paperback Archives - max gladstone

Posts Tagged ‘paperback’

Three Big Announcements: PW*, Paperback, Pathfinder!

Good afternoon, Starfighters, and I hope your weeks have all progressed awesomely, with ruination to your foes, glory to the cause of Justice, et cetera. This week: announcements!

First: LAST FIRST SNOW got a starred review in Publishers Weekly!

Gladstone’s gift for vivid storytelling, his deep empathy for his characters, his sly satire of current socioeconomic issues, and the rich, diverse world of his novels have become reliable pleasures, always enthralling and somehow consistently improving with every book.

Bam. Last First Snow drops on July 14th, Bastille Day, which amuses me for Reasons. This book is about protest, and communities trying to change themselves. I described some of the key themes on Tor.com a while back. You can pre-order it now wherever fine books are sold! For example: Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Pre-orders are golden: they help bookstores identify interest in a forthcoming title, which leads to more orders and excitement around the book. Do what you can for the cause!

Second: FULL FATHOM FIVE is out in paperback this week!

Paperback release is a beautiful time in a book’s lifecycle. I say this every time my books make paperback, but—when I was a kid, I never bought hardcover. One hardcover book cost a night’s wages at the pizza joint! Paperbacks won my heart on price efficiency; I could wait, albeit with great difficulty, for the softcover edition. So, teenage Max, wherever you are, you can afford this one now. Locus and the Lambda Award jury liked the book. You probably will too! Same link parade: Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.

Third: I’m writing a PATHFINDER novel!

This is long range news—like, I won’t break ground on this book until 2016—but I thought you might like to know! I’m really excited about this project. I’ve been tabletop gaming since I was a kid; it’s how I learned to talk, like in a group with people, and how I formed my closest and earliest bonds with friends. I’m itching to do something fun with the Pathfinder world’s almost but not quite medieval modes of production, murder hobos, planar travel, elves, and sideways transhumanism, with mystically reified morality axes, Vance-adjacent magic, chance-dependent physics—god, consider the sheer potential for shenanigans, and that’s just talking about the ruleset! Then we get into dead gods, kingdoms ruled by demonic contracts, undead stuff, yes yes yes. This gnarled conceptual space has so much storytelling potential—so many dark corners and intriguing tangles to explore, Planetary style. I’ve played with and pondered these concepts in my own tabletop games since Time Immemorial, as veterans of the Faerun Insurance and Recovery Corporation well know, and now I get to share the fruits of those ponderings with y’all, Dear Readers. We’ve all been playing in the same woods since we were kids, but follow me and I’ll show you what I found there. This will be a fun ride. Don’t buckle your seatbelts. It’s more entertaining for me that way.

*buckles his own seatbelt surreptitiously*

I’m grateful to James Sutter and the rest of the team at Paizo for loaning me their toys. I promise when I return them all of the heads will be on the proper bodies. Probably. Wherever they’ve spent the meantime.

Oh, and if your reaction to this news is but Max what about your other books, first, thank you for your support, and second, have no fear, Dear Reader. Tor already has a manuscript for Craft Sequence Book 5, which, because I so dearly love making my editor’s life easier, is numbered Four, tentative publication date 2016 sometime. Even with my tight schedule and overlapping Seekret Projekts for the rest of the year, I don’t anticipate breaking pace on the Sequence. More news on that front as soon as I have anything firm to report, of course.

Okay, that’s all for now! Enjoy your days. Vote in the Locus Awards. Find someone cool and give them a high-five. Peace.

Three Parts Dead in Paperback Today!

So you know how it is: you come back from Comic Con, reeling, because you’ve just spent 72 hours solid with 150,000 of your closest friends, and you retreat into editing your manuscript since you don’t actually have all that much time left to edit your manuscript and you’re completely socialled out. And then you wake up on Tuesday and do the same thing, only to realize around noon that, wait a second, when was your paperback launch date again?

Check it out, guys. I’m a paperback writer.

If this is your first visit to the site, hi! Three Parts Dead got me nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a lot of people have been saying nice things about it (including io9, ThinkProgress, Strange Horizons, All Things UF, and others).

The paperback release is a big personal milestone, as I think I’ve mentioned before. When I was a kid, I didn’t read in hardcover. I discovered science fiction and fantasy through paperbacks, and when I got around to buying my own books, I didn’t have much money to go around, which meant paperbacks and the library. The hardcover release of Three Parts Dead gave me a little frission for that reason—I wrote a book I would have loved to find when I was buying books out of my pizza money, but I couldn’t see how Teenage Max would have discovered the book I wrote. Well, it’s out there now. Enjoy, Teenage Max! (And other readers, too!)

On a somewhat related note, The Ranting Dragon asked me to nominate a book in their search / contest to identify The Great Fantasy Novel. I wrote about what that means, and why A Wizard of Earthsea is the obvious choice—read it here.

