The anthology I’m going to be appearing in–with Jim Butcher, Mary Robinette Kowal, Seanan McGuire, Joe Abercrombie, and Terry Brooks–is available for preorder. Check out the cover art and the table of contents.
My contribution is set during the events of The Way into Chaos. (Spoilers!)
Most everyone who’s following the news knows about the difficulties facing Syrian refugees. Author Kevin Hearne has decided he’s going to do something to help.
Basically, he’s giving away books to people who donate to UNHCR. All you have to do is donate, send him proof, and you’re entered to maybe win something.
And, to support his efforts, I’ve sent him four copies of the limited edition omnibus of The Great Way. Did you miss out on the Kickstarter? Would you like to get one of fewer than 200 copies of that omnibus edition, the one with nothing on the cover but the fantasy map?
If so, pop over to that link above and follow the directions, so you can get a chance to win. It will help people who need it, and maybe you’ll get some books, too. Admittedly, my books aren’t pictured (yet) but he should be receiving them today, so maybe there will be a picture later. Check out the update page with my (and several other authors’) books.
Time is short, though, so don’t wait.
A whole lot of folks are unhappy with the portrayal of Black Widow (“The Black Widow”? Hm.) in the second Avengers movie, and there are a whole lot of others insisting they just let it go. So naturally, I have to weigh in.
As a sidenote, it’s interesting to see: ““I’ve said before, when you declare yourself politically, you destroy yourself artistically,” [Joss Whedon] said.
And he’s right, obviously. People might criticize the sexist parts of, say, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD but they don’t subject Edgar Wright to the same “What a wonderful feminist/He calls himself a feminist? Ha!” rhetoric that Whedon gets. It’s the first thing people want to talk about. And many of those same people are really hot about Black Widow’s infertility and her use of the term “monster”. (spoilers) Continue reading
Today, finally, is the day that the third and final book in my epic fantasy trilogy will be released. The page for book two is right here, and the page for book one, with the introductory synopsis and the links to sample chapters, is right here.
If you haven’t read either of these books, you don’t want to read book three. It’s all one story.
How about a cover?
The Way Into Darkness, Book Three of The Great Way, art by Chris McGrath, design by Brad Foltz
Amazing, isn’t it?
Spoilers for the story so far if you read the synopsis below. For real, if you think you might want to read these books, stop reading here and check out the post about book one or read the sample chapters.
Or, if you’re a Spoilerphile, here’s the synopsis for the book:
BOOK THREE OF THE GREAT WAY: What was once the Peradaini Empire is now a wasted landscape of burned, empty cities and abandoned farmlands. The Blessing, now more numerous than ever, continues to spread across the continent, driving refugees to the dubious safety of the city walls. Unharvested crops mean that few strongholds have enough provisions to last the winter, although most know the grunts will take them before starvation will.
But hope survives. A piece of stolen magic just might halt the spread of The Blessing if Tejohn and Cazia can find a scholar with the skill to recreate the spell. If such a person still lives.
Unfortunately, they are nearly out of time. The few remaining human enclaves are isolated and under siege. Worse, The Blessing has spread to other sentient creatures. If Cazia and Tejohn are going to strike back at their monstrous enemy, they can not delay.
And there’s another, deeper question left unaddressed: where did The Blessing come from, and why have they invaded Kal-Maddum?
The Way Into Darkness is the final book in The Great Way, wrapping up the story begun in The Way Into Chaos and continued in The Way Into Magic.
If things seemed desperate in the previous books, this one brings humanity to the brink.
Some blurbs:
“One hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners, breathtaking holey moley of a book.” — C.E. Murphy, author of Walker Papers
“Highly recommended, if you want a stay-up-all-night, forget-to-eat, must-have-the-next-book-NOW reading experience.” — CC Finlay, author of Traitor to the Crown: A Spell for the Revolution and editor of F&SF
“Complex world, tight action, awesome women as well as men; Connolly was good right out of the gate and just keeps getting better.” — Sherwood Smith, author of Inda
“Gripping, absorbing, and fast-moving, an epic fantasy for those of us who like it lively” — Charles Stross, author of Halting State and The Laundry Files.
“Heroic in scope, but intimately human, and richly detailed.” — Kat Richardson, author of the Greywalker series.
Here is the page for book one. Here is the page for book two. To order book three, just click below.
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Jan 16th marked 30 days since The Way Into Chaos went on sale, and I know (because they ask) people are curious about how it’s doing and what effect it’s having on my backlist, aka, the Ray Lilly novels.
Before the graphs, the explanations. First of all, we’re talking about Kindle sales here. Most every other vendor is selling books in the low two digits. Paper copies (added together) are slightly better. But while Kobo, iBooks, Nook, Smashwords, etc, made a decent showing in the first few days after the books were released, they’ve since fallen off. The Kindle is where most of the action is, and these figures are 100% copied from Amazon’s Kindle page.
Next, Book one, The Way Into Chaos, was published on Dec 18. Book 2, The Way Into Magic, was published on Jan 13. However, Amazon treats the release date as GMT. So, once it hits midnight in Greenwich, England, they start delivering pre-ordered books.
