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Breaking in to pimp my next book

Hi, everybody! After my brief blogging stint here last summer, Charlie graciously offered to let me appear here now and then when I have something major to announce. I do: the fifth and final Virga novel, Ashes of Candesce, will be published in exactly a month, and you can read an excerpt online now for free, at Tor.com.

In 2008, at the height of my game, my life was derailed by long-anticipated but unwelcome heart surgery. The publishing gap this left has hurt me dearly, but finally it's here--the novel I wrote in the long and painful recovery period after they opened me up. I'm kinda nervous about this one, and hopeful, and eager to get back on the horse after nearly three years.

I'll leave you with a brief excerpt from a letter, addressed to Antaea Argyre, and sent by history tutor Leal Hieronyma Maspeth:

"I believe something has awakened in one of the cold abandoned places of the world. It is picking off the weak and those who get separated from the group and it is growing bolder.


If you make inquiries no one will admit to anything, so don't even try! I know I'm asking a lot, but you must trust me. We need someone who has experience with this world's mysteries, Antaea.

We need a hunter."

The rest, you'll be able to see for yourselves, after February 14.

28 Comments

1:

do you have a preferred ebook vendor? I read Ventus, thoroughly enjoyed it, and want more...

2:

Please ignore that lowercase d. While it may make me look like an illiterate denizen of the sleazier reaches of the interweb, Youtube manure fresh on my boots and Slashdot metamoderation points between my teeth, it was in fact a typo.

3:

I've been looking forward to the next book for a while, Virga is a fantastic world, pre-ordering now :)

4:

Oh yippee! I'm glad to hear that you have another book out—I had become afraid, based on the time it was taking and my lack of knowledge of your surgery and recuperation, that there wouldn't be another. Congratulations on surviving and recovering! I will be looking forward to the new book's publication!

I, too, am curious to know which e-book vendor you prefer, if any.

5:

Let me just add, ASHES OF CANDESCE really delivers a kick-ass series-scale climax. Strongly recommended (although you'd better read the first four books first)!

6:

I don't have a preferred vendor for ebooks. If you buy stuff off my site, you'll be taken to Amazon, but that's not because of any ideological or particular business-related passion on my part. I have a Sony reader and a Kindle, and I like them both--though I'm still partial to my large-format Irex Reader, because it allows me to annotate full-page pdfs. (Books from the Reader store look great on it.)

7:

Glad that you've pulled through, Karl, and am looking forward to completing the Virga cycle.

8:

I "discovered" your books when you were blogging here and am currently on the last Virga-book... so the finale will be out right on time for me :-). Looking very much forward to it although it is quite difficult to buy english e-books living in Austria (obviously we are not to be trusted with the english language ;-) )

9:

Recently read Ventus. Took a little while to get into it but was then gripped. Kept pondering the ideas afterwards. You're definitely on my, "must get more" list.

Good luck with the new one.

10:

The Series sounds great (and a Stross recommendation counts for a lot), but I can't find the ebooks in the UK. (Yes, I know...) If there is a legitimate route, I'd appreciate a pointer.

11:

YAY!

12:

Hey, don't rip on undercapping. (And in any event, an ellipsis will out you as an internet denizen more than anything else.)

13:

I'm actually trying to find a copy of Sun of Suns (because, you know, starting at the beginning).

I am failing.

Amazon think it's out of print in the UK and won't let me buy the US version. Tor link to Macmillan. Macmillan has it, but doesn't seem to have a 'buy' button on their website, although they do have a shopping cart. Barnes and Noble will sell me a copy, but only if I buy a Nook first. Google eBooks knows about it but doesn't have it for purchase.

Meanwhile, dodgy copies (including copies of the Tor giveaway) are trivial to find; or, if I wish, I can get a physical second hand copy delivered for less than what the ebook costs...

14:

B&N have a Nook app for iPhone/iPod & iPad and one for Android. So if you have an appropriate mobile device, just get the app (they're free), and read there. If you want to read them on your computer, you should get Calibre or some other ebook format reader/converter. B&N ebooks are in either epub (newer books) or pdb (older ones); you can convert this to something else or read it on you computer with Calibre.

