Mini-blog: How Long is Cradle?

2/26/2019

When a new ebook is released, before it has a paperback edition, Amazon estimates how long it will be in pages. Usually they guess low, so the "page count" is often inaccurate.

Once there's a paperback edition of that book, Amazon updates to using the paperback page count, which is correct. But because each printing and edition of any book can have wildly different page counts, writers and editors tend to use word count to describe the length of a book rather than pages.

With that in mind, I'd like to give you the length of all six books in Cradle thus far (according to my original Word files):

Book 1, Unsouled: 89,097
Book 2, Soulsmith: 86,534
Book 3, Blackflame: 111,484
Book 4, Skysworn: 86,760
Book 5, Ghostwater: 90,870
Book 6, Underlord: 103,130
TOTAL: 567,875 words

Hey, we've crossed half a million words!

-Will

56 Comments

Wesperado

2/26/2019 02:39:10 pm

Can't wait! And this is the longest one yet! Keep up the good work, and thanks for the awesome stories!!!

Maths student

2/26/2019 05:40:52 pm

Uhh, I'm pretty sure Blackflame is longer, but 2nd longest is still really nice! The more we get from Will the better!

Rambler

2/27/2019 05:52:27 pm

Maths student living up to your name

Kevin

2/26/2019 02:49:54 pm

When cradle started I was so hooked on S&S I didn’t think I had room for more. I have now re-read Cradle stories as much as HoB.

Dave

2/27/2019 05:41:58 am

What is HoB?

Kevin

2/27/2019 06:08:37 am

House of Blades. Meant to write traveler’s gate.

The Last Reader

2/26/2019 03:01:00 pm

Can't wait for it to come out. Although I still wish it was OKAK...

Elliot

2/26/2019 03:14:19 pm

Wow! Half a million!!!!! Hopefully we get much more than that!

Unklebeavis

2/26/2019 03:38:24 pm

Read HOB last Summer and loved it. Tried Cradle and was blown away. I've been looking for a new author for years, .you Sir, are my new favorite.

ripshin

2/26/2019 03:40:41 pm

So, the burning question is, how long are your books whemwmeaasured on the Sanderson-Rothfuss scale?

rip

Jacob

2/26/2019 06:14:27 pm

Brandon Sanderson word count is generally around 100k to 150k. His Stormlight is usually around 300k to 400k because they are multiple books in one volume. 100k+ is a good word count for any book.

Edit: Wow! Brandon's books are around 200k to 300k outside of stormlight. His YA are around 80k to 100k and his later mistborn series is also around 100k.

Patrick Rothfuss will be around 250k for his first book and 400k for his second! So around a Stormlight archive.

Lorenz

2/28/2019 12:36:18 pm

I could suggest an author that writes 1 M words/year if you want ;) .

Will link

2/27/2019 02:04:36 pm

Very small. However! The Stormlight Archive is made of about 1.25 million words from 2010-2019, and the Kingkiller Chronicles is about 650k from 2007-2019. Cradle is 550k from 2016-2019.

Rough math...

Kingkiller: ~55k words/year
Stormlight: ~139k words/year
Cradle: ~183k words/year

So over time, not too bad!

(If you could ignore the fact that Brandon Sanderson also wrote a ton of OTHER great non-Stormlight books during this time period, that would be swell.)

Shadowrope

2/28/2019 01:53:31 am

No matter how hard one tries, there's no beating the Sanderbot.
He is Legion.
Which, funnily enough, is one of his books I didn't enjoy.

abhishek tripathi

2/28/2019 06:53:56 am

No beating Sanderson, that's true however I truly feel Will has more similarities to Sanderson rather than Rothfuss in many ways: be it writing speed, or truly delighting there fans with back to back releases.

Shreyas Amrutkar

3/4/2019 06:30:45 am

The biggest difference I find between Will and Rothfuss is that the former gives out regular status updates about the books and involves the fans in the process. I feel it's really praiseworthy.

Sam

2/26/2019 03:40:57 pm

Looks good Will! Any benchmarks for when we'll cross 5,000,000 words?

Althane

2/26/2019 04:15:41 pm

And I just read about 464,000 of them in the past week to prep for Underlord.

Kinda wish I had read them slightly slower. Still thinking Ghostwater is my favorite (I dig the collapsing ruins setting), but Blackflame is definitely a strong second place.

Skysworn, I liked more on my second reading, although it still came off as a little breakneck (the main story components take place over essentially a few days, it feels like?).

I'd almost pair Unsouled and Soulsmith together in a single volume, Blackflame as a standalone (maybe with more scenes about Eithan or Yerin?), and Skysworn and Ghostwater together as another volume. We'll see how Ghostwater and Underlord flow together.