For the graphs they show me, though, the sales are attributed to each date according to *my* time zone, which is PST. So from my perspective, my pre-ordered books were loaded onto people’s Kindles starting at ~4pm on the day before release. Meh. It’s not something I worry much about.
Other next, I’ve removed the Y-axis data from some of these graphs. For Twenty Palaces and the short fiction collection, I’ve left the numbers in the Y-axis because each line is one sale and people have asked if The Great Way is giving a boost to 20P (obviously hoping the boost would be enough to revive that series. Spoiler: nope.)
As for the new books, I took them out, mainly because I didn’t want people sitting down trying to calculate what I’m earning, so they can give me advice. This is a thing that happens to me.
So, the y-axis for “All” books is identical to the y-axis for book 2, but not for book 1.
Okay, that was longer than I expected. Let’s do the thing.
Kindle sales for all books
Obviously, the first thing you notice is that gigongo spike on the right side. That’s the sight of many many pre-orders being delivered, just after GMT turned over to 1/13, as I mentioned above.
There’s no corresponding pre-order spike for book one at the far left because a) there weren’t many days for people to pre-order and b) it helps when book one is already out.
There’s also an utterly unsurprising dip on Christmas day, with a little bump just before. What I didn’t expect was that the days after the holiday would be even better. I thought the gift-buying effect would be stronger than the gift-card effect, but nope.
Something I like? The way it keeps trending up. In December, the best sales day was the 28th. The sales on that date tied with the worst sales date in the first half of January. Good thing I don’t believe in jinxes.
There’s also a little bump on and after Jan 3rd, but we’ll come back to that.
Here’s the trend for book 2, The Way Into Magic:
Book 2 Kindle sales figures
As I mentioned above, the y-axis for this chart is identical to the one above, so this just proves that the big spike really was all those pre-orders. And yeah, sales have dipped afterwards, but that’s not a big surprise. It’s still early days, as far as I’m concerned.
How about the trend for book 1, The Way Into Chaos:
The change in y-axis makes comparing numbers sort of useless, but the trend is there.
There’s an odd little dip on Jan 13th, the day book 2 was published. I’m not sure if it’s just the attention book 2 got that day, with it’s own blog post and everything, or if there was something else that made sales dip.
There’s also a nice jump on the third of Jan and after, but it dips again, so I’m not sure what it could be.
By the way, I’ve compared these peaks and valleys to the days I post on the blog, and there seems to be no correlation. Some blog posts come on low sales days, some high. Maybe I could compare tags or something, but it doesn’t seem worthwhile.
Let’s go with the short fiction collection, Bad Girls Die Horrible Deaths and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy.
This time, it’s a 90-Day graph.
As the caption says, this time the graph covers 90 days, because I wanted to show the effect on a backlist item when a front list item came out. Not powerful, is the verdict. As you can see, there’s some effect, but not a lot. Frankly, it’s about what I expected. Ebook-only short fiction collections are not exactly known for burning up the bestseller lists, which is why I released this last July. I was hoping for a little extra in my bank account.
There’s also what looks like the new book dip, although there are other troughs, too, so maybe it’s just noise. The first big spike came on the day I talked about being unable to get my backers to download their books. On the day after, sales were a little lower, even though I posted an apologia along with a note about the short fiction collection’s availability.
The other, slightly larger spike, comes on the third of January again. I’m still not sure what that’s from. I’ve been told that, when a book on Amazon hits 25 (and then 50) reviews, Amazon’s algorithms begin to show it more frequently to readers. On Jan 3rd, I got my 25th review for The Way Into Chaos, and maybe that caused a bump across a bunch of different books.
But it wasn’t a particularly long lasting one. It followed the upward trend, but didn’t establish a new, deeper one. So maybe it was something else. After all, Jan 3 is the day I retweeted this:
adios motherfuckers pic.twitter.com/rO3zyvTz1e
— AlmightyBob (@AlmightyBoob) January 3, 2015
Finally, the last chart that shows 90 days of sales of my last book, Twenty Palaces.
90 Days of Kindle sales for Twenty Palaces
Yeah, there’s a bump, but it’s pretty negligible. Part of this is because most of the people buying The Great Way already have the Ray Lilly books. Part is that new readers haven’t even gotten their hands on book 3 yet, because it comes out the first week of February.
So maybe 20P sales will pick up. I hope so. I could use the money, and a bump would take me closer to earning out in my contract with Del Rey.
That’s it! Thirty days.
One thing: I’m sure people out there could look these graphs over and make a pretty good estimate of the number of books I’m selling. Please don’t. It’s creepy.
Last thing: I’m glad that sales keep trending upward. I hope it continues for the next thirty years or so. But I have to say that most of that trend isn’t down to my marketing efforts. Yeah, I wrote the book, and people like it, but I’m not the one spreading the word, making the sales. I’m tweeting to the same people, sending Facebook updated and G+ posts to the same crowd of followers day after day. The real reason new people are trying the novels is because readers are spreading the word.
So thank you.
Hey, remember that book I released last month?
Well, it’s time to release book two, The Way Into Magic.
