I think James liked The March North; woohoo!
A Succession of Bad Days has been out for an unfamiliar critical read, and now another unfamiliar critical read (the people who one gets to bounce up and down and burble at about the gubbins of the world building are invaluable, but they're also not going to tell you where you've been incomprehensible quite the same way a new reader will), and ought to be winging its way to the editing processes relatively soon-like.
Doesn't look like I'm going to make a march release date, but April's not looking unlikely.
Any possibility of a print version now that you've got the James Nicoll review of approval?
ReplyDeleteAll these really complimentary reviews, James' included, attend on selling less than two hundred copies.
ReplyDeleteThat's darn near splendid for an obscure ebook; it's not the sort of thing that leads to a traditional publisher seeking me out, offer in hand. (And indeed remarks from people who work in traditional publishing about my fiction summarize as "this <complimentary adjective> book would never sell".)
Printing it myself would certainly be substantially more of a financial loss than the ebook version.
So I'm not seeing a paper version as likely any time soon. I can dream about some subsequent ebook selling so well that a publisher wants to go back and put the whole Commonweal in print, but that's maybe more hallucinatory than hopeful as dreams go.
I discovered this book by seeing an interesting series of comments you wrote on a history blog, going "is that the same guy who comments on that other blog?", doing a bit of Googling, finding that you wrote a book, and navigating a new and somewhat odd way of buying an ebook.
ReplyDeleteGiven that it took me quite a bit more Googling to find my way back here to see if there was a sequel coming out, I think 200 copies is pretty darn good indeed. ;-)
Also, the book is great. The last time I was so wonderfully confused was when i read Neuromancer for the first time.
Oh awesome! Hooray moar book(s)!
ReplyDelete(I finally have a theory about what Blossom used to [redacted] -- did you perhaps take advantage of a trip through the "Things I Won't Use" blog, and happen on a writeup of chlorine trifluoride...?)
@ctate --
ReplyDeleteYou're correct about "Things I Won't Work With", although only one of the things Blossom used was chlorine trifluoride. The other one was between three and five litres of cryogenic FOOF.
(There's a whole sorcerer subtext there about being able to control high energy chemistry -- generally any high energy molecules, the mischief gets into it and abrupt, unexpected, and bad things happen; if you can make it work you're powerful -- that the Captain missed completely. So that was also Blossom thumbing their nose at Rust as well as expressing a very uncomplimentary opinion of the guy on the wall.)