... I'm hyped.

Fellow Daoist Ji Ning

2/26/2019 10:26:17 pm

I get what you're saying about wanting longer novels, but Will definitely knows what he's doing with novels of this length. I haven't read any 200k word novels from Will but I've read enough of them to say that they're structured differently than an 80-100k word novel. It isn't just a matter of going from x -> z to x->y->z. Nor does just sticking too books together make them a longer book. You can't just throw more content in and expect the novel to remain good, you have to structure the plot, character arcs, and even the setting to keep to that pace.

The Cradle novels have clear beginnings and definite ends. There are character arcs and individual smaller-scale plot lines that are begun and concluded within the span of each book (The most obvious example is Yerin's attachment to her master's remnant in Blackflame).

I think a lot of the desire for longer books comes from the origins of this subgenre. Xianxia novels tend to be a continuous story published everyday with no breaks. That publishing format is reflected in the story structure, where there's one story arc after another but all threading together in one continuous chain of advancement. Will's writing differently, and I for one am willing to embrace this different structure.

I've read a bit about KDP, and from what I understand 100K is already pushing it in terms of business-profitability. The most financially successful self-published authors often publish 50-60k books. Fantasy just tends to skew longer. That's why if you read on some of these author forums they're always saying:

"Stay away from the Fantasy genre! Readers are way too demanding in terms of both quality and quantity. For the effort of one Fantasy novel you could write 4 romance novels!"

--paraphrased from a self-pub romance author

Chris

2/27/2019 10:27:19 am

This is actually both incorrect and correct. Ever since Soulsmith I would say there has not been both good beginnings and endings as far as arcs go in thanks mainly to Skysworn. Skysworn is simply not able to stand alone at all it is 100% a piece of a larger one. It finishes the Jai Family arc about a quarter of the way through, then at break-neck speeds begins the Monarch/Gold arc, in which it starts, but does not end until Ghostwater. Both Ghostwater and Blackflame were 9/10s for me where as Unsouled and Soulsmith were 10/10s and Skysworn takes a mere 7/10 because that book was/is the heart of the problem with what your saying. Will absolutely does know what hes doing, but it is the opposite of what you have posted. He IS writing one continuous story just like the Xianxia sub-genre. He has all but stated this to me in a previous comment under the release of Ghostwater Post I believe it was. Basically Unsouled and Soulsmith just got lucky In that their arcs began and ended in a very good fashion, but that the Cradle series is supposed to be read through as if they are mere chapters in one book .He is really just chopping Cradle down into many books so that he can charge more then 10 bucks for all this hard-work.(Which I absolutely agree with) However, Cradle is meant to be one long winding Path, which means the starting and stopping of each individual "book" ending/starting an arc is going to be lower on his agenda then making sure that if you read Cradle like ONE book it would flow exactly how he wants it too.

Will link

2/27/2019 01:54:56 pm

Just to weigh in on this: I see nothing incorrect about what our Fellow Daoist said. There ARE clear beginnings and endings to each volume in the Cradle series. I give them less weight than I would if I were writing something like The Dresden Files, for instance, but far more weight than I would if I were writing an actual xianxia web series.

Each book should stand alone and still read more or less seamlessly when read back-to-back. Certainly, I am writing these to be read as part of a series, not on their own. But I don't design them as one long story that I then chop up into parts, I design them one part at a time and then link that part into what should be a cohesive chain.

I'm very aware of the problems with Skysworn, but it is a sequence of events that form an arc. It begins with Jai Daishou choosing to break the rules and steal the Archstone, which sets in motion a chain of events that culminates in the Bleeding Phoenix awakening and being beaten into submission by the Akura Monarch.

Even if I were to go back and rewrite that book today, it would cover that same sequence of events, just in a more...cohesive manner.

TL;DR - The books are designed to each tell a story. They are also designed to tell a story together.

Jerlowthom

2/27/2019 07:28:55 am

I agree on skysworn. On the second reread I found my self enjoying it a lot more. On the third I was just happy I was reading a cradle book.

Will link

2/27/2019 02:09:50 pm

Thanks for reading, Althane!

When I began planning Underlord, I was afraid that it would read kind of like Ghostwater Part II: Son of Ghostwater. Where it felt like an in-between story filling the gap between books five and seven.

That was my fear right up until my beta readers all read it and (pretty much unanimously) agreed that it replaced Ghostwater as their favorite book in the series.

Now I'M hyped. I really want you all to read it and see if they were right, or if I should fire them for being liars.

Joe Lee McCune

2/27/2019 07:45:13 pm

How do I sign up for this beta testing? Would not mind being a first read fan!!!

