Tag Archives: Tricked

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Summer Tour 2012

Very excited! In less than a week, I’m off on a quick tour of the south—hope I can see you there!

Before you say, “Come to my town!” please understand that this is my best attempt to do so. The tour is out o’ me own pocket and I can’t afford to visit every place I’d like to. I’m trying to meet you more than halfway, in other words; you might have to drive a little bit to see me, especially since I might not make it back to your neck of the woods soon. I’m planning on doing the west coast in the summer of 2013.

The best and easiest way to get me out to your neighborhood is to have a local convention or writers’ conference invite me—that’s why I’m going to Indianapolis July 6-8 and heading to Utah October 5-6. Otherwise, I design road trips during the summers and visit places I wanna visit. So here’s where I’ll be—very soon!

June 7, Dallas, Texas

  • A Real Bookstore, appearing with Jaye Wells, author of the Sabina Kane novels, at 7 pm!
I’ll be signing TRICKED and Jaye will be signing copies of her latest release, BLUE BLOODED VAMP. Though of course we’ll sign anything. Our older books. Your youngest children. Flagons of ale. YE GODS this is going to be fun! Jaye is in The League of Reluctant Adults with me and A Real Bookstore serves alcohol. It’s gonna be a party. If you’re in driving distance of Dallas, you won’t want to miss this!
M

June 8, Cincinnati, Ohio and Lexington, Kentucky

  • I’ll be at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in both cities. Cannot say enough good things about those stores. In Cincinnati at 3pm, I’m doing a bit of a drive-by; I’ll say howdy to everyone, sign books, and hang out, but I won’t make a long presentation for two reasons: 1) I have to get to Lexington, and 2) the Illustrious John Scalzi will be there at 7pm signing Redshirts and I need to evacuate the Green Room so they can fill it full of Coke Zero. :) Quite a good day to show up in Cincinnati, eh? In Lexington at 7pm I’ll take my time—the guys there have been so great promoting my books. I think they deserve a hug.

June 9, Nashville, Tennessee

  • Happily at Parnassus Books at 5 pm. This bookstore is owned by author Ann Patchett and it looks to be pretty spiffy. If you’re anywhere near Nashville please come visit!

June 10, Atlanta, Georgia

  • I’ll be signing at A Cappella Books at 2 pm. Since I won’t be going to Dragon*Con, this will be my only visit to the Atlanta area! I hope to see you there; please bring your friends!

June 11, Charlotte, North Carolina

  • I’ll be at Park Road Books in Charlotte at 7 pm! I think I’ve managed to double-book myself with two different fans. I’m supposed to get coffee with one and a beer with another. This will be interesting. And cool. And fun.

June 12, Durham/Chapel Hill, North Carolina

  • So here you might be wondering, hey, why does NC get two visits? Well, it’s because of the greatest sports movie EVAR, Bull Durham. Ever since that movie came out way back when I’ve wanted to catch a game there. So I’m going to see the day game against the Toledo Mud Hens and then I’ll drive down to Chapel Hill to visit with people at Flyleaf Books at 7 pm! And hell yes I’ll be wearing my Durham Bulls hat! It’ll be all new and shiny! You should come just to witness my giant haul of Bulls merchandise.

June 13, Washington, DC

  • Library of Congress! Heck yes you can go there! It’s not like the members of Congress are using it. It’s the people’s library! I’ll be speaking there at high noon with a wee speech called “Urban Fantasy: A Uniquely American Genre.” It’s in the Staff Multipurpose Room, 6th Floor, Red Corner of the Madison Building, and yeah, it’s totally open to the public. They won’t be selling my books there, but you can come anyway with anything you’d like me to sign—one of my books, your pocket Constitution—and I’ll happily do so. I was invited to speak there by a librarian and so of course I couldn’t refuse.

So there you have it! Hope to see you on my road trip! If I’m impossibly far from you, I’m very sorry, and I hope we can meet at some event later on!

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NY Times and more

ZOMG! TRICKED is on the NY Times Best Seller List!

As you might expect, I am very sore from happy dancing, but I am also extremely grateful to my readers for embracing the series and making this happen. Thank you so much for reading and spreading the word!

