After doing a little inventory thingie in the GIANT! WAREHOUSE! of my wee closet, I’ve decided I could stand to give away three copies each of the audiobooks for HEXED and HAMMERED. US only, no previous winners, leave a comment, I’ll pick ya randomly on Saturday. :)

I just began to enjoy audiobooks this summer. While I of course prefer to read myself, sometimes you simply don’t have the time, or you’re in a situation where it’s illegal to read, like when you’re driving. I listened to The Hunger Games in June while I was driving around Colorado on the Book & Beer Tour, and I loved it. Kind of expensive, though, for all those CDs. There is good news if you’re not used to the audiobook thing and maybe not so anxious to plop down a wad o’ cash on a big package of CDs: there’s a fairly newish service (new to me, anyway) that works on the subscription model—but it’s a subscription you can cancel anytime, and you get to listen to stuff on whatever device you want (iPods, etc.). It’s called Audible.com, and they have this deal where the first three months are $7.49, which includes one free audiobook download per month. Naturally, from the Shameless Plug Department, I would like to point out this means that you can listen to all three of my books for $22.47. That’s more than 28 hours of entertainment for less than a buck an hour! Aw, yeah! That’s way cheaper than movies. It’s cheaper than the soda and popcorn too! Plus you can listen on the treadmill or something and maybe lose a couple pounds! Woohoo!

Methinks that there are many other services similar to Audible out there. Feel free to share your faves in the comments—I’m very new to the audiobook scene and could stand the education. One of the cool things about Audible is that it lets you rate every audiobook on an overall basis, and then separately for story and performance. Huge kudos to Luke Daniels, the reader for my books, who consistently gets better ratings for his work than I do for mine! :) He seriously does a great job with all the accents in the series, and his voice for Oberon is hilarious. So yeah, there you go—a cheap way to try audiobooks.

Right now I want to feel that I have cleverly mixed a public service announcement with wholly self-serving promotion. It’s sort of like a yin-yang thing. Balance achieved! Except that I don’t think I was very clever about it. If I have achieved balance in the Tao, I should feel calm and at peace, but instead I feel that mild revulsion yet strange attraction you always get when you realize you have a bad case of Cheeto fingers. But wait! I’m giving stuff away for free! Ahh, that’s what I needed: a small salve for my conscience. :)

Yet perhaps there is no hope for my conscience, because I’ve been hiding this secret for years: I don’t even know what a nerfherder is or if they indeed have ears. I think they must, because how else would they hear the lowing of the nerfs at night? Still, this lack of knowledge has not prevented me from brazenly claiming a Nerfherding Award. I present these facts to a candid world and beg mercy.

Went to Rúla Búla today for lunch with the incredibly spiffy Chelsea from Vampire Book Club. If you’ve never visited her particular blog, it’s one o’ the better ones out there (that I’ve read, anyway), and that probably has a bit to do with the fact that Chelsea’s a journalist as well as an avid reader. Though she’s now based in Texas, Chelsea went to ASU and recognized the neighborhood in HOUNDED, and so we got to gabbing a bit back and forth via Twitter. (Twitter is cool like that.) She’s visiting family and friends for a week, so she and her husband were able to squeeze in some time to visit at everyone’s favorite Irish pub on Mill Avenue. Here’s what it looks like—I snapped a photo before I went in to meet Chelsea:

If you ever do find yourself in Tempe (or the Phoenix area), now you’ll know what to look for. :) I’m hoping to see plenty of  you there on April 28, because that’s when we’re holding Atticus n’ Oberon’s Sausage Fest to celebrate the release of TRICKED. We have most of the details worked out now, I’m just waiting on the art; I’ll do a full post on it once it’s ready to go!

