The Way of Kings vs. The Way of Kings

Many people know The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, an epic fantasy masterpiece. However, only those well invested in the Cosmere will know that the Way of Kings is also an in-fiction book written by Nohadon, an ancient Rosharan king. Each real book in the Stormlight Archive is named after an in-fiction work of the same name.

Even fewer will know that, compared to Brandon Sanderson, Nohadon is an absolute lightweight of an author.

While reading Oathbringer, I was struck by a passage. In chapter 105, Spirit, Mind, and Body, we experience one of Dalinar’s flashbacks as he remembers the night of Gavalar’s funeral. As Dalinar sinks into his despair, he overhears Jasnah reading from The Way of Kings (in-fiction). Breaking through the darkness, Dalinar joins Jasnah and requests that she read the book to him from the beginning.

We are then treated to this detail about the in-fiction text: 

“It took almost eight hours to finish, but Jasnah never gave any indication she wanted to stop. When she read the last word, Dalinar found himself weeping again.”  Chapter 105, Oathbringer.

This small detail of the length of the book read aloud is the key to understanding the size of The Way of Kings (in-fiction). By comparing how long it took Jasnah to read through The Way of Kings (in-fiction) to modern audiobook timings, we can get a base standard for how large the book was compared to The Way of Kings (Brandon Sanderson), which we all know and love.

To begin, we’ll establish our baseline.

The Way of Kings (Brandon Sanderson) clocks in at 383,389 words and a total of 45 hours and 30 minutes in audiobook at 1x speed. Both of these are representations of the English language versions. I couldn’t find accurate accounts of other languages, which would have been an interesting and appropriate study for this problem, but the lack of quality data caused me to turn away.

Now, to start the math of figuring out how long The Way of Kings (in-fiction) might have been, we need to understand the mechanics of audio narration. It simply won’t do to just calculate against the hours and word count from The Way of Kings (Brandon Sanderson): the book was narrated by Kate Reading and Michael Kramer, and each author has a slightly different cadence to their voice and by extension, speed. This may affect how quickly either work might have been completed. 

We will use Kate's average words per minute (WPM) for this experiment since they read Jasnah’s primary point of view chapters. But what is Kate’s average WPM? Great question.

I pulled a few samples of Kate’s work where they were the sole audiobook narrator, and the book had a published word count. Remember that this isn’t too scientific since the published word count won’t account for the extra bits that come in through audiobook times. 

This totals out to an average WPM of 101.25 for Jasnah. With a semi-solid WPM in hand, we can calculate the length.

In Oathbringer, it took Jasnah “almost eight hours” to finish. Let’s call that 7 hours and 45 minutes, or 465 minutes. Multiply that by their average WPM of 101.25; you get a total word count of 47,081.

By comparison, The Way of Kings (in-fiction) is roughly between Edgedancer and Dawnshard in length.

When compared to the book about the book, The Way of Kings (in-fiction) is roughly 88% smaller than The Way of Kings (Brandon Sanderson).

I guess it is the journey, not the destination

At the end of the day, I suppose you can’t blame Nohadon for his brevity. He did have the full collapse of civilization to contend with.

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