pilots and screenplays were not getting made and that TV-related production limitations like budgets and episode lengths were forcing him to cut characters and trim battle scenes. This pushed Martin back towards writing books, where he did not have to worry about compromising the size of his imagination. Admiring the works of
in his childhood, he wanted to write an epic fantasy, though he did not have any specific ideas.
When Martin was between Hollywood projects in the summer of 1991, he started writing a new science fiction novel called Avalon. After three chapters, he had a vivid idea of a boy seeing a man's beheading and finding direwolves in the snow, which would eventually become the first non-prologue chapter of A Game of Thrones. Putting Avalon aside, Martin finished this chapter in a few days and grew certain that it was part of a longer story. After a few more chapters, Martin perceived his new book as a fantasy story and started making maps and genealogies. However, the writing of this book was interrupted for a few years when Martin returned to Hollywood to produce his TV series
had ordered but ultimately never aired.
"The first scene...chapter one of the first book, the chapter where they find the direwolf pups...just came to me out of nowhere. I was...at work on a different novel, and suddenly I saw that scene. It didn't belong in the novel I was writing, but it came to me so vividly that I had to sit down and write it, and by the time I did, it led to a second chapter, and the second chapter was the Catelyn chapter where Ned has just come back."
—George R. R. Martin in 2014
In 1994, Martin gave his agent, , the first 200 pages and a two-page story projection as part of a planned trilogy with the novels A Dance with Dragons and The Winds of Winter intended to follow. When Martin had still not reached the novel's end at 1400 manuscript pages, he felt that the series needed to be four and eventually six books long, which he imagined as two linked trilogies of one long story. Martin chose A Song of Ice and Fire as the overall series title: Martin saw the struggle of the cold Others and the fiery dragons as one possible meaning for "Ice and Fire", whereas the word "song" had previously appeared in Martin's book titles
and Songs the Dead Men Sing, stemming from his obsessions with songs. Martin also named 's 1920 poem "" and cultural associations such as passion versus betrayal as possible influences for the series' title.
The revised finished manuscript for A Game of Thrones was 1088 pages long (without the appendices), with the publication following in August 1996. Wheel of Time author
had written a short endorsement for the cover that was influential in ensuring the book's and hence series' early success with fantasy readers. Blood of the Dragon, a pre-release sample novella drawn from Daenerys's chapters, went on to win the 1997 Hugo Award for Best Novella.
The 300 pages removed from the A Game of Thrones manuscript served as the opening of the second book, entitled . It was released in February 1999 in the United States, with a manuscript length (without appendices) of 1184 pages. A Clash of Kings was the first book of the A Song of Ice and Fire series to make the best-seller lists, reaching 13 on
in 1999. After the success of
films, Martin received his first inquiries to the rights of the A Song of Ice and Fire series from various producers and filmmakers.
Martin was several months late turning in the third book, . The last chapter he had written was about the "Red Wedding", a pivotal scene notable for its violence (see ). A Storm of Swords was 1521 pages in manuscript (without appendices), causing problems for many of Martin's publishers around the world.
published A Storm of Swords in a single volume in the United States in November 2000, whereas some other-language editions were divided into two, three, or even four volumes. A Storm of Swords debuted at number 12 in the New York Times bestseller list.
After A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords, Martin originally intended to write three more books. The fourth book, tentatively titled A Dance with Dragons, was to focus on Daenerys Targaryen's return to Westeros and the associated conflicts. Martin wanted to set this story five years after A Storm of Swords so that the younger characters could grow older and the dragons grow larger. Agreeing with his publishers early on that the new book should be shorter than A Storm of Swords, Martin set out to write the novel closer in length to A Clash of Kings. A long prologue was to establish what had happened in the meantime, initially just as one chapter of
on the Iron Islands at the Kingsmoot. Since the events on the Iron Islands were to have an impact in the book and could not be told with existing POV characters, Martin eventually introduced three new viewpoints.
In 2001, Martin was still optimistic that the fourth installment might be released in the last quarter of 2002. However, the five-year gap did not work for all characters during writing. On one hand, Martin was unsatisfied with covering the events during the gap solely through flashbacks and internal retrospection. On the other hand, it was implausible to have nothing happen for five years. After working on the book for about a year, Martin realized he needed an additional interim book, which he called . The book would pick up the story immediately after the third book, and Martin scrapped the idea of a five-year gap. The material of the written 250-page prologue was mixed in as new viewpoint characters from Dorne and the Iron Islands. These expanded storylines and the resulting story interactions complicated the plot for Martin.
The manuscript length of A Feast for Crows eventually surpassed A Storm of Swords. Martin was reluctant to make the necessary deep cuts to get the book down to publishable length, as that would have compromised the story he had in mind. Printing the book in "microtype on onion skin paper and giving each reader a magnifying glass" was also not an option for him. On the other hand, Martin rejected the publishers' idea of splitting the narrative chronologically into A Feast for Crows, Parts One and Two. Being already late with the book, Martin had not even started writing all characters' stories and also objected to ending the first book without any resolution for its many viewpoint characters as in previous books.