Anyway, some slightly blurry proof (eek, sorry!) that we had a convivial meeting:

We shared our geekouts over meeting our favorite authors. We discussed tattoos, because both Chelsea and her husband have some really impressive ones. I found out that there’s a pretty cool indie bookstore in Fairview, Texas (nearish Dallas) called A Real Bookstore, where, gods willing, I’ll be able to visit next summer. (I’m going to try to visit a few places in the south next summer because, dang it, I want to, and I haven’t been to the south since the mid-90s; so far I’ve pencilled in Lexington, KY; Nashville, TN; Atlanta, GA; maybe somewhere in NC? And Dallas.) We also got to chat with Steve, the owner of Rúla Búla, for a little while. He gave me some hints about where to visit when I finally get myself across the Atlantic to visit Ireland—cannot wait to go!

Chelsea n’ Matt were completely lovely people and I’m glad I got to hang out with them for a while. The wife n’ I hit Mill Avenue afterward and enjoyed the shops there. Woohoo! Sunday afternoons are cool. Hope you had a good one too. :)

TRICKED got accepted today, so that gave me an excuse—if I needed one—to bust open some cider and quaff a proper flagon. This particular book was a tougher one to write and revise than the other three, from outline to end product, and I think it had quite a bit to do with the fact that it’s a “bridge book” as the good Dr. Nicole Peeler calls it: A book that ties off all the loose ends of one particular story arc while launching a completely new, batshit insane one. (That definition is mine, not hers, by the way. Hers would sound much more academic yet leave you feeling inexplicably titillated.)

This may inspire some of you to say, “Great! Ship it tomorrow, dude!” But oh, no. You don’t really want that.

I’m going to write a joint post on the revision process with my editor and post it in a couple/few weeks, because lots of people are probably unaware of how much revision goes into a book before it hits the shelves. And that brings me to the “sort of” part: “Accepted” doesn’t mean the book is finished and can be shipped tomorrow. There are still copy edits and then galley proofs to go through, and then there will be at least one, maybe two “cold” proofreads to do before they finally greenlight the text as approved for printing. And then, yeah. There’s OTHER STUFF. Like, the cover. I haven’t seen any sketches for the cover yet, though there’s still plenty of time. There is a completely über-nice lady at Random House who gets books ready for NetGalley and Amazon and Barnes & Noble and other electronic retailers. There are sales people who talk to buyer people over lunches drizzled in pork fat and they laugh heartily together and then decide how many copies they’re going to buy for their stores…which impacts visibility and sell-through numbers. (Is there a formula correlating the ratio of pork fat in these lunches with sales numbers? Only the mysterious people in Accounting know the truth.) There are people who smell of ink and paper and glue who print the books and pack them into boxes. Their fingers have fine white scars on them from years of paper cuts and for some reason, in my imagination, they all have mutton chop whiskers on their faces and tattoos high on their right shoulders. Anyway. There’s a lot of stuff to do still. And because there’s a lot of stuff, you’ll have to wait until April 24 to read this bad boy.

To make the wait happy: You will also get to read Chapter 1 of TRAPPED when you’ve finished TRICKED. Also, if I can manage it (emphasis on IF), there will be bonus content for the e-book version of TRICKED, just like there was for HOUNDED and HAMMERED.

Why can’t we print bonus stuff in the paperback version too? Excellent question! Well, it’s because getting stuff ready for print takes MONTHS, which is why you won’t see TRICKED until April 24 even though it’s close to being spiffy here in September. And it’s because I haven’t written the bonus stuff yet. :) I have, however, finished chapter 1 of TRAPPED, so it can be included.

That bonus story for HAMMERED, “A Test of Mettle,” told from Granuaile’s point of view while Atticus was in Asgard, wasn’t written until April of this year. I hadn’t even thought of it until then. By that time the book had been completely typeset, and there was no way I could include it in the print version. But the flexibility to include it electronically was so cool I couldn’t stand not including it, and the peeps at Del Rey were helpful with editing and formatting it for me. (I’ll include that story for free on my website in December, by the way.)

Someone asked me on Twitter why the bonus stuff wasn’t included in the audio versions—another great question! Again, it’s a question of timing, but also pesky things like money and contracts. When I slip that bonus stuff into the e-book versions, it’s truly a bonus for readers. I haven’t been paid diddly squat for those stories, and I’m cool with that because I just want to share some goodies about the Iron Druid world that wouldn’t get published otherwise. But if the audio company wants to include those stories in their releases, you can bet they won’t be able to get their reader to read it for free or get the studio to donate the studio time. That’s basically what it boils down to: e-books allow me to give stories away, but various realities of print and audio don’t.

