I’ve had a fair number of requests to provide a detailed design for the Iron Druid tattoos, not only for cosplay but for people who might consider getting them for real. Well, here you go! Many thanks to Phil Balsman at Odin Star Industries for drawing these up.

We don’t have the full body design here, but we have the arm stuff, which is what most people would see and cosplay. I do have a schematic for the whole body where there is a different sequence of knotwork for all the stuff a Druid can do, but getting it done would be costly and time-consuming when very few people would actually use it. I have high hopes, however, that I’ll see some of this in cosplay at conventions in the future. :)

You are free to print out and use the designs below however you wish. If you print them out on temporary tattoo paper you’ll be all set. I’ve provided the shapeshifting forms for Atticus only, and if there is significant demand I might provide the forms for Granuaile as well. If you’re so inclined, now that you’ve seen the style you can of course design your own zoomorphic forms to suit you.

I will place smaller jpegs below, but for printing purposes, please download this PDF file.

First, here’s a diagram showing how the tattoos should be placed:

Next, we have the strip falling down from the top of the shoulder and the transition curve to the shape-shifting bands that wrap around the biceps:

Here’s all the fun: The shape-shifting bands. This will require some adjustment depending on the diameter of your arm. However, we’ve included another band of the default shapeshifting pattern to fill in as needed. When you first transition from the shoulder you’ll probably find that the human form kind of disappears into your armpit, but hopefully you can work things so that the four animals appear on the outside of the arm. Use that extra default pattern to fill in!

Lastly, you have the planeshifting knots down the forearm and the healing triskele on the back of the hand. The transition curve from shapeshifting to planeshifting can be found on the first page of designs. We have two strips of the planeshifting knotwork to allow for shorter or longer forearms. And then we’ve provided the triskele by itself and with the transition to the planeshifting knots.

Happy cosplay!

This is a fun contest thingie. :) The prize is a signed early copy of HUNTED. I have five o’ those to give away and it’s an international contest. I’ll send you a signed Oberon bookmark too!

Photo contests are spiffy because everybody likes looking at the entries afterward. We’ve done the Iron Pet contest and Nerdscapes and we even did this one where we took pictures of sausage, but I don’t want to repeat myself so we gotta do something else. I’ll give you one guess what we’ll do. But first I will point you to the blog post title.

The Rules:

1) You’re required to have fun!
2) Send your entry as a jpeg to kevin@kevinhearne.com. Entries sent via Twitter or Facebook will not be counted. Include your name in your email. If you want me to call you Sparkly Puffypants that’s fine, I just want to give credit for the photo so that in case you win I can say HEY SPARKLY PUFFYPANTS, YOU WON!
3) Your still life must have a beer and a book. Anything else is a bonus.
a) Wine doesn’t count. Nor do wine coolers or harrrrrd likker! or whatever. This is a Beer & Book still life.
b) Yeah, you should probably be 21 to enter. Because you might have to acquire beer.
c) This isn’t about beer snobbery, though! If you have a Pabst or whatever that’s totally cool. This is about art and life and enjoying them. Don’t feel like you have to find the One True Beer or anything. (On the other hand, a quest for the One True Beer sounds pretty fun.)
c) The book must NOT be one of mine. I already know you read my books or you would have no interest in entering this contest. I—and everyone else—would really like to see what’s your top recommendation right now outside of Atticus n’ Oberon. :)
d) You can use a hardcover, paperback, or ebook. If the latter, then please set your ereader screen to the cover of the book so we can clearly see what you’re reading. The cover/title/author need to be visible.
e) Totally cool to have other books in there besides the one you’re focusing on, but again, please, no Iron Druid stuff. Seriously. And of course you can have dogs and lizards and weeping angels and whatnot.

Ready for my examples, which often pale compared to the entries you guys send in…? Here’s the first one:

That’s Jamaica Red Ale with The Darwin Elevator by Jason M. Hough. Also my Twenty-Sided Dice Fez and a bottle opener from Ommegang Brewery in New York. Can’t recommend Jason’s work enough; in fact, if you look closely, you’ll see I wrote the blurb at the top of the cover. It comes out July 30, so I’d say pre-order that puppy now and prepare to have your shit blown up. Greatest sci-fi I’ve read in years!

Okay, here’s one with my ereader. I rock a Nook SimpleTouch.