With the characters spread out across the world, a friend suggested that Martin divide the story geographically into two volumes, of which A Feast for Crows would be the first. This approach would give Martin the room to complete his commenced story arcs as he had originally intended, which he still felt was the best approach years later. Martin moved the unfinished characters' stories set in the east (Essos) and north (Winterfell and the Wall) into the next book, A Dance with Dragons, and left A Feast for Crows to cover the events on Westeros, King's Landing, the Riverlands, Dorne, and the Iron Islands. Both books begin immediately after the end of A Storm of Swords, running in parallel instead of sequentially, and involve different casts of characters with only little overlap. Martin split Arya's chapters into both books after having already moved the three other most popular characters (Jon Snow, Tyrion, and Daenerys) into A Dance with Dragons.
Upon its release in October 2005 in the UK and November 2005 in the US, A Feast for Crows went straight to the top of
bestseller list. Among the positive reviewers was Lev Grossman of , who dubbed Martin "the American Tolkien". However, fans and critics alike were disappointed with the story split that left the fates of several popular characters unresolved after A Storm of Swords' cliffhanger ending. With A Dance with Dragons said to be half-finished, Martin mentioned in the epilogue of A Feast for Crows that the next volume would be released by the next year. However, planned release dates were repeatedly pushed back. Meanwhile,
acquired the rights to turn A Song of Ice and Fire into a dramatic series in 2007 and aired the first of ten episodes covering A Game of Thrones in April 2011.
With around 1600 pages in manuscript length, A Dance with Dragons was eventually published in July 2011 after six years of writing, longer in page count and writing time than any of the preceding four novels. The story of A Dance with Dragons catches up and goes beyond A Feast for Crows around two-thirds into the book, but nevertheless covers less story than Martin had intended, omitting at least one planned large battle sequence and leaving several character threads ending in cliff-hangers. Martin attributed the delay mainly to his untangling "the
knot", which the interviewer understood as "making the chronology and characters mesh up as various threads converged on [Daenerys]". Martin also acknowledged spending too much time on rewriting and perfecting the story, but soundly rejected the theories of some of his critics that he had lost interest in the series or would bide his time to make more money.
Martin believes the last two volumes of the series will be big books of 1500 manuscript pages each. The sixth book will be called , taking the title of the last book of the originally planned trilogy. Displeased with the provisional title A Time for Wolves for the final volume, Martin ultimately announced A Dream of Spring as the title for the seventh book in 2006. Martin said in March 2012 that the final two novels will take readers farther north than any of the previous books, and that the Others will appear in the book.
will resolve the cliffhangers from A Dance with Dragons early on and "will open with the two big battles that [the fifth book] was building up to, the battle in the ice and the battle [...] of Slaver's Bay. And then take it from there." By the middle of 2010, Martin had already finished five chapters of The Winds of Winter from the viewpoints of , , , and , accumulating to around 100 completed pages. After the publication of A Dance with Dragons in 2011, Martin announced he would return to writing in January 2012. He spent the meantime on book tours, conventions, and continued working on his
companion guide and a new
In December 2011, Martin posted a chapter from The Winds of Winter fr several other chapters have been made public since. Four hundred pages of the sixth novel had been written as of October 2012, although Martin considers only 200 as "really finished"; the rest needs revising. In 2011, Martin gave three years as a realistic estimate for finishing the sixth book at a good pace, but said ultimately the book "will be done when it's done", acknowledging that his publication estimates had been too optimistic in the past. Martin did not intend to separate the characters geographically again.
In 2015 there were indications that the book would be published before the
of the HBO show but in early January 2016 Martin confirmed that he had not met an end-of-year deadline that he had established with his publisher for release of the book before the sixth season. He added that there was "a lot still left to write" and that completion of the book was "months away still...if the writing goes well." Martin also revealed there had been a previous deadline of October 2015 that he had considered achievable in May 2015, and that in September 2015 he had still considered the end-of-year deadline achievable. He further confirmed that some of the plot of the book might be revealed in the upcoming season of Game of Thrones. In February 2016, Martin stated that he dropped all his editing projects except for , and that he would not be writing any teleplays, screenplays, short stories, introductions or forewords before delivering The Winds of Winter.
During the Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico in early December 2016, Martin offered the following hint as to the tone of this book:
There are a lot of dark chapters right now ... I've been telling you for 20 years that winter was coming. Winter is the time when things die, and cold and ice and darkness fill the world, so this is not going to be the happy feel-good that people may be hoping for. Some of the characters [are] in very dark places.
