On the continent of Essos, east of Westeros across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys is married off by her elder brother Viserys Targaryen to a powerful warlord but slowly becomes an independent and intelligent ruler in her own right.

The story follows her year-long conflict with the region's city states, in which she aims to consolidate power, disrupt the Essosi slave trade, and gather support for her ambitions to reclaim Westeros.

He grew frustrated that his pilots and screenplays were not getting made[26] and that TV-related production limitations like budgets and episode lengths were forcing him to cut characters and trim battle scenes.

In 1994, Martin gave his agent, Kirby McCauley, the first 200 pages and a two-page story projection as part of a planned trilogy with the novels A Dance with Dragons and The Winds of Winter intended to follow.

[12] The Wheel of Time author Robert Jordan had written a short endorsement for the cover that was influential in ensuring the book's and hence series' early success with fantasy readers.

[22] Martin moved the unfinished characters' stories set in the east (Essos) and north (Winterfell and the Wall) into the next book, A Dance with Dragons,[47] and left A Feast for Crows to cover the events in King's Landing, the Riverlands, Dorne, and the Iron Islands.

Meanwhile, HBO acquired the rights to turn A Song of Ice and Fire into a fantasy drama series in 2007[54] and aired the first of ten episodes covering A Game of Thrones in April 2011.

[70] In February 2016, Martin stated that he dropped all his editing projects except for Wild Cards, and that he would not be writing any teleplays, screenplays, short stories, introductions or forewords before delivering The Winds of Winter.

On the other hand, Martin noted the challenge to avoid a situation like the finale of the TV series Lost, which left some fans disappointed by deviating too far from their own theories and desires.

"[63] In April 2018, Martin commented he had not started working on the book,[79] and in November he said that after The Winds of Winter he would decide what to do next: A Dream of Spring or the second volume of Fire & Blood or one or two stories for the Tales of Dunk and Egg.

[44] He prefers to write stories about characters from other A Song of Ice and Fire periods of history such as his Tales of Dunk and Egg project, instead of continuing the series directly.

[44][82] Martin said he would love to return to writing short stories, novellas, novelettes, and stand-alone novels from diverse genres such as science fiction, horror, fantasy, or even a murder mystery.

[26] He also decided to avoid the conventional good versus evil setting typical for the genre, using the fight between Achilles and Hector in Homer's Iliad, where no one stands out as either a hero or a villain, as an example of what he wants to achieve with his books.

[28] Unlike Tolkien, who created entire languages, mythologies, and histories for Middle-earth long before writing The Lord of the Rings, Martin usually starts with a rough sketch of an imaginary world that he improvises into a workable fictional setting along the way.

[38] Influenced by his television and film scripting background, Martin tries to keep readers engrossed by ending each A Song of Ice and Fire chapter with a tense or revelational moment, a twist or a cliffhanger, similar to a TV act break.

[38] The Atlantic pondered whether Martin ultimately intended the readers to sympathize with characters on both sides of the Lannister–Stark feud long before plot developments force them to make their emotional choices.

[118] Contrary to most conventional epic fantasies, the characters of A Song of Ice and Fire are vulnerable so that, according to The Atlantic, the reader "cannot be sure that good shall triumph, which makes those instances where it does all the more exulting.

[38] In Martin's eyes, literary effective magic needs to represent strange and dangerous forces beyond human comprehension,[61] not advanced alien technologies or formulaic spells.

[108] Since Martin drew on historical sources to build the world of A Song of Ice and Fire,[84] Damien G. Walter of The Guardian saw a strong resemblance between Westeros and England in the period of the Wars of the Roses.

[125]Publishers Weekly noted in 2000 that "Martin may not rival Tolkien or Robert Jordan, but he ranks with such accomplished medievalists of fantasy as Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson.

[50] As Grossman said in 2011, the phrase American Tolkien "has stuck to [Martin], as it was meant to",[109] being picked up by the media including The New York Times ("He's much better than that"),[126] the New Yorker,[51] Entertainment Weekly ("an acclaim that borders on fantasy blasphemy"),[24] The Globe and Mail,[53] and USA Today.

[127] According to The Globe and Mail's John Barber, Martin manages simultaneously to master and transcend the genre so that "Critics applaud the depth of his characterizations and lack of cliché in books that are nonetheless replete with dwarves and dragons".

[53] Publishers Weekly gave favorable reviews to the first three A Song of Ice and Fire novels at their points of release, saying that A Game of Thrones had "superbly developed characters, accomplished prose and sheer bloody-mindedness",[12] that A Clash of Kings was "notable particularly for the lived-in quality of [their fictional world and] for the comparatively modest role of magic",[14] and that A Storm of Swords was one "of the more rewarding examples of gigantism in contemporary fantasy".

"[128] The Christian Science Monitor advised reading the novels with an A Song of Ice and Fire encyclopedia at hand to "catch all the layered, subtle hints and details that [Martin] leaves throughout his books.

The New Yorker said in April 2011 (before the publication of A Dance with Dragons) that more than 15 million A Song of Ice and Fire books had been sold worldwide,[51] a figure repeated by The Globe and Mail in July 2011.

[38] The fourth installment, A Feast for Crows, was an immediate best-seller at its 2005 release,[24] hitting number one on "The New York Times" hardcover fiction bestseller list November 27, 2005, which for a fantasy novel suggested that Martin's books were attracting mainstream readers.

Bantam was looking forward to seeing the tie-ins boost sales further,[55] and Martin's British publisher Harper Voyager expected readers to rediscover their other epic fantasy literature.

[8] Unlike most other big titles, the fifth volume sold more physical than digital copies early on,[141] but nevertheless, Martin became the tenth author to sell 1 million Amazon Kindle e-books.

[145] Westeros.org, one of the main A Song of Ice and Fire fansites with about seventeen thousand registered members as of 2011[update], was co-founded in 1999 by a Swedish-based fan of Cuban descent, Elio M. García Jr., as well as Linda Antonsson, who introduced him to the series; their involvement with Martin's work has now become semi-professional.

The novella The Princess and the Queen, or, the Blacks and the Greens appeared in Tor Books's 2013 anthology Dangerous Women and explains some of the Targaryen backstory two centuries before the events of the novels.