Had a spectacular time at Atticus n’ Oberon’s Sausage Fest, the release party held on April 28. Met lots of spiffy people from around the country and wished I could have spent more time with them. I taught a couple of girls from Florida who had never thrown up the horns for a picture before how to rock out, sang “Fly Me to the Moon” in front of everybody, and received confirmation from all and sundry that Rula Bula really does have the best fish and chips anywhere. I would have pictures except that the picture CD I was sent got fractured in the mail; I’ll get the pics eventually and post them up on my Facebook page, never fear.

I’m writing this in a hotel room in Albuquerque; I met some wonderful people at Alamosa Books here yesterday. Alamosa is a fairly new indie store and it’s geared toward children and young adult readers, though they have an adult fiction section as well. Completely fabulous place, and I got some great questions from the readers there. If you’re in Albuquerque they still have a few signed copies of the series left.

FOR UK AND AUSTRALIA/NZ READERS

Some of you have noticed that TRICKED hasn’t been released overseas yet. I assure you that it is not an evil corporate plot to deprive you of Oberon—far from it!

The truth is that some artists—musical, literary, or otherwise—don’t ever hit it big across the pond. Some UK and Aussie authors never really get going in the US, and sometimes US authors don’t catch fire over there. That’s basically what’s happening here. For  whatever reason, the series hasn’t sold well in either region, even though it’s enjoyed some success in the US and Canada (see above). Those of you who have found me there have been utterly spiffy and I appreciate your enthusiasm for the books, but publishers are of course in business and need to support titles that grow their business. The way they look at it is, why should we supply something for which there is little or no demand?

There’s some hope. I do have a UK release date: May 24. The publisher is going to take a chance that the series will belatedly get some momentum going and make the financial risk worth it. So this is where I need your help: if you’d like the series to continue to be available in the UK, please tell all your friends to start reading it.

The same holds true for Australia, but even more so. I currently don’t have an Australian release date for book four. Not sure if I’m getting one or not, to be honest, though I’m trying to remain optimistic. I know there are some huge fans of the series out there, but from an accountant’s point of view, there aren’t enough. So, like I suggested to the UK readers, please tell your friends about the first three. Only when there is sufficient demand will a publisher supply the rest of the series. I’m getting zero publicity in Australia; I have to depend entirely on your word of mouth.

All authors do, by the way. If you like an author’s work and you’d like to see more, the best possible thing you can do to ensure that author will keep writing is tell your friends about their books. Write a review online. Press your copy into someone’s hands and stare into their eyes as you say, “This book will change your life or I will eat your socks with gravy.” That tends to work. And honestly, you hardly taste the socks if the gravy is good.

Thank you all again for reading about Atticus and Oberon and sharing. You’re tremendously kind and I appreciate it!

Blog

Release Week!

I know the wait has been excruciating for many of you, but it’s here! Release week for TRICKED, available Tuesday in paperback, e-book, and yes, audio as well! I hope you all enjoy it, and since many of you are fast readers and will probably ask me the same day when the next book is coming out, TRAPPED will be available Nov. 27!

Aside from some reviews that I assume will pop up here and there, I’ll be on the web in a couple of notable places: Anton Strout’s Once and Future Podcast (Episode 29), and also a guest post on Wicked Lil’ Pixie’s site, wherein I taunt her mercilessly over her aversion to the word MOIST. (That will be up on release day, by the way.)

The big release party is at Rula Bula on Mill Avenue at 6 pm on Saturday, April 28. I’ll be on the patio, Patrick from The Poisoned Pen bookstore will be there too selling books, and if you want to have a pint of something tasty and a plate of the world’s best fish n’ chips while you’re there, why, there will be cool people working there who’d be happy to take your order! If you’re in Arizona, I really hope you can come to this and support a great indie bookstore and a great Irish pub. Bring a camera and we’ll take silly pictures together and chat a bit!

If you have can’t make it Saturday night, I will try to arrange a consolation prize. What I’ll do on Sunday the 29th after I recover is drive around the east valley and sign stock in some bookstores. I’ll tweet as I go, so you’ll know where I’m going and where I’ve been so you can pick up a signed copy. But also remember that if you’re out of town or out of state, even out-of-country, you can always order a signed copy of any of my books from The Poisoned Pen. They ship anywhere.