Martin is firm about ending the series with the seventh novel "until I decide not to be firm". With his stated goal of telling the story from beginning to end, he will not truncate the story to fit into an arbitrary number of volumes. He knows the ending in broad strokes as well as the future of the main characters, and will finish the series with bittersweet elements where not everyone will live happily ever after. Martin hopes to write an ending similar to
that he felt gave the story a satisfying depth and resonance. On the other hand, Martin noted the challenge to avoid a situation like , which left some fans disappointed by deviating too far from their own theories and desires. In 2015, Martin said that he was not writing A Dream of Spring together with The Winds of Winter, and in early 2016, he said he did not believe A Dream of Spring would be published before the last season of the HBO show.
Martin offered the following hint as to how the series would conclude during a Q&A at the Guadalajara International Book Fair. "I'm not going to tell you how I'm going to end my book, but I suspect the overall flavor is going to be as much bittersweet as it is happy."
Early during the development of the TV series, Martin told major plot points to producers
and . (The New York Times reported in 2011 that, at age 62, Martin was by all accounts in robust health.) Martin was confident he would have published at least The Winds of Winter before the TV series overtook him. Nevertheless, there was general concern about whether Martin would be able to stay ahead of the show. As a result, head writers Benioff and Weiss learned more future plot points from Martin in 2013 to help them set up the show's new possible seasons. This included the end stories for all the core characters. Deviations from the books' storylines are also being considered, but a two-year show hiatus to wait for new books is not an option for them as the child actors continue to grow and the show's popularity would wane. Martin indicated he would not permit another writer to finish the book series. On January 2, 2016, Martin confirmed that the sixth volume would not be published before the start of the sixth season of the HBO series.
Regarding A Song of Ice and Fire as his , Martin is certain never to write anything on this scale again and would only return to this fictional universe in the context of stand-alone novels. He prefers to write stories about characters from other A Song of Ice and Fire periods of history such as his
project, instead of continuing the series directly. A possible future side project is a prequel set during Aegon's conquest of Westeros. Martin said he would love to return to writing short stories, novellas, novelettes, and stand-alone novels from diverse genres such as science fiction, horror, fantasy, or even a murder mystery. However, he will see if his audience follows him after publishing his next project.
George R. R. Martin believes the most profound influences to be the ones experienced in childhood. Having read , , , , , , , and
in his youth, Martin never categorized these authors' literature into science fiction, fantasy, or horror and will write from any genre as a result. Martin classified A Song of Ice and Fire as "", and specifically named
as very influential for the writing of the series. One of his favorite authors is , although Martin considered the series not particularly Vancean.
Martin experienced some harsh winters when living in
a few years in the 70s, and suspects these winters had an infl "I think a lot of the stuff in A Game of Thrones, the snow and ice and freezing, comes from my memories of Dubuque".
"[Martin's Ice and Fire series] was groundbreaking (at least for me) in all kinds of ways. Above all, the books were extremely unpredictable, especially in a genre where readers have come to expect the intensely predictable. [...] A Game of Thrones was profoundly shocking when I first read it, and fundamentally changed my notions about what could be done with epic fantasy."
—Fantasy writer
The medieval setting has been the traditional background for epic fantasy. However, where historical fiction leaves versed readers knowing the historical outcome, original characters may increase suspense and empathy for the readers. Yet Martin felt historical fiction, particularly when set during the Middle Ages, had an excitement, grittiness, and a realness to it that was absent in fantasy with a similar backdrop. Thus, he wanted to combine the realism of historical fiction with the magic appeal of the best fantasies, subduing magic in favor of battles and political intrigue. He also decided to avoid the conventional good versus evil setting typical for the genre, using the fight between Achilles and Hector in 's , where no one stands out as either a hero or a villain, as an example of what he wants to achieve with his books.
Martin is widely credited with broadening the fantasy fiction genre for adult content, including incest, paedophilia, and adultery. For 's Writing for , Amber Taylor assessed the novels as
with vulnerable characters to which readers become emotionally attached.
found in 2000 that Martin's mature descriptions were "far more frank than those found in the works of other fantasy authors", although Martin assessed the fantasy genre to have become rougher-edged a decade later and that some writers' work was going beyond the mature themes of his novels.
called Martin's series the most successful and popular example of the emerging subgenre of
fantasy, influencing other writers associated with that style, such as .
Setting out to write something on an epic scale, Martin projected to write three books of 800 manuscript pages in the very early stages of the series. His original 1990s contract specified one-year deadlines for his previous literary works, but Martin only realized later that his new books were longer and hence required more writing time. In 2000, Martin planned to take 18 months to two years for each volume and projected the last of the planned six books to be released five or six years later. However, with A Song of Ice and Fire series evolving into the biggest and most ambitious story he has ever attempted writing, he still has two more books to write as of 2018. Martin said he needed to be in his own office in
to immerse himself in the fictional world and write. As of 2011, Martin was still typing his fiction on a
computer with . He begins each day at 10 am with rewriting and polishing the previous day's work, and may write all day or struggle to write anything. Excised material and previous old versions are saved to be possibly re-inserted at a later time. Martin does not consider A Song of Ice and Fire a "series" but a single story published in several volumes.
