Yes, yes, I also brought up speculative elements in there along with presenting the evidence, but of course as you're not discussing but trying to have the last word after being shown your facts were wrong and your opinions prejudiced, you've ignore the e evidence in there, such as the marketing campaign of KOD as the last book before the final one. The first comment by Jordan himself came shortly after he finished KOD (but months before its publication). That's when he said he would probably not write the second prequel book but rather jump straight to writing the last main book. The marketing campaign is hard fact, just take a look at the New Spring paperback, the first comic book etc. - months before Jordan was sick.



And on and on with fairy tales...

Of course if you twist the facts the right way, you'll dirty up any commercial initiative.

I don't know where you took that information about "six books", but I've been following WOT news closely for years and I've never seen any of that. From the get go, it was explained that this would most likely concern only the two first books.

It happened in the Harry Potter years when young kids suddenly seemed attracted to longer series again, and to Fantasy series in particular. Macmillian thought that WOT had potential with this audience - it already had many young readers - but decided the size of the first books was a likely obstacle to really penetrate that market. That's why they decided to split the first two books in two, design YA covers, add illustrations, use a larger font and a more kid-friendly layout - and to publish it not with Tor, but through one of Macmillan's YA imprints, which would make them enter in the YA section. The so-called "new material" (appearing only in EOTW, even though you're implying this is "new material" put there to make the WOT fans buy this edition and reap more cash" is merely an extra "prologue" introducing the characters much younger, with an excuse to include early exposition of several of the series's concepts that are normally introduced much later through the narrative (Tam is explaing the WOT world, the OP and the War of Shadow to the kids...) - all meant to simplify the introduction into the series for very young readers. The tone of the "new material" is childish, and there's no "nuggets" in there to be found for the older fans. Jordan didn't put any.

So yeah, it was a commercial initiative to penetrate more a specific market. That's no different from dozens and dozens similar initiatives to market novels for kids that were not originally written for them but could attract them if presented properly. There's nothing wrong with that.

I don't know what made you invent out of the blue this was a failure, that YA edition is still in print after all these years. Macmillan didn't abandon it, and never published the other books in that edition as that wasn't their goal to do that. Early on some wondered if the other books would be published that way as well, and the answer was "most likely no", that it had been done strictly to make the beginning of the series easier for kids, and after that they were expected to continue reading it with the standard Tor edition.



That's simply pathetic.