Going forward from there, I’ll be at Alamosa Books in Albuquerque, NM on May 5 at 3 pm. I’ll be at the Velma Teague Branch of the Glendale Public Library on May 19 at 2 pm. And then I’ll be roaming around the Phoenix Comicon May 24-27, and shouldn’t be too difficult to track down.

For more information on where I’ll be in June and July, please check my Events & Appearances page!

In other news, somebody recently gave me the gift of beer. Glorious stuff, too! Kevin DeLange at Dry Dock Brewing sent me a sampler of his stuff and it’s amazing so far! Lookit, I haz proof:

I decided to try the Apricot Blonde seasonal first because SHE WAS LOOKING AT ME with her Herbal Essences hair and stuff. So I poured a glass and it looked like this:

Now it seems like she’s looking at the glass and asking, “Are you gonna drink that or what?” Well, heck yes! But be patient, I’m gonna enjoy it with some lunch first, like so:

The beer is fabulous. It doesn’t have the artificial taste so many flavored beers have; it’s light and refreshing and nom nom nom. If you ever go on a beer tour of Colorado, definitely stop by Dry Dock! They know what they’re doing.

Thanks again for reading and supporting indie bookstores. I hope you enjoy TRICKED and I hope I get to visit with you soon!

Cheers,
Kevin

Blog, Publishing Stuff

Publicity Do-Dah

Whew! What a difference a year makes!

When HOUNDED debuted on May 5 last year, I wasn’t sure how things would go, or that I’d even get to write book 4, but thanks to your support I will technically have four books published inside of a single year! I’m stupidly lucky to be here. Thank you, sincerely.

So what have I discovered in a year of being a published author?
1.) You don’t need to hire social media experts unless you are truly incapable of human interaction. They’re not selling anything you can’t figure out yourself—or if they are, it’s probably something akin to spam. I might be able to sell a few more copies here and there if I reeeeeally wanted to, but I think it would involve a Faustian bargain. Like most people, I’d rather keep my soul, thank you very much.
2.) If you write about your favorite sports team in your books and portray them as struggling mightily, they will open the next season by sweeping the San Francisco Giants 3-0. True fax.
3.) I vastly prefer interviews to guest posts. Vastly. The chasm is wide and deep, people. Even when the interview questions are repetitive, and they often are, that’s totally

    okay. I prefer interviews because book bloggers usually have a good sense of what their audiences want to know, and I’m happy to provide that. With guest posts I’m constantly thinking I’ve either already written what I’m writing or else I’ve read it somewhere before. I can’t keep from second-guessing myself and I wind up spending way too much time on them. However, I have recently written a very spiffy post with my editor about the revision process for novels, and if you’re an aspiring writer I’m sure you’d find it educational and perhaps even entertaining.
    4.) Some authors, in addition to being excellent writers, are also excellent human beings.
    5.) I geek out pretty hard when I meet an author I admire. Sorry, Mr. Rothfuss. I couldn’t help it.
    6.) My dogs really don’t give a damn that I’m now a published author. I get absolutely no credit with them for unlocking that achievement. They still climb right up to my face while I’m sitting on the couch, turn around, and let one rip.
    7.) My readers are frickin’ rad. They send in pictures of my books with action figures and stuff to create Nerdscapes. They tell me about cool beers they’ve had and neato tabletop games they play with their geek friends. They create amazing sausage recipes and take pictures of them with their dogs. And so far I’ve gotten some beautiful fan art for Atticus, Oberon, Leif, Granuaile, and the Morrigan. I’m kind of waiting for someone to do Vainamoinen and the sea serpent… :)
    8.) Indie bookstores are super cool! Plus: libraries! Also: book bloggers!
    9.) Social media is kind of hard to keep up with and I don’t think I’ll ever get the hang of it and be a deity of Twitter. I’m following under 100 people and I can’t even keep up with that. I just try to say howdy to the people who say something directly to me via @ replies. If you do follow me on Twitter, don’t be shy, I’m happy to chat. Facebook seems to be my biggest social doohickey but I’m not sure why. It’s a mystery. Can’t even consider joining Google + and LinkedIn and Amp My Orifice. (That last one isn’t real, but wouldn’t it be fun? There wouldn’t be friend requests. Instead you’d get this: “Kevin wants to amp your orifice. Will you amp his?”)
    10.) Yeesh. I’m still pretty immature.
    11.) Publicity is sooo much different than I thought it would be. I thought publishers spent all their money on ads and lunches with agents, and sometimes they do. But most of their budget these days tries to generate word-of-mouth. They give away lots of free copies to reviewers and bloggers and hope that they build buzz and stuff. There are probably nifty marketing words I should have used instead of “buzz and stuff,” but if I did use them you might think I knew what I was talking about.