A Song of Ice and Fire series was partly inspired by the , a series of dynastic civil wars for the throne of England. This painting by
demanding that his defeated enemies be taken from .
Martin set the A Song of Ice and Fire story in a
inspired by Tolkien's writing. Unlike Tolkien, who created entire languages, mythologies, and histories for Middle-earth long before writing , Martin usually starts with a rough sketch of an imaginary world that he improvises into a workable fictional setting along the way. He described his writing as coming from a subconscious level in "almost a daydreaming process", and his stories, which have a mythic rather than a scientific core, draw from emotion instead of rationality. Martin employs maps and a cast list topping 60 pages in the fourth volume, but keeps most information in his mind. His imagined backstory remains subject to change until published, and only the novels count as . Martin does not intend to publish his private notes after the series is finished.
Martin drew much inspiration from actual history for the series, having several bookcases filled with medieval history for research and visiting historic European landmarks. For an American who speaks only English, the history of England proved the easiest source of medieval history for him, giving the series a British rather than a German or Spanish historic flavor. For example, Ned and Robb Stark resemble
and his son , and Queen Cersei resembles both
and . Martin immersed himself in many diverse medieval topics such as clothing, food, feasting, and tournaments, to have the facts at hand if needed during writing. The series was in particular influenced by the , the , the , and the , although Martin refrained from making any direct adaptations. Martin was also inspired by the French historical novels
by , which are about the
in the 13th and 14th centuries.
The story is written to follow principal landmarks with an ultimate destination, but leaves Martin room for improvisation. On occasion, improvised details significantly affected the planned story. By the fourth book, Martin kept more private notes than ever before to keep track of the many subplots, which became so detailed and sprawling by the fifth book as to be unwieldy. Martin's editors, copy editors, and readers monitor for accidental mistakes, although some errors have slipped into publication. For instance, Martin has inconsistently referred to certain characters' eye colors, and has described a horse as being of one sex and then another.
Number of chapters per point-of-view character
POV character
Prologue/Epilogue
Total (characters)
The books are divided into chapters, each one narrated in the
through the eyes of a
character, an approach Martin learned himself as a young journalism student. Beginning with nine POV characters in A Game of Thrones, the number of POV characters grows to a total of 31 in A Dance with Dragons (see table). The short-lived one-time POV characters are mostly restricted to the
and . David Orr of
noted the story importance of "the
(good guys), the
(at least one good guy, or girl), the
(conniving), the
(mostly conniving), the
(mixed bag), the
(unclear) and the
(ditto), most of whom are feverishly endeavoring to advance their ambitions and ruin their enemies, preferably unto death". However, as 's
noted, readers "experience the struggle for Westeros from all sides at once", such that "every fight is both triumph and tragedy [...] and everybody is both hero and villain at the same time".
Modeled on The Lord of the Rings, the story of A Song of Ice and Fire begins with a tight focus on a small group (with everyone in , except Daenerys) and then splits into separate stories. The storylines are to converge again, but finding the turning point in this complex series has been difficult for Martin and has slowed down his writing. Depending on the interview, Martin is said to have reached the turning point in A Dance with Dragons, or to not quite have reached it yet in the books. The series' structure of multiple POVs and interwoven storylines was inspired by , a multi-authored shared universe book series edited by Martin since 1985. As the sole author, Martin begins each new book with an outline of the chapter order and may write a few successive chapters from a single character's viewpoint instead of working chronologically. The chapters are later rearranged to optimize character intercutting, chronology, and suspense.
Influenced by his television and film scripting background, Martin tries to keep readers engrossed by ending each A Song of Ice and Fire chapter with a tense or revelational moment, a twist or a , similar to a TV . Scriptwriting has also taught him the technique of "cutting out the fat and leaving the muscle", which is the final stage of completing a book, a technique that brought the page count in A Dance with Dragons down almost eighty pages. Dividing the continuous A Song of Ice and Fire story into books is much harder for Martin. Each book shall represent a phase of the journey that ends in closure for most characters. A smaller portion of characters is left with clear-cut cliffhangers to make sure readers come back for the next installment, although A Dance with Dragons had more cliffhangers than Martin originally intended. Both one-time and regular POV characters are designed to have full character arcs ending in tragedy or triumph, and are written to hold the readers' interest and not be skipped in reading. Main characters are killed off so that the reader will not rely on the hero to come through unscathed and will instead feel the character's fear with each page turn.
The unresolved larger narrative arc encourages speculation about future story events. According to Martin, much of the key to A Song of Ice and Fire's future lies over a dozen years in the fictional past, of which each volume reveals more. Events planned from the beginning are foreshadowed, although Martin is careful not to make the story predictable. The viewpoint characters, who serve as , may clarify or provide different perspectives on past events. Therefore, what the readers believe to be true may not necessarily be true.
