Presumably because he’s a big fan of search engine optimization, George R.R. Martin spent a lot of time back in May talking about how his A Song Of Ice And Fire books versus the then-upcoming end of HBO’s Game Of Thrones adaptation. First there was a theory that Martin had made a deal with HBO to sit on the final two books in his series until the show had ended, a bizarre scheme that would’ve been bad for everyone involved, and after that he offered a confusing non-statement about how the ending of the books both will and will not be different from the ending of the show—which, as we all remember, was a very popular ending that everyone enjoyed. Now, with Game Of Thrones’ extremely divisive final episodes solidly in the rearview mirror (we were just joking about them being popular before), Martin has explained that they won’t “change anything at all” about how he approaches the end of his books.
Speaking with The Guardian about how the end of the show was “freeing” to him because he can now finish at his own pace, Martin quoted Rick Nelson’s “Garden Party” and said, “you can’t please everybody, so you’ve got to please yourself.” That could either be a good thing or a bad thing, based entirely on how you feel about the end of Game Of Thrones and what Martin intends to do with his books. He’s an artist, so he’s obviously not going to say that he changed his whole plan because of how the show did things, but it could mean that the things people didn’t like in the show might still happen in the same way in the books.
Elsewhere in the Guardian chat, Martin says that he felt a lot of pressure to finish his books while the show was popular, and that he’s now become so famous that he doesn’t like going to parties or to bookstores because he gets recognized and has to take selfies with people, but annoyances like that are probably a lot easier to swallow when you’re getting millions of dollars for not writing books.