Martin's argument would be that if he had kept the release date promise and released the book in 2006/07, it would not have been very good, and he took the decision to go back on his promise to make the book a lot stronger, rewriting about 98% of it from scratch. Fair enough, his PR and communication about that sucked donkey balls and he should be criticised for that (and has been, at tedious length), but the artistic decision seems valid.

Of course, if ADWD comes out and it's rubbish, or if somehow an earlier draft from three or four years ago leaks out and turns out to have been really good, that's another issue, since GRRM will have been proven wrong. But at the moment we simply don't know if that decision will have been vindicated or not. Certainly if ADWD had been released in 2007 and was as weak or even weaker than AFFC, people would now be very angry about that instead, so it appears to be a no-win scenario.



This has never happened to any major fantasy author, though, not even when the wait massively eclipses ADWD's. In SF, maybe David Gerrold who's coming up on 20 years between books in his CHTORR series has suffered this, but that series was nowhere near as massive as any of these fantasy ones and most people have now forgotten it existed. Melanie Rawn, whose sales are extremely modest by Martin's standards (and GRRM is not amongst the biggest-selling fantasy authors overall, though his per-book sales are impressive), is still getting a lot of flak over her CAPITAL'S TOWER series (12 years between volumes and counting) and the final book, when it appears, will likely be a huge seller.

Maybe GRRM will be the first author to see this kind of sales backlash, but the history of the genre and the forthcoming massive boost in sales that will result from the TV series (even if the TV show's success is relatively limited) make it extremely unlikely.