Before I go any farther, why don’t I post the cover?
Gorgeous, right? I love all the covers for this trilogy, but this is the one I love the most. The dragon skeleton, the cool blue, Cazia’s whole pose… It’s just incredibly appealing.
As I’ve said before, you don’t want to read this book without having read book one. This is a continuation of the story, not a stand alone text. That’s why there won’t be any new sample chapters (although you can still read the beginning of the story here) and why the description of the book will absolutely contain spoilers.
So why should you read it?
(Spoilers beyond this point.) Continue reading
Chris McGrath is selling prints of the art he did for The Way Into Chaos, and not only is it gorgeous, the prices are beyond reasonable.
Check it out.
My new book, first in a new trilogy, is on sale now. Let me start with a blurb.
“It’s Epic Fantasy that reads like a Thriller” — Kat Richardson
Here’s the description from the back cover:
The city of Peradain is the heart of an empire built with steel, spears, and a monopoly on magic… until, in a single day, it falls, overthrown by a swarm of supernatural creatures of incredible power and ferocity. Neither soldier nor spell caster can stand against them.
The empire’s armies are crushed, its people scattered, its king and queen killed. Freed for the first time in generations, city-states scramble to seize neighboring territories and capture imperial spell casters. But as the creatures spread across the land, these formerly conquered peoples discover they are not prepared to face the enemy that destroyed an empire.
Can the last Peradaini prince, pursued by the beasts that killed his parents, cross battle-torn lands to retrieve a spell that might—just might—turn the battle against this new enemy?
Several free chapters start here. Go forth and sample.
And here’s the cover itself:
Art by Chris McGrath. Design by Brad Foltz
God, I love that cover. (Chris sells prints at very reasonable rates.) Spoiler: the art on the inside is gorgeous, too. If you want to see a larger version of the map, the artist has put it on her site.
Let’s have some backstory. When I announced that poor sales numbers meant I was not going to be writing any more Twenty Palaces novels, I kept telling readers “I hope you like my next series just as much.”
Well, no pressure on me, but the next series is here. Anyone who’s been following this blog knows it was written as part of a homeschool project with my son. I tried to find traditional publication for this book and the two sequels, and when that failed, I turned it into a successful Kickstarter.
Hold on, let me just post this to see if I’m tired of looking at it yet.
Nope. Not yet.
It has a map by Priscilla Spencer, illustrations by Claudia Cangini, and the paperback was designed by a professional (who uses the pseud “thebarbarienne” online).
Anyway, the original working title for this trilogy was Epic Fantasy With No Dull Parts, which everyone thought was funny but few understood was mostly aspirational. Most epic fantasy has a slack, touristy feel to it, and I wanted to try for something different.
But I like to think this is more than just a thriller. It’s also about empire, and how it feels to live in one, and how you come to identify with it even if you hate it.
It’s also about being invaded. In fact, one of the NY publishers who turned the book down explicitly complained about this: a portal fantasy where the enemy is magically transported to a new land? Apparently, that’s Doing It Wrong. Portal fantasies are supposed to be about protagonists invading other places, not being invaded.
Please read the sample chapters. Book 2, The Way Into Magic is out right now. So is The Way Into Darkness, book 3.
If you like the books, please tell your friends.
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After being six months past the “there’s-no-way-these-books-will-take-longer-than-this” deadline, I finally ordered the trade paperbacks for my new trilogy, The Great Way. The expected delivery date from UPS was last night, and I rescheduled a bunch of work so I would be ready when the boxes of books arrived (16 of them) and could slip them into the already-addressed and sorted envelopes.
Then, on Tuesday morning, I double-checked the UPS tracking numbers and realized the books had been bumped a day, to Wednesday. Sure, the boxes had arrived in Seattle before 3 am on Tuesday morning, but apparently UPS needed 30 hours to get them on a truck.
Do I need to say I was disappointed and angry? I griped about it on Twitter, and a UPS help account encouraged me to email their customer service department with the tracking numbers and other details to confirm that they were actually sitting in a warehouse down in south Seattle.
The customer service rep confirmed it. My books, which had been delivered to Seattle the night before, still had not been unloaded and sorted. I’d have to wait for them to be delivered the next day.
Three hours later, sixteen boxes of books arrived.
My son, to my great surprise, believed me when I said I needed his help. He got off his computer (not a small deal) so he could slip bookmarks into books so I could turn to the title page quickly and seal envelopes. When my wife got home at 9pm after a long day of physical work, she cheered to see us working together, then chipped in.
I started alone at 5:30. We sent the boy to bed at midnight. My wife and I didn’t finish until almost two am. This morning, we got up early, called a cab, and transported all the books to the local post office to mail them out.
Pictures behind the cut. Continue reading
Curious where things stand with my upcoming fantasy trilogy, The Great Way? Well, I just did a Kickstarter update laying out the details. Short version: I received the proofs for the trade paperbacks, approved them, and placed the order for backer copies.
Which means they’re being printed right now.
I’m just waiting for the proofs for the omnibus cover and, assuming that’s all correct, I’ll order those, too.
In other words… SOON.