15:

I don't want to download the app --- I don't have anything it would run on, anyway. I just want to download the goddamned book file so I can convert it to mobi and read it on my Kindle. Jumping through B&N's hoops to do so is just not worth the effort, particularly so given they provide no information on format, DRMness, etc...

16:

In the UK, if you want to start at the beginning, look for the book "Virga: Cities of the Air", which is a combined edition of the first two in the sequence. (I got my copy last summer after seeing the recommendation here, and am eagerly awaiting the last volume).

17:

I'm still waiting for The Sunless Countries to arrive in paperback, since I'm old-fashioned and hate hardcovers. But good to know there'll be more, a few dozen years from now when THIS will hit paperback.

18:

Hey, Peter, The Sunless Countries is scheduled to be out in paperback on May 8. This will be Trade paper, I believe, like Pirate Sun before it; but hey, the cover design is gorgeous on these.

19:

Any book that has to be ripped bloodily out of your heart must be brilliant...

20:

I found a copy of Cities of the Air (thanks for that, BTW) on Diesel eBooks here. Are they legitimate? I've never heard of them before.

21:

Diesel are perfectly legit, but if you manage to get an eBook out of them to a UK credit card/address, you'll be doing considerably better than I have ever managed :-(

22:

Indeed so, John.

And while book pimping is going on, this might be a good point to remind people that your next book, Transmission is due out in a week. I'll just say that, having already got my copy, I'd recommend it heartily.

So, folks, that's Transmission by John Meaney. Buy it, or see a scarily proficient martial artist pout in disappointment.

(Meanwhile I am, of course, off to order Karl's book. If it's as good as the preceding volumes, I'm in for a treat.)

23:

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of trade paperback format either, but you are one of a handful of authors I'll make an exception for and buy in that format, so I just have to wait another few months.

24:

Looking forward to it.

Virga is a BDO unlike any other and I want to see how you finish up the sequence.

25:

Just to add another data point to the mix, live in the UK and tried to order Sun of Suns in eBook format from Diesel...and it wasn't having any of it:

"Sales of the following ebook(s) are restricted within your territory and are being removed from your cart. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please understand these restrictions are driven by the publisher and author."

:(

Has anyone living over here found a way of getting their hands on a legit electronic copy?

26:

That sucks, sorry. I'm toying with doing a series of skype sock-puppet shows to retell the story. Meanwhile, the graphic novel version will be premiering as a webcomic soon, though annoyingly I don't know exactly when yet. But you'll certainly be able to read it in that form.

27:

Karl Schroeder, I think I told in last summer how your serialized novels blew me away more than any other new fiction besides Charles Stross, in the decade.

Since 6 July 2010 when I doubled by daily fiction writing quota to 2,000 words, I have also been in emergency medical care. Not as severe as the life-saving surgery of three years before that. Really shakes up one's priorities. Missing regular writing is the least concern.

Makes every sunset, smell of rose, smile on a loved one's face, even more precious.

That was, by the way, 1,219,100 words ago, since summer 2010, amounting to 12 novel manuscripts, and many short fictions (only 5 sold in 2011 of those). Pent-up demand, I think.

I'm about to spend a week in Australia, Heron Island Nature Preserve, Great Barrier Reef, teaching "Science Fiction and Complex Systems" to grad students and post-docs in a workshop. My air travel is paid, by an Oz university, but I still go out-of-pocket for hotel, ferry, and so forth. Yet worth it.

You and Mr. Stross are leaders in post-post-singularity fiction. The more Computer Science, Physics, Cosmology, Cognitive Sciences one knows, the deeper your fiction seems. Is. I look forward to 14 Feb -- which is also my wedding anniversary. Did I mention that my wife's smarter than me? I got lucky.

28:

Thanks, Jonathon, and all I can say about your Australia trip is, give'r! (I think that's not obscene.)

My wife's sister lives in Western Australia, essentially on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert. We had our honeymoon in Kalbarri and places like Monkey Mia. So I speak from experience when I say you'll love it.

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This page contains a single entry by Karl Schroeder published on January 10, 2012 4:39 PM.

World building 301: some projections was the previous entry in this blog.

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