    I actually think I learned much more than that, but some of it is Sekrit and some of it I can’t remember right now. I’m kinda tired so I’ll hit the hay, but thank you again for reading IDC and spreading the word so I can write more. We’re only two weeks away from the release of TRICKED (squee!) and I’m so glad that you’ll finally be able to dig in!

    May harmony find you,
    Kevin

Blog

Now it can be told

I actually kinda told this to my Facebook peeps a while back, but since there’s overlap and some people probably haven’t heard yet, I’ve changed audiobook publishers from Brilliance to Random House.

What I haven’t changed is the narrator. Luke Daniels will continue as the narrator for books 4-6. TRICKED just finished recording this week, as a matter of fact, and from what I understand they had a blast at it. Lots of good times with the new voices and some old favorites. And congratulations to Luke for being one of the highest-rated narrators on Audible for 2011 for his performances on The Iron Druid Chronicles!

In practical terms for you as a consumer, the only difference you may notice is that you can’t pre-order the TRICKED audiobook. There will be no physical CDs made; the audiobook will be digital only, but sold through regular vendors. TRICKED will appear for sale online April 24 wherever you like to buy your audiobooks.

Why no CDs? Many publishers see it as a dying medium. Everything’s going digital. I’m very sorry for those of you who listened to the first books on CD at libraries and so on, but I guess it’s not cost-effective to continue doing that.

TRAPPED:

I’ve turned in book 5, TRAPPED, to my editors and we’re still on schedule. You’ll get to read it on November 27—or, if you’re an audiobook listener, you’ll get to download it on that same date. I’ve seen a first draft of the cover. You’re going to see someone besides Atticus on this one. :)

OTHER GOODIES:

I have three shorter pieces “in the works” for you, all Iron Druid stories. TWO RAVENS AND ONE CROW is a novella that really should be considered IDC 4.5. It ties up a lot of stuff from HAMMERED and TRICKED, and as you might guess from the title, you can expect it to feature Odin and the Morrigan. This should be available over the summer in eBook form. Date and price and all that will be forthcoming.

“The Chapel Perilous” is a short story for one hell of an anthology. I’ll announce the date, title, and all that stuff when I can, but trust me when I say you’re going to want it. Every author on the list is worth a squee or five. This story will share Atticus’s experiences with the quest for the Holy Grrrrrrrail.

Another novella, THE GRIMOIRE OF THE LAMB, dealing with Atticus’s brouhaha with Bast and others, will most likely be ready in between TRAPPED and HUNTED.

STUFF I’M READING: 

This bit is kind of surreal. People are starting to ask me to read books before they’re published now and say something spiffy about them. My TBR list is full of books that haven’t come out yet. Still, you’d probably like a heads-up on the cool shit coming your way, right?  Let me, my friends, be the first to build some buzz—you’re going to want to read these:
1) YEAR ZERO by Rob Reid
2) STORMDANCER by Jay Kristoff
3) THE DARWIN ELEVATOR by Jason Hough

Sorry about all the book-related stuff. I’ll get something silly up here soonish. :)

Many cheers,
Kevin

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Wee excerpt from TRICKED

I want to thank all who voted for Atticus in the Suvudu Cage Match. You know and I know that he would have won had it truly been ON. But according to Rolling Stone, Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle has sold more than 33 million copies worldwide, and my Iron Druid Chronicles…hasn’t. His readers simply outnumber mine by a magnitude that makes my brain hurt, and they don’t know what Atticus can do. The fact that Atticus kept it even marginally close is testament to your spiffiness!