DesperateFan

2/28/2019 08:43:02 am

You to know Will in person to be a beta reader. Sad, I know.

Alex

2/26/2019 04:32:28 pm

And no word counter for the next book?! I jest. Really excited for this next book! I think I read through all the books in about a month and never looked to see if there was another in the series until I finished the current book I was on. Was disappointed to hear I had to wait 3 months for Underlord so I hope I don't finish it too quickly. Grats on the soon to be released book!

Rogue 9

2/26/2019 04:57:38 pm

There is a word count on Underlord it's the one on the bottom

Will link

2/27/2019 02:10:49 pm

>And no word counter for the next book?

Darth Vader: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

D rk M tter

2/26/2019 06:30:38 pm

You are a Wordsmith!

PoShui

2/27/2019 12:22:05 am

So what is the 500,000 word and the sentence it is end? I mean it would be interesting to know and your giving previews.

Diego

2/27/2019 08:55:28 am

How long will Overlord be?

Bryce

2/27/2019 01:29:34 pm

I think it should be a rule that each subsequent book in a series cannot be shorter than the one before it.

Will link

2/27/2019 01:59:16 pm

A lot of fantasy authors seem to really follow this rule, and IMHO it leads to a lot of unnecessary padding and pointless, meandering sub-plots.

I don't want MORE words, I want BETTER words!

stephen

2/27/2019 11:32:39 pm

You and your logic

Matt

2/27/2019 07:38:37 pm

Congrats! May you always find pure sources of word madra!

Justin

2/28/2019 05:39:26 am

Will the audiobook be released at the same time as the e book?

Not Justin

2/28/2019 10:06:59 am

I would like to know this too!

Jlo

2/28/2019 10:26:16 am

Me too!

Martin

2/28/2019 05:49:10 am

Few hours. Clocks are moving so slow. How to pause myself and be back on with the time of release? So much quiver anticipation...

Jay

2/28/2019 01:04:34 pm

Reading Ghostwater again to get rdy!

Whitless

2/28/2019 07:49:35 am

Will,

You’re books reintroduced me to reading and got me back into it. Now, I’ve read not just your books, but also the works of other authors.

Thank you

Josh

2/28/2019 08:05:19 am

Love the books and I’ve read all the Cradle novels on KU. I heard that you get less from KU than a purchase though. If I read on KU and then buy them, does it count twice? Is there some kind of duration I have to wait to get the purchase to count twice?

Jay

2/28/2019 01:03:47 pm

Yes he gets more if you purchase. Yes it counts twice. You can read and purchase them at any time and it will count towards his totals.

Jason

2/28/2019 01:29:31 pm

Not asking for specific numbers/amounts but I am curious as to what order of profitability each format is for you. That way we know which format gets the most money to you when we throw it at you!

ShadyUpvoteDealer

2/28/2019 01:01:00 pm

Buying a copy of Underlord for $20 in crypto.

Bill

2/28/2019 03:35:20 pm

Couldn't you just... you know... spend the $20 buying Underlord yourself?

ShadyUpvoteDealer

2/28/2019 03:36:17 pm

Nah, I'm not going to give my money to the man.

A little while but... Travelers Gate

2/28/2019 03:50:27 pm

Saw this in the FAQs.
"The next adventure in the Traveler's Gate universe will be called the Traveler's Blade Trilogy, and it will follow Simon after the events of City of Light."
I know its from a while ago but can you give us an update on when you plan to start. Also is there a way you can maybe make a series about Valins origins and when he first created the Dragon Army.
Also about how Kai and Indirial locked him away in the Ragnarus Tree.
Thanks!

Alex

2/28/2019 04:05:24 pm

Will, I'm not buying it. The numbers for underlord seem waaaay off. Tell ya what, email me the book and I'll count it for you.

Patricia Murray

2/28/2019 05:00:49 pm

Nice try!

Alex

2/28/2019 06:09:39 pm

Member of Will's Chilean Fanbase

2/28/2019 05:51:10 pm

Does someone know the time it will get released? I dont live in the US, so timezones make me a lil stressed cause i also want to read the book as soon as it goes out.
ALSO WILL I LOVE YOU
And thanks for sharing this amazing world with us

excited guy

2/28/2019 06:24:23 pm

I'm excited

fujitiv link

2/28/2019 09:03:16 pm

It's live!

Bob

2/28/2019 09:56:54 pm

Having inhaled Underlord over the past <24 hours since release i am now awaiting the next installment.

The price of greatness is high indeed...

Dream

3/14/2019 09:43:29 am

Yayy!!!... that's equivalent to one of Robert Jordan's or Tad Williams' books... keep 'em coming ;-)

In which we ramble on.
And by we, I mean me.