Regarding the characters as the heart of the story, Martin planned the epic A Song of Ice and Fire to have a large cast of characters and many different settings from the beginning. A Feast for Crows has a 63-page list of characters, with many of the thousands of characters mentioned only in passing or disappearing from view for long stretches. When Martin adds a new family to the ever-growing number of
in the appendices, he devises a secret about the personality or fate of the family members. However, their backstory remains subject to change until written down in the story. Martin drew most character inspiration from history (without directly translating historical figures) and his own experiences, but also from the manners of his friends, acquaintances, and people of public interest. Martin aims to "make my characters real and to make them human, characters who have good and bad, noble and selfish well-mixed in their natures". Jeff VanderMeer of the
remarked that "Martin's devotion to fully inhabiting his characters, for better or worse, creates the unstoppable momentum in his novels and contains an implied criticism of Tolkien's moral simplicity" (see ).
Martin deliberately ignored the writing rule of never giving two characters names starting with the same letter. Instead, character names reflect the naming systems in various European family histories, where particular names were associated with specific
and where even the secondary families assigned the same names repeatedly. The story of A Song of Ice and Fire therefore has children called "Robert" in honor of King Robert of House Baratheon, a "Brandon" in every other generation of the Starks in commemoration of Brandon the Builder (of the Wall), and the syllable "Ty" commonly occurring in given names of House Lannister. Confident that readers would pay attention, Martin distinguished people sharing a
by adding numbers or locations to their given names (e.g. ). The family names were designed in association with ethnic groups (see ): the First Men in the North of Westeros had very simply descriptive names like Stark and Strong, whereas the descendants of the Andal invaders in the South have more elaborate, undescriptive house names like Lannister or Arryn, and the Targaryens and Valyrians from the Eastern continent have the most exotic names with the letter Y.
All characters are designed to speak with their own internal voices to capture their views of the world. The Atlantic pondered whether Martin ultimately intended the readers to sympathize with characters on both sides of the Lannister–Stark feud long before plot developments force them to make their emotional choices. Contrary to most conventional epic fantasies, the characters of A Song of Ice and Fire are vulnerable so that, according to The Atlantic, the reader "cannot be sure that good shall triumph, which makes those instances where it does all the more exulting." Martin gets emotionally involved in the characters' lives during writing, which makes the chapters with dreadful events sometimes very difficult to write. Seeing the world through the characters' eyes requires a certain amount of empathy with them, including the villains, all of whom he has said he loves as if they were his own children. Martin found that some characters had minds of their own and took his writing in different directions. He returns to the intended story if it does not work out, but these detours sometimes prove more rewarding for him.
Arya Stark, Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow, and Daenerys Targaryen generate the most feedback from readers. Martin has stated that Tyrion is his personal favorite, as the grayest of the gray characters, with his cunning and wit making him the most fun to write. Martin has also said that Bran Stark is the hardest character to write. As the character most deeply involved in magic, Bran's story needs to be handled carefully within the supernatural aspects of the books. Bran is also the youngest viewpoint character, and has to deal with the series' adult themes like grief, loneliness, and anger. Martin set out to have the young characters grow up faster between chapters, but, as it was implausible for a character to take two months to respond, a finished book represents very little time passed. Martin hoped the planned five-year break would ease the situation and age the children to almost adults in terms of the Seven Kingdoms, but he later dropped the five-year gap (see section ).
Although involving dragons and sorcery, A Song of Ice and Fire series de-emphasizes magic as compared to many other epic fantasy works (emblem of 's 1905 fantasy work The Face in the Pool).
Although modern fantasy may often embrace strangeness, A Song of Ice and Fire series is generally praised for what is perceived as a sort of medieval realism. Believing that magic should be used moderately in the epic fantasy genre, Martin set out to make the story feel more like historical fiction than contemporary fantasy, with less emphasis on magic and sorcery and more on battles, political intrigue, and the characters. Though the amount of magic has gradually increased throughout the story, the series is still to end with less overt magic than most contemporary fantasies. In Martin's eyes, literary effective magic needs to represent strange and dangerous forces beyond human comprehension, not advanced alien technologies or formulaic spells. As such, the characters understand only the natural aspects of their world, but not the magical elements like the Others.
Since Martin drew on historical sources to build the world of A Song of Ice and Fire , Damien G. Walter of
saw a strong resemblance between Westeros and England in the period of the . The Atlantic's Adam Serwer regarded A Song of Ice and Fire as "more a story of politics than one of heroism, a story about humanity wrestling with its baser obsessions than fulfilling its glorious potential", where the emergent power struggle stems from the feudal system's repression and not from the fight between good and evil. Martin not only wanted to reflect the frictions of the medieval class structures in the novels, but also explore the consequences of the leaders' decisions, as general goodness does not automatically make competent leaders and vice versa.
A common theme in the fantasy genre is the battle between , which Martin rejects for not mirroring the real world. Attracted to gray characters, Martin instead endorses 's view that only the human heart in conflict with itself was worth writing about. Martin explores the questions of redemption and character change in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. The multiple viewpoint structure allows characters to be explored from many sides, such that the supposed villains can provide their viewpoint.