Paperback Writer! Also post-Readercon catchup!

Today is run-around-getting-ready-for-the-big-tour day, but I wanted to take a second first to say how great a time at Readercon. Granted, I slunk home on Sunday after having slept only a few hours, and promptly sought out the coolest, darkest place I could find, but man was that con fun. Times like these I wish I was more of a photo-junkie—instead I end up wishing I could describe five-hour wine-fuelled conversations about books & storytelling & general madness, the description of which, while possible, would involve me sitting here until we were both entirely confused. One of the best parts of these cons is the ability to hang in person with folks I know primarily through the internet. Bodies and voices are better than phosphors about 99% of the time, give or take a percentage point.

How good was this year’s con? Well, it should tell you something that the Irish pub was closed and we still had an awesome time.

On another note, Monday afternoon I checked our mail and found the following giant package waiting:

These paperbacks look awesome, folks. Here’s a shot of the back cover, with rocking quotes from John Crowley, Jim Morrow, io9, and Felicia Day:

This is a big milestone for me. When I was a kid, I didn’t get hardcover books—I only had so much money from the pizza place, and one night’s check could buy me maybe three quarters of a hardcover, or three paperbacks. This is the point at which my childhood self would have bought my book, and he, finally, feels gratified.

Also, well, there’s this:

Three Parts Dead Trade Paperback Tour!

I’ve been off-blog busy for the last couple months—finishing a first draft of another book, working on short stories, fencing in tournaments, and pondering revisions to the third book in the Craft Sequence.

I’ll be bringing you up to speed on a lot of cool new developments over the next few days, but for now, I wanted to make sure you all knew that Three Parts Dead is due out in paperback late next month, and that I’ll be touring to celebrate! Those of you who want a hardcover, buy now; those of you who want something you can throw in a beachbag, flock to bookstores on July 23.

The paperback features a slightly redesigned cover, with an enlarged version of Chris McGrath’s amazing cover art, and new quotes on the back from the glowing io9 review (!) and Felicia Day (!!).

(Um guys Felicia Day read my book!)

So, tour? What does that look like? Where will I be and when? Read on, dear reader.

MAX’S WEST COAST AND BOISE SUMMER TOUR EXTRAVAGANZA!

San Diego Comic Con, July 19-21

I’ll rock out at San Diego Comic Con, and most likely participate in some programming, though we’re still working on final details. More details to come on this one—we’re waiting for final info. This is my first time to San Diego, and I have no idea what to expect beyond absurd over-the-top excess. More details to come!

Powell’s Books, Portland OR, July 25, 7:30 PM

I’ll be reading some of Three Parts Dead, and maybe from new (as yet unreleased) material. And answering questions. Ask and ye shall receive. If you dare! Warning: answers not guaranteed to be comprehensible, or in a language hitherto known or comprehensible to humankind. Probably will be, I just don’t want to make any promises.

University Bookstore, Seattle WA, July 26, 7 PM

More readings. More questions. Even less sanity! It’s been a long time since I was last in Seattle, and I’m sort of impoverished when it comes to Seattle-themed reading material. I guess part of Reamde’s set in the Seattle area; still, the strongest literary tie I have with the city is Terry Brooks’ A Knight of the Word, which is compelling, but probably left me with a warped image of Seattle, featuring more demon-muggings than occur in the actual city. Dangers of urban fantasy tourism, I suppose. Any suggestions?

Borderlands Books, San Francisco CA, July 27, 3 PM

I had a wonderful time on my last visit to Borderlands, and came away with a coffee mug and good memories. Come for me, stay for the bookstore (which you really need to see this place to believe it, it’s so cool and pleasant and well-organized and if I lived in SF I would spend so much time and money there I probably wouldn’t have any left to spend anywhere else in San Francisco). Or come for the bookstore and stay for me. Works either way.

Hyde Park Books, Boise City ID, July 28, 3 PM

I’m very excited for this one—it’s the first signing I’ll give that will be attended by someone I’ve killed (in fiction, natch). To make a long story short, one of the first novels I wrote (using 100,000 words as a cutoff here, for convenience’s sake—I wrote some stuff in the 100-page range as young as eight or so) was a giant fanfic for the Fantasy Powers League, an immense apocalyptic pastiche which doubled as a way to kill off a bunch of other people’s characters, with their consent of course. And one of those dudes will be in the audience! Hopefully he isn’t out for revenge.

Also, it’s likely that I’ll be doing some sort of workshop with the Boise Novel Orchard while I’m in town—again, more details as Evil Plans develop.

And that’s all I have time for this afternoon. More details coming soon, especially about Two Serpents Rise—the next book in the Craft Sequence—and about the Craft Sequence as a whole. Be well!