Will Rhythm of War be shorter than Oathbringer?

Author Brandon Sanderson isn’t known for being short-winded. Many of his books break 200,000 words on the regular. His Stormlight Archive novels are all around 400,000 words or so. Up until now, each novel had been slightly longer than the one that came before it. The Way of Kings was around 384,000, Words of Radiance around 400,000, and Oathbringer around 455,000 words. But how long would the fourth book, Rhythm of War be?

It’s a question we’ve been trying to break down for a while. Prior to finishing his final draft of the book, Sanderson indicated there were roughly 466,000 words or so in Rhythm of War. Of course, in the midst of the process, that word count is malleable, so we couldn’t take it to the bank that it’d be longer than Oathbringer. Months have passed, and we still have no official final word count of the book. But we may have a hint to its length.

On Tuesday, Stormlight Archive narrators Michael Kramer and Kate Reading posted a picture of them after a hard day’s work. They claimed to be done with 161 pages out of 1222. Take a look down below!

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But, what kind of manuscript are they working with here? As we know, the final page count depends entirely on how it’s printed. However, based on a post from them earlier in the week, we could infer that they are working with a PDF of the manuscript Tor Books will publish. Yes, there are likely some aesthetic changes to make, but as far as text size and all that, the actual interior looks to be pretty on-point. You can take a look at what I mean down below.

So, with that in mind, I’d say they have 1222 pages of content to read. Given their track record of even reading Ars Arcanum post-scripts, I believe this page count of theirs includes those pages. For reference, Oathbringer’s page count is 1244 when including the post-script. So, when all said and done, Rhythm of War looks to be a slightly shorter offering than its predecessor — though not by much. All in all, it looks to be less than a 10,000-word difference Given how long The Stormlight Archive books are, that’s till a hell of a lot of content.

Do you agree that Rhythm of War is likely to be shorter than Oathbringer? Sound off down below!

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SOURCE: Michael Kramer and Kate Reading