That’s Oberon Ale from Bell’s Brewery in Comstock, Michigan. There’s also something cute and fluffy there and IT’S SO FLUFFY but I can’t for the life of me explain why it’s in my house. The book is Mockingbird by Chuck Wendig. I’m about to dive into that because I read his first book starring Miriam Black (called Blackbirds) and really liked it. Chuck’s a lot of fun to follow on Twitter if you’re not already doing so (@ChuckWendig) and his blog is balls rad too.

Deadline for entries is Sunday, June 9. I’ll post ’em all up on my Facebook page each day as they come in and you can like the heck out of ’em and get giant lists of beer and books to try out. And maybe win stuff. :)

I’ll pick two winners by somewhat arbitrary standards of coolness but generally skewing toward photographic quality. Between my two example pics, the second one would win in my eyes because it’s in a bit sharper focus. I’ll also pick three winners randomly, so you have a chance of winning no matter what. I’ll announce winners on June 10.

I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with! And as always, thanks for reading!

From time to time I get questions about the audio situation overseas, so here we go—all the answers. Like, ridiculously detailed stuff you probably didn’t want to know. But when people ask WHY THIS and WHY THAT and I say IT’S COMPLICATED they’re like BRING IT, SON, so here we go.

When audio rights to the Iron Druid Chronicles were first sold to Brilliance Audio, they bought North Amercian rights only, which means they could legally sell the English recordings only in the United States and Canada. Due to a rather large mistake, they told their distribution peeps they had World Rights, so they pushed it out in the UK and Australia and…yeah, the whole world. We were selling copies in South Africa. I didn’t find out about it for close to a year because I don’t check overseas vendors, and on the one hand, I was like, “Cool, people dig it in that country with the posh accent! Nice!” But on the other hand, it’s unwise to let people overreach on contracts. So I asked my agent to send Brilliance a polite wtf, and they politely said oh crap we didn’t mean to do that, and they took it down overseas.

But they couldn’t just buy World Rights and carry on—because while we didn’t know what was going on over there, we wound up giving UK territory rights to Orbit in the meantime, so once the audiobooks came down, they didn’t go back up. Notice that we only gave UK rights to Orbit…not Australia and New Zealand, also known as ANZ. That’s because the paper books of 1-3 were published by a third publisher, Harper Collins. Harper Collins never wanted audio rights, so at that point nobody had the rights to sell audio in ANZ. We couldn’t give ANZ audio rights to Orbit UK because audio is a subsidiary right and Orbit doesn’t publish books 1-3 in ANZ.

Still with me? Because I might have lost myself. To recap things to this point: Brilliance has NA rights for 1-3, Orbit has UK rights but no recording, and nobody has ANZ rights. Except consumers in the UK and ANZ did have access to the NA audiobooks for a while due to an error. You can imagine the emails I was getting for a good year or so there. I didn’t have any good answers for people who wanted to know where Atticus and Oberon went. I didn’t know when or even if things would eventually work out.

So: The second book contract for books 4-6 comes along, and we do things differently. North American rights are sold to Random House, not Brilliance. Luke Daniels continues as narrator, it’s just a different audio publisher. In this contract we don’t do CDs because it’s a dying medium. So if you’re waiting for CDs—I get emails about that too—I’m very sorry, they’re never coming. Everything will be digital only going forward.

UK and ANZ audio rights for books 4-6 were all given to Orbit UK, and Harper Collins was out of the picture. But we still had this situation where no one had ANZ audio rights for books 1-3, and Orbit understandably didn’t want to publish books 4-6 if 1-3 weren’t available there. GAH. So Brilliance did us a solid and stepped up to buy ANZ rights for 1-3 since they made the Worldwide Mistake earlier. Truly very cool of them—they didn’t have to do that.

OK. Awesome. We finally have a situation where Orbit can consider developing audio overseas, and so they’re doing it! YAY! But UK publishers in general—not just Orbit—tend to like doing their own versions of audiobooks—and the same is true of US publishers. If there’s a UK audiobook out there they want to publish here, they’ll probably record their own version for US audiences. Very common. So Orbit UK is recording books 1-6 with a different narrator named Christopher Ragland—solid dude—and they’ll all come out pretty quickly leading up to the release of Hunted in late June. Hounded is out now! I’m turbo happy that we can finally get you audio of the Iron Druid Chronicles overseas!

But there’s a coda for ANZ: Because of the bizarre rights situation, ANZ will have access to the Brilliance recording of Luke Daniels for books 1-3 and the Orbit recording of Christopher Ragland for books 4-6. And no, I can’t fix that so you get all Luke or all Christopher. Sorry. I know that a change in narrators isn’t ideal but hopefully it’s better than nothing.