Although fantasy comes from an imaginative realm, Martin sees an honest necessity to reflect the real world where people die sometimes ugly deaths, even beloved people. Main characters are killed off so that the reader will not expect the supposed hero to survive, and instead will feel the same tension and fear that the characters might. The novels also reflect the substantial death rates in war. The deaths of supernumerary extras or orcs have no major effect on readers, whereas a friend's death has much more emotional impact. Martin prefers a hero's sacrifice to say something profound about human nature.
According to Martin, the fantasy genre rarely focuses on sex and sexuality, instead often treating sexuality in a juvenile way or neglecting it completely. Martin, however, considers sexuality an important driving force in human life that should not be excluded from the narrative. Providing sensory detail for an immersive experience is more important than plot advancement for Martin, who aims to let the readers experience the novels' sex scenes, "whether it's a great transcendent, exciting, mind blowing sex, or whether it's disturbing, twisted, dark sex, or disappointing perfunctory sex." Martin was fascinated by medieval contrasts where knights venerated their ladies with poems and wore their favors in tournaments while their armies mindlessly raped women in wartime. The non-existent concept of adolescence in the Middle Ages served as a model for Daenerys' sexual activity at the age of 13 in the books. The novels also allude to the incestuous practices in the
to keep their bloodlines pure.
Martin provides a variety of female characters to explore the place of women in a patriarchal society. Writing all characters as human beings with the same basic needs, dreams, and influences, his female characters are to cover the same wide spectrum of human traits as the males.
stated in 2000 that "few would dispute that Martin's most monumental achievement to date has been the groundbreaking A Song of Ice and Fire historical fantasy series", for which reviews have been "orders of magnitude better" than for his previous works, as Martin described to The New Yorker. In 2007,
magazine described the series as a "superb fantasy saga" that "raised Martin to a whole new level of success". Shortly before the release of A Dance with Dragons in 2011, Bill Sheehan of
was sure that "no work of fantasy has generated such anticipation since 's final duel with Voldemort", and Ethan Sacks of
saw the series turning Martin into a darling of literary critics as well as mainstream readers, which was "rare for a fantasy genre that's often dismissed as garbage not fit to line the bottom of a dragon's cage". 's
The success is all the more remarkable because [the series debuted] without mass market publicity or any kind of buzz in the fantasy/SF scene. George R. R. Martin earned his following the hard way, by word of mouth, by hooking his characters into the psyche of his readers to an extent that most writers of fantasy only dream of.
noted in 2000 that "Martin may not rival
or , but he ranks with such accomplished medievalists of fantasy as
and ." After the fourth volume came out in 2005, 's Lev Grossman considered Martin a "major force for evolution in fantasy" and proclaimed him "the American Tolkien", explaining that, although Martin was "[not] the best known of America's straight-up fantasy writers" at the time and would "never win a
or a  ... his skill as a crafter of narrative exceeds that of almost any literary novelist writing today". As Grossman said in 2011, the phrase American Tolkien "has stuck to [Martin], as it was meant to", being picked up by the media including
("He's much better than that"), the New Yorker,
("an acclaim that borders on fantasy blasphemy"), The Globe and Mail, and USA Today. Time magazine named Martin one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2011, and USA Today named George R.R. Martin their Author of the Year 2011.
According to The Globe and Mail's John Barber, Martin manages simultaneously to master and transcend the genre so that "Critics applaud the depth of his characterizations and lack of cliché in books that are nonetheless replete with dwarves and dragons". Publishers Weekly gave favorable reviews to the first three A Song of Ice and Fire novels at their points of release, saying that A Game of Thrones had "superbly developed characters, accomplished prose and sheer bloody-mindedness", that A Clash of Kings was "notable particularly for the lived-in quality of [their fictional world and] for the comparatively modest role of magic", and that A Storm of Swords was one "of the more rewarding examples of gigantism in contemporary fantasy". However, they found that A Feast For Crows as the fourth installment "sorely misses its other half. The slim pickings here are tasty, but in no way satisfying." Their review for A Dance with Dragons repeated points of criticism for the fourth volume, and said that, although "The new volume has a similar feel to Feast", "Martin keeps it fresh by focusing on popular characters [who were] notably absent from the previous book."
According to the , "Martin's brilliance in evoking atmosphere through description is an enduring hallmark of his fiction, the settings much more than just props on a painted stage", and the novels captivate readers with "complex storylines, fascinating characters, great dialogue, perfect pacing, and the willingness to kill off even his major characters".
remarked that "the story weaves through differing points of view in a skillful mix of observation, narration and well-crafted dialogue that illuminates both character and plot with fascinating style", and David Orr of The New York Times found that "All of his hundreds of characters have grace notes of history and personality that advance a plot line. Every town has an elaborately recalled series of triumphs and troubles." Salon.com's Andrew Leonard "couldn't stop reading Martin because my desire to know what was going to happen combined with my absolute inability to guess what would happen and left me helpless before his sorcery. At the end, I felt shaken and exhausted."
advised reading the novels with an A Song of Ice and Fire encyclopedia at hand to "catch all the layered, subtle hints and details that [Martin] leaves throughout his books. If you pay attention, you will be rewarded and questions will be answered."