Anyway—want to thank you for all the comments on the previous post regarding the store! I will be getting to work on those ideas soon. :) Thank you, too, for your patience waiting for the book! I’ve already started work on TRAPPED. You’ll notice the word meter over on the right-hand side.

Cheers!

Congratulations to ROB, winner of the sketch of Atticus and the Morrigan! I did one of those sequence generator things on Random.org, and it looked like this:

Rob was comment number 30, so congrats, sir! Please send me your address immediately using kevin at kevinhearne dot com and I’ll get it in the mail to you!

In other news—remember I’ll be at the Velma Teague branch of the Glendale Public Library next Saturday at 2pm! Would love to see you there! You can bring stuff (books, babies, etc.) for me to sign or  you can buy books there! You can also just chill out and chat if you like. I’ll be talking a wee bit and more than happy to answer questions afterward!

In other, other news—I just got the UK version of HEXED in the mail. ‘Tis beautiful! I’ll probably run another contest soon for five signed copies. It will be US only because I can’t afford to send packages all over the world—sorry. But stay tuned for details!

Stuff has been happening! Like, you know, life. Haven’t been able to blog as often since school has started, but I’ll still try to keep up with once a week. Here we go—

1. I’m going to make a personal appearance thingie soon. I feel weird saying it like that, as if my “appearance” is some kind of magical event. But no, it’s pretty mundane. People say, “Dude, can you chill with us for an hour or so on such a date and such a time?” and if I’m available, I’ll probably say heck yes, because I’m a nerd and extremely grateful when people want to chill with me. So that’s why I’ll be at the Teague Branch of the Glendale Public Library on Saturday, Sep. 17, at 2 pm. Full address n’ stuff here. I’ll talk a wee bit, and you can ask me whatever you want, and then if you’d like me to sign something I’ll do it. They’ll have copies of the series for sale there, but you can also bring copies you’ve already bought, have me sign your e-Book cover, whatever. Basically I’m going to be happy to see you if you take the trouble to come see me. :)

2. I just finished the third version of TRICKED and sent it off to my editor, Tricia. We’ll see how she digs it, but for you keeping score at home, this draft is 99,487 words; the first draft was 81,666. Tricia and I will be doing a joint blog post in the future about the revision process from a writer’s perspective and an editor’s, but the extremely short version of my perspective is this: I love revising, because I can see the book getting better.

3. My publisher, Del Rey, is on Facebook as Del Rey Spectra. If you “Like” them, then you’ll find that you don’t just get updates on books (though that is cool): they also do polls and discussions on various geeky topics and hold some pretty rad giveaways. They’re 10 away from 2,000 likes, and they’ll be doing some giveaways soon to celebrate that milestone, so there’s never been a better time to click Like.

4. I just got 1,700 likes on Facebook, so thank you to everyone—I appreciate the love. To let you know I love you back, I’m having a wee random contest to celebrate this rather random number. Open internationally, folks! The prize is a signed sketch of Atticus and the Morrigan, seen below. (I’m only a mediocre artist but people seem to like sketches for some reason, so why not, they’re fun!) To enter, just leave a comment about what roleplaying or video games you enjoy. I’m kind of curious what everyone’s into. I’m into a tabletop game called HORDES these days, but I also do Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. No video games for me right now—I’d never get my writing done!—but I used to play. If you don’t play games, you can leave a comment about what SciFi/Fantasy books you’re into right now, and that’s fine too. Rules: I’d like this to go to someone who’s never won stuff from me before, because I like to share the love. Must enter by 6pm EST on Friday, Sep. 9. I’ll announce the winner—chosen randomly—on Saturday morning on a new blog post. If you enter, please check back on Sep. 10 to see if you won, then contact me with your mailing address. Good luck, and thanks again for reading my books. :)