12/27/2018

Forthcoming in 2019: books, books and more books

In 2018, I had two books out: Ghost Frequencies, and Scienceville and Other Lost Worlds. In 2019, if certain cards fall the way I hope they will, I'll have another two books coming out - and possibly even three if things work out the way I'm hoping.

One of these three works is caught up in negotiations at the moment, so let's just leave that to the side for now and talk about the other two regarding which I'm much more certain. This is going to take a little explaining:

I recently completed a sequel to Extinction Game and Survival Game, to be called Doomsday Game. It completes the story of Jerry Beche, Rozalia Ludke, Katya Orlova and the rest of the Pathfinders as they face up against their greatest challenge yet. If you've bought Scienceville and Other Lost Worlds, you already know at least one part of that story as The Long Fall, a novelette included in that collection.

However, I don't intend just yet to publish it, at least not in the conventional sense. The simple reason for this is that I'm hoping to eventually win back the rights to the previous two volumes from my former publisher, and it doesn't make sense to publish the third book until I once again have the rights to all three books in the series begun by Extinction Game. It would benefit Tor UK far more than it would benefit me.

Really,  I should have thought of this before I embarked on writing it, but you live and learn. So I've decided that I will make Doomsday Game available...after a fashion. For the moment at least, I'm planning on making it available only to people who subscribe to my Patreon.

I haven't quite figured out the details, but it's like this: Patreon is a subscription site where you pay to get updates from me on a regular basis. The subscription payments help me to afford the time I need to work on my writing. Over the past year, I've posted the chapters of Doomsday Game to my Patreon feed as and when they're completed. Soon, the book will become available to my Patreon subscribers as a formatted ebook.

So if you're looking for a copy of that third book, you'll be able to get it - so long as you join my Patreon. It won't be much - a couple of pounds a month, perhaps, with no requirement to keep up that payment any longer than you want to. But figuring out the specific terms of how it will work is something for the beginning of next year.

But wait, there's more! Along with Doomsday Book, once I've finished formatting and designing it, you'll also get a free ebook of Scienceville and Other Lost Worlds. You'll also be able to follow along as I write the third book I'm hoping to publish sometime next year, called Ely Strong. It's a kind of steampunk/dieselpunk/hard sf mashup I've been working on and planning for a long, long time. I've already posted up the first three chapters and hope to keep posting them on a regular basis and through subsequent drafts and redrafts.

Once Ely Strong is finished, it will go on sale as an ebook at Amazon and at other digital online stores and as a paperback. That's some months away, however: at least six months, and possibly as many as nine.

I appreciate this all sounds a little complicated, but once I've ironed out the details it'll all seem perfectly simple. 

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