Among the most critical voices were Sam Jordison and Michael Hann, both of The Guardian. Jordison detailed his misgivings about A Game of Thrones in a 2009 review and summarized "It's daft. It's unsophisticated. It's cartoonish. And yet, I couldn't stop reading .... Archaic absurdity aside, Martin's writing is excellent. His dialogue is snappy and frequently funny. His descriptive prose is immediate and atmospheric, especially when it comes to building a sense of deliciously dark foreboding [of the long impending winter]." Hann did not consider the novels to stand out from the general fantasy genre, despite Martin's alterations to fantasy convention, although he rediscovered his childhood's views:
That when things are, on the whole, pretty crappy [in the real world], it's a deep joy to dive headfirst into something so completely immersive, something from which there is no need to surface from hours at a time. And if that immersion involves dragons, magic, wraiths from beyond death, shapeshifting wolves and banished princes, so be it.
Sales performance of A Song of Ice and Fire series in the New York Times combined print and e-book fiction bestseller list in 2011 between the airing of the Game of Thrones pilot episode and the publication of A Dance with Dragons.
The reported overall sales figures of the A Song of Ice and Fire series vary. The New Yorker said in April 2011 (before the publication of A Dance with Dragons) that more than 15 million A Song of Ice and Fire books had been sold worldwide, a figure repeated by The Globe and Mail in July 2011. Reuters reported in September 2013 that the books including print, digital and audio versions have sold more than 24 million copies in North America.
reported more than six million sold copies in North America by May 2011. USA Today reported 8.5 million copies in print and digital overall in July 2011, and over 12 million sold copies in print in December 2011. The series has been translated into more than 20 USA Today reported the fifth book to be translated into over 40 languages. Forbes estimated that Martin was the 12th highest-earning author worldwide in 2011 at $15 million.
Martin's publishers initially expected A Game of Thrones to be a best-seller, but the first installment did not even reach any lower positions in bestseller list. This left Martin unsurprised, as it is "a fool's game to think anything is going to be successful or to count on it". However, the book slowly won the passionate advocacy of independent booksellers and the book's popularity grew by word of mouth. The series' popularity skyrocketed in subsequent volumes, with the second and third volume making
in 1999 and 2000, respectively. The series gained Martin's old writings new attention, and Martin's American publisher
was to reprint his out-of-print solo novels.
The fourth installment, A Feast for Crows, was an immediate best-seller at its 2005 release, hitting number one on "The New York Times" hardcover fiction bestseller list November 27, 2005, which for a fantasy novel suggested that Martin's books were attracting mainstream readers. The paperback edition of A Game of Thrones reached its 34th printing in 2010, surpassing the one million mark. Before it even premiered, the TV series had boosted sales of the book series, with A Song of Ice and Fire approaching triple-digit growth in year-on-year sales. Bantam was looking forward to seeing the tie-ins boost sales further, and Martin's British publisher
expected readers to rediscover their other epic fantasy literature. With a reported 4.5 million copies of the first four volumes in print in early 2011, the four volumes re-appeared on the paperback fiction bestseller lists in the second quarter of 2011.
At its point of publication in July 2011, A Dance with Dragons was in its sixth print with more than 650,000 hardbacks in print. It also had the highest single and first-day sales of any new fiction title published in 2011 at that point, with 170,000 hardcovers, 110,000 e-books, and 18,000 audio books reportedly sold on the first day. A Dance with Dragons reached the top of The New York Times bestseller list on July 31, 2011. Unlike most other big titles, the fifth volume sold more physical than digital copies early on, but nevertheless, Martin became the tenth author to sell 1 million
e-books. All five volumes and the four-volume boxed set were among the top 100 best-selling books in the United States in 2011 and 2012.
The TV series has contributed significantly boosting sales of both the books and collectibles like box-sets, merchandise, and other items. The TV series also contributed in increasing the geographic coverage of the books, introducing new customers in emerging countries like India and Brazil to the book series. All this has significantly increased the overall book sales.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Martin's novels had slowly earned him a reputation in science fiction circles, although he said to only have received a few fans' letters a year in the pre-internet days. The publication of A Game of Thrones caused Martin's following to grow, with fan sites springing up and a -like society of followers evolving that meet regularly. Westeros.org, one of the main A Song of Ice and Fire fansites with about seventeen thousand registered members as of 2011, was established in 1999 by a Swedish-based fan of Cuban-American descent, Elio M. García, Jr., their involvement with Martin's work has now become semi-professional. The Brotherhood Without Banners, an unofficial fan club operating globally, was formed in 2001. Their founders and other longtime members are among Martin's good friends.