As bureaucrats on trial are fond of saying, “Mistakes were made.” If we had a TARDIS and could get all timey-wimey and re-do contracts we would, but alas. We’ll just have to travel through time in a linear fashion and deal with it.

The final situation for books 1-6:

North America: Luke Daniels
UK: Christopher Ragland
ANZ: Luke for 1-3, Chris for 4-6.

Keep in mind that only Hounded is available in the UK at this time of this post, but the others are in the pipeline and will be released soon. Same goes for ANZ—if it’s not up yet, it will be soon. Happy listening wherever ye may be; I hope you enjoy the stories!

People ask me every so often what to read while they’re waiting for more Atticus n’ Oberon and I do have a list of good stuff on my FAQs page if you’d like to check it out. You’ll also find a series chronology there in case you were wondering how all the short stories and novellas fit in with the books.

But I’d like to put a few upcoming books on your radar. They’re all available for pre-order wherever you buy books, and hell yes I’ve pre-ordered them myself. Going in order of release date:

Tempest Reborn by Nicole Peeler is the sixth and final book of her series, coming out soon on May 28. Jane True is a selkie—not your normal badass, and in fact she’s a reluctant fighter, which I love—and these books are full of mythology and fun. Peeler gets me laughing out loud several times per book. Her first one, Tempest Rising, is on sale for cheap as an eBook, so there’s very little risk in giving her a try and if you like ’em you can mow through the whole series before the month is up! I feel I should offer up a horrid pun here…um. DIVE INTO ADVENTURE WITH A SELKIE

Jason M. Hough is going to have three books come out this year, bam-bam-bam, the way I did back in 2011. Same publisher as me and they’re giving him the same support, which should tell you how much they believe in him. I am also supporting him however I can because I’ve already read these and it’s the most entertaining sci-fi I’ve read in years. I want Jason to do well for entirely selfish reasons: If he sells enough books then he gets to keep writing them, and I cannot wait for this guy to write more books.

The Darwin Elevator comes out July 30; The Exodus Towers on August 27; and The Plague Forge on September 25. Here’s what I wrote about the first book:  “The best part about alien stories is their mystery, and Jason M. Hough understands that like no other. Full of compelling characters and thick with tension, The Darwin Elevator delivers both despair and hope along with a gigantic dose of wonder. It’s a brilliant debut and Hough can take my money whenever he writes anything from now on.” Yeah, I’m completely sold.

If you’d like to meet me and Jason, we’ll be in San Diego together on his release day, July 30, at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego at 7 pm.

Unstoppable force of nature Jaye Wells is launching a new series called Prospero’s War after the conclusion of her successful Sabina Kane series. The first book, Dirty Magic, doesn’t come out until January 21, 2014, so if you pre-order now you will get an awesome surprise next year. As you can probably guess by the cover, this series has quite a bit to do with alchemy and potions and a protagonist who wishes everyone would stop playing around with that dangerous shit. Well, I thought it was five kinds of cool and I wrote a blurb for it as well: “Kate Prospero is my new favorite heroine—imperfect, haunted, driven, and dangerous.”

So there you go! Please give ’em love! I have a book coming out at the end of June, but I’m sure you guys knew that already. :) If you can’t make it to one of my tour stops then you can order a signed copy from The Poisoned Pen now, I’ll sign ’em before I go on tour, and they’ll ship it to you on release day. Rock on!

This is a much-delayed and overdue companion piece to the post I did back in November called The Economics of Tours. That first post spoke of why it’s not so easy for an author or a publisher to set up big sprawling tours—it costs a lot of money to travel, basically, and not enough people show up and buy books to justify the expense.

But hiding on the other side of that coin are the bookstores where events are to be held. Holding a signing is not without its own set of economic risks and headaches. And again, since most people are probably unaware, I’m sharing some basic math in the interest of being helpful, to foster understanding of why a bookstore might not wish to hold events sometimes, and appreciate those indie stores who go out of their way to hold lots of events every year.

Bookstores generally buy books from publishers for 60% of the cover price—or, if you want to look at it a different way, at a 40% discount. Let’s break down a paperback and a hardcover sale and eventually get around to what this means for touring and events.

Most paperbacks are $7.99, unless you have one of those slightly larger ones that are $9.99 and annoying to hold, but let’s go with the $8 example. On an eight-dollar book, the bookstore “keeps” $3.20. That’s if it doesn’t give you a discount or a coupon or anything.