Since my readers are awesome and drink beer and laugh at sausage jokes, I want to do something to reward you: below is a wee excerpt from TRICKED, the last part of Chapter 2. There’s nothing spoilery: It’s just Oberon’s bath, and you can imagine the shenanigans he’ll get into with a new role model like this one…

If you’d rather wait for the book, I totally understand! Read no more! But in case you’d like to enjoy it now, please enjoy it now, and thanks again for your support!

Much love & my flagon raised to you,
Kevin

(P.S. The little carat marks that Oberon usually has around his speech may or may not show up…the blog is funny about that stuff. I think you’ll figure it out, though.) :)

Leaving the binoculars behind, I bound my shape to an owl and flew south to my hotel. It’s not pleasant flying in rain like that, but I had to get out of there. Once safely in my room, I greeted my wolfhound, Oberon, who’d been watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 on TV. Then I took a cold shower and tried to think about teddy bears and baseball and those little bouncy air castles you can rent for kids’ birthdays—anything but the Morrigan.

Since it’s always better to clog up someone else’s drain with dog hair than your own, I thought it would be a good time to give Oberon a bath as well. He hadn’t had one for a while and I didn’t know when we’d have an opportunity like this again.

“Hey, Oberon,” I called, filling up the tub for him, “it’s time for your bath!”

<It is?> He sounded doubtful. <Do you have a decent story?> Oberon wouldn’t sit still for baths unless I told him a story—a real story about historical figures. He never settled for faery tales.

“I’m going to tell you the true story of a man named Francis Bacon.”

<BACON?> He came running so fast that he couldn’t negotiate the sharp turn into the bathroom very well, and he slammed into the door awkwardly and then splashed into the tub, soaking me after I’d just finished drying off.

<Oh, this is going to be great! I can tell I’m going to like this man already. He had to have been a genius with a name like that. Was he a genius?>

“Yes, he was.”

<I knew it! I have an instinct for that kind of thing. But I hope this story doesn’t end with him chopped into bits and sprinkled on a salad. That would be tragic, and a story about bacon should be uplifting.>

“Well, Francis Bacon was quite inspirational to many people,” I said, pouring water on Oberon’s back. “He’s the father of modern empiricism, or the scientific method. Before he came along, people conducted all their arguments through a series of logical fallacies or simply shouting louder than the other guy, or if they did use facts, they only selected ones that reinforced their prejudices and advanced their agenda.”

<Don’t people still do that?>

“More than ever. But Bacon showed us a way to shed preconceived notions and conduct experiments in such a way that the results were verifiable and repeatable. It gave people a way to construct truths free of political and religious dogma.”

<Bacon is the Way and the Truth. Got it.>

As I shampooed Oberon’s coat, I explained how to craft hypotheses and test them empirically using a control. And then I stressed safety while I rinsed him off.

“It’s best not to experiment on yourself. Bacon practically froze himself to death in one of his experiments and died of pneumonia.”

<Right! Bacon must be heated. Knew that already, but thanks for the reminder.>

I love my hound.

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Sausage Fest Contest!

I do stuff when I feel like it. Usually I feel like it when I have reached an arbitrary number of readers going clickity-click on social media sites. I have 3,000 Likes on Facebook (thanks to Mindi and Pete Young!) and 1,692 birdies on Twitter. Those look like good numbers to me. So I should do some stuff! Or rather, give stuff away!

Here is the stuff I’m giving away to two Sausage Fest Contest winners: 1) A Sausage Fest pint glass 2) A Sausage Fest T-shirt in your size 3) A signed Sausage Fest poster and 4) An early, signed author’s copy of TRICKED. Aw yeah!

Wanna know why this is the best contest EVAR? It’s because you get to EAT YOUR ENTRY—after you take a picture of it. If you think about it, you really can’t lose! You get tasty nom noms and you might also win bonus book-related stuff from that Kevin guy. Best. Contest. EVAR.

So here’s how you enter: Cook something tasty with sausage in it, take a digital picture, and then email it to me with a caption. The caption should include a luxuriously written description of the food pictured, followed by your name. You can use a fake secret agent name if you want. I’ll post all entries into a gallery on my author Facebook page. It should look nummy like this:

The Iron Druid Breakfast consists of a succulent cheese and chive omelet, toast with orange marmalade, and three juicy maple sausage links. Tabasco spices up the omelet and coffee washes it down. Submitted by Kevin Hearne, Nerfherder.

