“A Memory of Light” is the eagerly anticipated final volume of Robert Jordan’s fantasy epic “The Wheel of Time”, and the signs are, in fact, pointing to a 2009 release…of volume one. That’s right, it also looks like the book will be broken up into two parts. In his latest blog post, Brandon Sanderson alluded to an announcement that will most likely be made at next month’s JordanCON. Of course, the widgets (below) released by Tor, also take some of the mystery out of the announcement.

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You might be thinking that none of this points to a split, but then you probably haven’t been following Sanderson’s blog. He reached the 400,000 word mark at the end of last year, but ever since that point, instead of finishing the book, Harriet (Robert Jordan’s Widow and editor) has had him revising the first half of the book. Sanderson says this round of revisions should be finished in April, which seems like that leaves enough time for some more notes, and another few round of revisions before Tor prepares to take it to print.

There are a few reasons I can see for splitting the book, the obvious reason is profit. Tor can make more money off of two books rather than one. I’m sure they’d also like to get the book out sooner rather than later, but I think the biggest reason is the colossal page count. Brandon Sanderson is estimating the final page count to be around 700,000 words. To put that in perspective “The Shadow Rising”, the longest book in the series so far (by word count), is 393,823 words, and 1008 pages. That means that A Memory of Light will be close to 2000 pages once it’s complete, I’m not sure it’s possible to mass produce a book of that size, at least not economically.

Then again, during his signing tour for “Knight of Dreams”, I heard Robert Jordan claim that there would be “1 more book, even if it was a 2,000 page tome”.