On a $25 hardcover—and I know hardcovers vary somewhat in price, but the math is super easy at $25 so let’s just go with it—the bookstore keeps $10 if it doesn’t discount.

So right there, without going any further, you can see that any rational business person would prefer to sell hardcovers to paperbacks because they make almost three times as much money per unit. To put it another way, a bookstore has to sell three paperbacks to equal one hardcover sale. That has a profound impact on signing events.

Depending on the author, the book, the day of the week, the time of the event, and even the weather, signings tend to draw anywhere from one person to a hundred. Really big authors will draw more, of course—they’ll have seven-hour lines and maybe bathe in Courvoisier afterward—but most signings draw fewer than a hundred people in a big city. Seriously. Plenty of signings are below fifty.

Let us, however, for the sake o’ easy math, say we sell fifty books at each signing. A bookstore would make $160 if those were paperbacks, and $500 if those were the aforementioned $25 hardcovers—provided they haven’t discounted anything. But wait! They don’t actually get to keep all that!

Say you have two employees in the store. Just two. The event lasts two hours, often three, and sometimes the events go past closing time so it’s not like we’re always talking normal business hours here. The employees are paid, what, I don’t know, maybe $10 an hour? I’m afraid to ask, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more or less, honestly, and there are taxes and health insurance and OMG, but I’m trying to keep this simple. So two employees at $30 for three hours eats up $60 of that money. Then there’s the overhead for the bricks and mortar—lights and computers and things. And sweet deity of your choice, they pay credit card companies 8-10% per transaction! And they have marketing costs to advertise the event—signage and newsletters to subscribers and website gurus to do webby things and all the goodies they have to do to coax fifty people in a metro area of one or two million to show up. Thus, if you’re a paperback author selling fifty copies and only bringing in $160 minus a buttload of expenses for the bookstore—even less if they give the customers any kind of discount—there is so little margin there that it’s hardly worth the time and effort to do all that. In fact, there’s a very real risk that the bookstore will LOSE MONEY on the event if the turnout is low, and as I hope I have intimated clearly, turnout is often low. Or you’ll have 75 people show up but only 40 copies get sold because 35 people inexplicably believe it’s polite to show up and not buy anything—they’ll bring in copies they bought elsewhere and contribute absolutely nothing to the local store that has gone to the trouble and expense of hosting the author.

I know my math is very basic and the devil’s in the details, and I know some indie stores have figured out how to do events well and come out ahead. They build massive mailing lists and do a ton of events and become a vibrant part of the city’s culture. The Poisoned Pen, for example, my local store, does more than 300 events a year. But many stores—especially in smaller cities without a giant mailing list—can’t shoulder the risk of a paperback event and have to turn some authors away. (Yes, even ones that sell pretty well.) And the vast number of indie bookstores that have closed over the past decade demonstrates that figuring out how to do events well (or how to sell paper books, period) is easier said than done.

With hardcover numbers, of course, there’s much more room for error. And that’s why bookstores would vastly prefer to host a hardcover author than a paperback one. At a hardcover event they can pray for a good night whereas with a paperback event they’re praying to break even.

There is probably a desperate plea in here to support your local independent bookstore—yes, please do that if you are lucky enough to have one!—but that’s not why I wrote this post. I wrote it to help people understand why it’s not so simple for me (and most authors) to come visit you wherever you are. There are not only economic limits to what authors can do but limits to what bookstores can do as well. It’s not that authors despise smaller cities or certain regions of the country or tiny island nations, and it’s not as if bookstore owners are actively trying to deny their communities access to authors. It’s that book signings are risky undertakings even in major cities, and everybody has to pay bills. In truth, the only reason you will ever see a signing by someone who isn’t a gigantic superstar is that bookstores love bringing authors and readers together. It’s never a sure thing that a signing will work out but they take the risk anyway and hope it will turn out okay. That’s why I love indies.

I am turbo grateful to the indie stores that have let me come by so far and to those who will be hosting me this summer, and super-turbo grateful to the readers who take the trouble to come out and see me and support those stores. I do wish I could see everyone—and I think most authors of a sociable bent would feel the same way—but yeah, for innumerable reasons, it’s just not possible. Like the famous eHarmony cat lady, I love my readers, I want to hug you all and I want you in a basket, so please don’t feel slighted if I (or another writer you dig) can’t make it to your neighborhood soon. We totally would if we could.