Why Is The Doors of Stone Taking So Long?

There is still no release date for The Doors of Stone, the third book in The Kingkiller Chronicle, and it remains to be announced. The latest word from Patrick Rothfuss is second-hand: at an event in June 2025, fans reported on Reddit that he joked about a "bloated, unpublishable" manuscript. Nothing official has followed since.

If you've ended up here after typing the same question into a search bar for the fifth time this year, you're in good company. This is what's known, who said it and when, and what would have to happen before a date appears.

Is there a release date for Kingkiller Chronicle book 3?

No. Ken Reid's blog, which tracks the book and was updated in October 2026, says there is still nothing official. Books of Brilliance reports that Astra Publishing House's Rothfuss catalogue lists the published Kingkiller books but gives no on-sale date for book three. That's a secondary report of the listing, but it matches everything else.

The same site notes that neither Rothfuss nor DAW has publicly confirmed that the manuscript is finished or that it has been accepted for publication. That matters more than the missing date. A publisher can't schedule a book it hasn't got.

Rothfuss has said where the news will come from. According to Books of Brilliance, he wrote on his official blog that he would post the publication date there once he had one. Winter Is Coming reports that the last post there dates from November 2023, so the blog has gone quiet.

How long has the wait been?

The Wise Man's Fear, the second book, was first published in 2011. That puts the gap at about fifteen years, which is why Ken Reid's essay on the subject is titled "Fifteen Years of Silence". Some readers who were teenagers when book two came out now have teenagers of their own.

The wait hasn't thinned the readership. The Name of the Wind is number 30 of the 102,674 books in our catalogue when ranked by Hardcover readers, with 8,697 readers there. Hardcover is a much smaller site than Goodreads or StoryGraph, so that's a lot for it, and it puts the first book in the top sliver of everything we track.

It's still picking up new readers, too. AuthorPing's own daily count shows its Hardcover readers growing by about 1.8% a week, measured over 29 days. That means people are still starting the series right now and walking straight into the same wait as everyone else.

The Doors of Stone itself already has 1,245 readers on Hardcover, a strikingly high figure for a book with no date, no cover and a one-line blurb. That's roughly one reader for every seven who have the first book.

What has Patrick Rothfuss said about why it's taking so long?

Here is the public record, in the order it happened. Some of it comes from Rothfuss directly, some from his publisher, and some from fans' reports of events, so I've flagged which is which.

2016 to 2020: the publisher hadn't seen a draft

In early 2016, a fantasy blog reported that DAW publisher Betsy Wollheim had told its author at the turn of the year that she had yet to see a draft. In 2020 she went further. Ken Reid's blog says she posted on Facebook that she had "never seen a word of book three" in nine years.

That's the clearest single fact in the whole story. Whatever state the book was in, it hadn't reached his editor.

2020 and 2021: rebuilding the book

An essay in the Hugin & Munin Journal says that in a 2020 discussion Rothfuss explained that parts of the third section of the original story dated back to 1998. When asked, he said the ending hadn't changed.

The same essay says that in 2021 he described dismantling a big piece of the book in order to rebuild it, along with rearranging and rewriting other material. That's the essay's summary rather than a direct quote, but it fits a picture of a book that exists in pieces and is being reworked, rather than one sitting finished in a drawer.

2021 and 2022: the missed chapter

In December 2021, Rothfuss promised a fully narrated chapter of the book if a Worldbuilders charity stretch goal was met. Ken Reid's blog says the chapter was promised by February 2022 and that the deadline passed with nothing released.

Asked about it later on a livestream, he said, as quoted by Winter Is Coming, that "it got complicated and it got hard", and that fires in his life stopped him finishing it. On a 2022 Twitch stream he put it more plainly: "things are moving more slowly than I would like". In the same stream he said much of the reason was simply that he was moving more slowly than he'd like, with a lot going on in his life.

2023: a novella and a new tool

Rothfuss's 2023 novella came out in this period, and around its release he said its Embril magic system gave him another tool to use in book three. A month before that release, he said on a livestream that he feels bad about not delivering the promised chapter.

2025: an "unpublishable" draft

The most recent mention came at an event with Joe Abercrombie during Abercrombie's book tour in June 2025. Fans there reported the "bloated, unpublishable" quip. Winter Is Coming reads this as a sign he was still working on it as recently as mid-2025, while also noting fans said he gave no substantial update on the book.

It's worth reading that remark for what it is: a joke at a public event, passed on by people in the audience. It's not a progress report, and it shouldn't be treated as one.

The wider picture

Across these years, Winter Is Coming says Rothfuss has been open about struggles in his personal life and how they've delayed the book. The Hugin & Munin essay adds that he has spent time on Worldbuilders, adaptation projects and shorter fiction.

On adaptation, Ken Reid's blog says Lionsgate acquired the TV and film rights in 2015, and that Showtime, which had been developing a series since 2017, later dropped it. The same post doesn't claim this affected the book, so I wouldn't draw that line either.

Put together, the explanation the sources support best is a mix of two things. One is a long, difficult rewrite of a book whose bones go back decades. The other is a hard stretch in the author's life that he has spoken about himself. The theory that a finished book is being held back has nothing in the record behind it, and his publisher's own comments cut against it.

What would it take for a date to be announced?

The steps are ordinary, even if the timeline isn't. Rothfuss would need to finish the manuscript and deliver it to DAW, the publisher would need to accept it, and then the book would need a slot in a publishing schedule. Only after that does a date exist to announce.

There's no public sign yet that the first of those steps has happened. When it does, the likeliest places to hear are Rothfuss's own blog, where he's said he'll post the date, and a publisher catalogue listing that suddenly gains an on-sale date. I'm not going to guess a year, and you should be wary of any site that does.

What can readers do while they wait?

Re-reading is the obvious answer, and there's a decent case for it: anyone who read The Wise Man's Fear when it came out has had a long time to forget the details. If you're starting fresh, or lending the books to someone, the full The Kingkiller Chronicle reading order is on our series page, including the shorter books set in the same world.

Shelving The Doors of Stone on Goodreads or StoryGraph keeps it in your lists, though refreshing that page won't make a date appear any faster. Many of us have tested this thoroughly.

If you'd rather not keep checking at all, AuthorPing notifies you when a series or author you love has a new book coming out and shows a countdown to every release. It's free on iPhone and Android, and it will tell you about this one too, whenever the time comes.