Dayum
3261
I love that here we have one of the major authors of fantasy doing a taped interview and he is wearing that shirt, great to see that he doesn’t take himself overly seriously. He does general seem like a really laid back guy.
I especially liked the What will you write when you’re finished with Game of Thrones question.
Ah, optimism…
Yeah, laid back on his giant mattress of money. That would relax just about anyone.
Bit of a digression (overreaction) but I think people conflate the internet fame/cache of someone like Martin with real fame and fortune. Even going from strength to strength as he is, I’m sure he’d have done better as a scrip-pushing anonymous hedge fund manager we’ve never heard of. He’s sold a few million books and his series was adapted into a successful HBO show; he isn’t Dan Brown, and Dan Brown isn’t Gordon Gekko.
I say hooray for a nerd who gets to buy a yacht. A smallish yacht.
I’d be interested to see some real numbers.
Dan Brown wrote one spectacularly successful book, executive-produced two successful movies, and wrote two other NYT best-selling novels plus two pretty minor ones.
Martin, by contrast, has a string of best-selling books - the Ice & Fire are all NYT best-sellers, and I believe that some of his recent “Wild Card” books made the list. He has a very long list of writing/producing credits on TV shows and (minor) movies, and he is a prolific writer of short stories, plus the (very successful in the 80s) Wild Cards universe that generated a host of novels (all of which Martin got $ from).
Both men’s properties have spawned calendars, collector’s editions, computer games, etc. I suspect that Martin’s stuff probably is more lucrative in the secondary market – the GoT and the Wild Cards comics and RPGs are probably better sellers than any DaVinci Code spin-offs, I’d think.
The scale is telling, of course. I have to imagine that the DaVinci Code out-sold all of the GoT books together, but that said, I wonder if all of Martin’s other endeavors together might actually be more lucrative.
You would be wrong on at least one of your assumption. Total sales for The Da Vinci Code is about 80 million copies. Best estimate for the entire Song of Ice and Fire series put together doesn’t even approach that. I don’t know how it all comes together with the merchandising, since there’s so much more merchandise potential in Martin’s genre stuff, but just in terms of the books? Martin isn’t even in the same galaxy as Brown, solely on the basis of that one really successful book.
Wikipedia’s currently listing 80 million of the da Vinci code alone (and Brown has had other very substantial hits) as against 15 million for Martin, which I am pretty sure means 15m books sold all told and not 15m copies of the series, on the basis of more subdivided figures I’ve seen elsewhere. (The series wasn’t hitting the NYT-best-sellers until Storm of Swords I think, the earlier books only made it after he was a hit.)
the film of the Da Vinci Code made three quarters of a billion dollars. So even exclusive of those other projects I’m pretty sure Martin is sub-Da Vinci. (I guess actually JK Rowling may be the go-to author for making piles and piles of money now, with 450m books sold. I’m thinking that again, this is total books and not total copies of the series.)
Anyhow. Even authors I’m not crazy about like Rowling and King seem like worthier-than-usual masters of the universe compared to the run of the mill jillionaires of the 2010s.
So he was actually right in his assumption…
Right in fact but severely underestimating the scope. There are, like, seven books in the universe that have sold more copies than The Da Vinci Code (and if that doesn’t make you kind of hate humanity a little I dunno what will). It’s a deficiency of language that we refer to both phenomena as “hits.” They’re not even remotely comparable to one another. Even with the show being successful by HBO standards, that doesn’t approach a breakout hit on the cataclysmic order of Brown’s windfall.
Brown doesn’t have fewer credits just because he’s not good at things. He doesn’t have to work on anything ever again if he doesn’t want to. He can afford to not produce stuff. Martin wins in a lot of respects, but just beating the sheer profit differential that Brown’s books and movies have as compared to Martin’s is a nigh-impossible task.
Mordrak
3270
Except perhaps the fallout from contractual obligations, I think Martin could afford to never work again given the proceeds of his books. While there is a scale difference between how much they made, painting Martin as some kind of working man nerd who became mildly successful misrepresents his success as well.
Not if he wants a bigger yacht. I’d put Martin in the same school as Kirkman - great creators who know their niches and hit them hard. Neither will ever be any sort of breakout success unless they do something wildly different from what they already do (which in Kirkman’s case would involve ditching all those kiddy pictures he insists on having in his material, so I’m doubtful of the prospects). Brown, on the other hand, elevated himself from relative obscurity to the rank of literary megagod (crapping out terrible, awful conspiracy theory fuel along the way) as a result of convenient happenstance. I don’t intend to minimize what Martin’s achieved - I’m more trying to emphasize the absolutely gargantuan scope of impact that Brown had for no reason that I can perceive.
Back to the actual point, I did finally finish the season last week. What is it with shows running out of gas in the next-to-last episode this year? I mean, the last episode wasn’t terrible, but it all felt like the first episode of the next season and the same feeling of rush that the prior couple of episodes had was still there. It doesn’t seem to have ruined the show for anybody (which is what the other major show that had this problem did - I think I agree with whichever one of those two at IGN said that The Killing would have gone out on top if they’d just ended the season an episode earlier), but it does feel like a weird place to break, unless they’re jumping a considerable span of time, which I guess they’re going to need to do, since so many important people in the cast are of an age where there can be quite a bit of change from year to year.
So setting the edge cases of Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling aside for a second, who would you point to as a breakout success?
I mean that as a serious question, as anyone who is making enough to afford even a modest yacht qualifies as a success in my book, and I can’t think of more than a handful of modern writers who would qualify – King, McCarthy… Janet Ivonovitch, maybe?
I doubt there is anyone here who will dispute that Dan Brown is one of the luckiest sons of bitches on the planet – how lightning struck just right to make that book a success is unfathomable.
Roy Dotrice has been cast as Pyromancer Halleyne. Never listened to the audiobooks myself, but that’s kinda cool.
Game of Thrones, The RPG.
Some casting tidbits!
Michael McElhatton as Roose Bolton:
Robert Pugh as Craster:
Hannah Murray as Gilly:
McElhatton and Pugh look good for their roles.
Athryn
3276
You gotta post the Roosier image of McElhatton:
He just looks like my in head description of Bolton.
If you don’t fix the link, I’ll think you picture Bolton as a little broken image icon :)
Drastic
3278
That’s a nice Roose. Perfect after a few bloodlettings and hundreds of leech-hours.
I suppose they could just use make-up and lighting and a dash of cg postprocessing instead if they want to ruin the immersion.
Athryn
3279
Oona Chaplin (Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter) has been cast as “Jeyne.”
I’m guessing they mean Jeyne Westerling as opposed to Poole, based on the age.
salwon
3280
She wouldn’t show up until aSoS though, wouldn’t she? Come to think of it, is Robb in Clash at all?