One person will win in a Random.Org drawing, so you don’t necessarily have to be a great chef or anything. You could give me a sad picture of biscuits and gravy with one nugget of sausage in it and still potentially win. But one person will win because that person is frickin’ awesome. They’ll make a beautiful dish, take a beautiful picture, and write an amazing caption. And everyone will salivate.

I suggest that the sausage be plainly visible in the picture. Don’t just take a picture of a bun and some lettuce and tell me there’s a patty hidden underneath. We are celebrating sausage in all its tubular, greasy glory. It should be the focus! And yes, soy/tofu sausage is perfectly acceptable. We just won’t tell Oberon.

Also consider composition. Will there be drinks? Will there be origami? Dogs photobombing? Will there be playful visual double entendres?

Mostly I want you to have fun and enjoy entering. I hope you’ll experiment and create something tasty for yourself and the family. Become a gourmet foodie for a while. Life’s too short not to do something like this once in a while, you know?

Okay, let’s give this until February 29. That way you have a couple of weekends to work with. Please email entries to kevin @ kevinhearne.com. Have fun!!!

Oh, one more thing: I don’t have my author copies yet and probably won’t get them until April, so you’ll still have to wait until April to find out what happened to the widow and if Leif is going to make it…you just won’t have to wait until April 24. :)

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TRICKED cover

Oh, my. Cover artist Gene Mollica has surpassed himself. This is so badass! Behold:

WOOOO! No hidden face. No glaring off-camera. Just straight up I’m-gonna-liquidate-your-401K! I love it!

Apart from Gene’s masterful work, huge kudos also to my editor, Tricia Pasternak, and Dave Stevenson, the designer, for their vital contributions. (For the official cover reveal at Suvudu and to see what Tricia has to say about it, I direct thee there.) I really appreciate them consulting me along the way and tweaking this until I was happy. And they also said it was okay for me to make a wallpaper for your desktop to give everyone around you a shiver of awesomeness! The wallpaper is cropped a smidge wider and you can see more of the beautiful knotwork of Atticus’s binding:

1440 x 700
1920 x 1080

Tricia and Dave wanted to give books 4-6 their own look, slightly different from the first three, and so they started by asking me two questions: What would be a good setting for book four’s cover? What does Atticus’s magic look like?

Much of the book takes place in the Navajo Nation, which is a large chunk of northeastern Arizona, as well as bits of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. I’d made a scouting trip up there in order to write the book, and I still had some pictures on me. Tyende Mesa, which is located about ten miles or so southwest of Kayenta, has about five or six buttes jutting up from it—very distinctive. I sent them this picture of two of the buttes:

If you look on the cover right behind the blurb from SFF World (really nice of them to say, by the way) you’ll see the silhouette of these buttes. Gene actually used the picture! Woohoo! I also sent them a suggestion for layout because I’m a nerd like that and I like to draw a wee bit. There’s a passage in the book where Atticus and Oberon are tracking something near those buttes, so I thought that would make an interesting tableau. I sent them this sketch:

They chose a much more dramatic pose, of course (and thank goodness!), and I’m told Oberon might make an appearance on the back cover (I’m crossing my fingers), but Gene kept the buttes and also the tracks. They cropped the tracks out of the cover, and I had to crop them out for the wallpaper too, but they’re in the full illustration so I went ahead and geeked out about that.

As far as what Druidic binding looks like, I referred them to the way Atticus describes it to Granuaile in HEXED. In our normal vision we’d see nothing, but in the magical spectrum we’d see Atticus outlined in a soft white glow and then his bindings are seen as Celtic knotwork of various patterns, depending on the binding. I said these would originate from his hand and take shape from there, and wow, I’m still grinning at what a fantastic job Gene did with that! I hope you like it as much as I do! I love it!

And I suppose I should mention that TRICKED is now available for pre-order at your Indie bookstore, as well as B & N and Amazon and wherever else you buy books, and pre-ordering is one of the nicest things you can do for an author. It makes a difference!

Very happy holidays to you from me, and a Happy Solstice from Atticus!

Blog

Rúla Búla is for reals!

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. :)

 

 

Blog, Publishing Stuff

It’s in da can! Sort of.

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!