Martin runs an official website and administers a lively blog with the assistance of Ty Franck. He also interacts with fandom by answering emails and letters, although he stated in 2005 that their sheer numbers might leave them unanswered for years. Since there are different types of conventions nowadays, he tends to go to three or four science-fiction conventions a year simply to go back to his roots and meet friends. He does not read message boards anymore, so that his writing will not be influenced by fans foreseeing twists and interpreting characters differently from what he intended.
"After all, as some of you like to point out in your emails, I am sixty years old and fat, and you don't want me to 'pull a ' on you and deny you your book. Okay, I've got the message. You don't want me doing anything except A Song of Ice and Fire. Ever. (Well, maybe it's okay if I take a leak once in a while?)"
—George R. R. Martin on his blog in 2009
While Martin calls the majority of his fans "great", and enjoys interacting with them, some of them turned against him because of the six years it took to release A Dance with Dragons. A movement of disaffected fans called GRRuMblers formed in 2009, creating sites such as Finish the Book, George and Is Winter Coming?. When fans' vocal impatience for A Dance with Dragons peaked shortly after, Martin issued a statement called "To My Detractors" on his blog that received media attention. The New York Times noted that it was not uncommon for Martin to be mobbed at book signings either. The New Yorker called this "an astonishing amount of effort to devote to denouncing the author of books one professes to love. Few contemporary authors can claim to have inspired such passion."
nominee, 1997
(1998) – Locus Award winner, Nebula Award nominee, 1999
(2000) – Locus Award winner,
and Nebula Awards nominee, 2001
(2005) – Hugo, Locus, and
nominee, 2006
(2011) – Locus Award winner, Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award nominee, 2012
Martin has written several
novellas. The
series, three novellas set ninety years before the events of the novel series, feature the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire "Egg", the later King Aegon V Targaryen. The stories have no direct connection to the plot of A Song of Ice and Fire, although both characters are mentioned in A Storm of Swords and A Feast For Crows, respectively. The first installment, The Hedge Knight, was published in the 1998 anthology . The Sworn Sword followed in 2003, published in . Both were later adapted into . The third novella, titled The Mystery Knight, was first published in the 2010 anthology , and is planned to be adapted as a graphic novel as well. Martin planned to release the first three novellas as one collection in 2014. Up to eight further Dunk and Egg installments are planned.
The novella
appeared in 's 2013 anthology , and explains some of the Targaryen backstory two centuries before the events of the novels. , published in the 2014 anthology , is itself a prequel to the events of The Princess and the Queen. The novella
appeared in the 2017 anthology , is the story of Aegon the Conqueror's two sons Aenys I and Maegor I "the cruel".
Chapter sets from the novels were also compiled into three novellas that were released between 1996 and 2003 by
Blood of the Dragon (July 1996), taken from the Daenerys chapters in A Game of Thrones.
Path of the Dragon (December 2000), taken from the Daenerys chapters in A Storm of Swords.
Arms of the Kraken (March 2003), based on the Iron Islands chapters from A Feast for Crows.
With the popularity of the series growing,
optioned A Song of Ice and Fire for a television adaptation in 2007. A pilot episode was produced in late 2009, and a
was made in March 2010. The series, titled , premiered in April 2011 to great acclaim and ratings (see ). The network picked up the show for a
covering A Clash of Kings two days later. Shortly after the conclusion of the first season, the show received 13
nominations, including , winning
for Peter Dinklage's portrayal of Tyrion Lannister. HBO announced a renewal for a
in April 2012, ten days after the season 2 premiere. Due to the length of the corresponding book, the third season only covered roughly the first half of A Storm of Swords.
Shortly after the season 3 premiere in March 2013, the network announced that Game of Thrones would be returning for a fourth season, which would cover the second half of A Storm of Swords along with the beginnings of A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons. Game of Thrones was nominated for 15 Emmy Awards for season 3. Two days after the fourth season premiered in April 2014, HBO renewed Game of Thrones for a fifth and sixth season. Season 5 premiered on April 12, 2015 and set a
for winning the highest number of
for a series in a single season and year, winning 12 out of 24 nominations, including . These episodes were watched by 8 million viewers, setting a record number for the series. The sixth season premiered on April 24, 2016. These episodes received the most nominations for the
with 23, winning 12, including the award for .
A Song of Ice and Fire spawned an industry of spin-off products.
released a collectible , a , and two collections of artwork inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire series. Various roleplaying game products were released by
adapted A Game of Thrones into a
in 2011. Several video games are available or in production, including
(2011) and
(2012) both received mediocre ratings from critics. A
allows players to live the life of a noble during the series' period setting.
released an official map book called , which includes old and new maps of the Ice and Fire world. The companion book
by Martin and the
owners Elio M. García Jr. and Linda Antonsson was published in October 2014. Other licensed products include full-sized weapon reproductions, a range of collectable figures, Westeros coinage reproductions, and a large number of gift and collectible items based on the HBO television series. The popularity of the HBO series has made its version of the Iron Throne an icon of the entire .
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