Orbit Publisher Tim Holman has the data on Urban Fantasy growth in the US market last year. Looks like we may need to change the abbreviation to UFSFF!

Karen Miller’s The Prodigal Mage has just been released in hardcover in the US and UK. Its sequel, The Reluctant Mage, comes out next year and she’ll be starting work on that in a couple of weeks. She’s currently doing a down and dirty rewrite on the 3rd Rogue Agent novel, Wizard Squared, before it goes off to copy it. That’s due out next year too.

Pamela Freeman is ecstatic to receive an advance copy of Full Circle. The fans who have started a Castings Trilogy page on Facebook can hardly wait until it hits the bookstores.

Glenda Larke reports that the UK cover of The Last Stormlord by has been finalized, and Book Two, Stormlord Rising, is now with the copy editor. When her main Orbit editor, Samantha, remarked that she was on tenterhooks for Book Three, Glenda checked hurriedly checked the due date for submission… Luckily it seems that Sam just meant that Book Two was such a cracking story she’s finding it hard to wait for the conclusion! You can follow Glenda’s musings over at Tropic Temper.

Meanwhile, Sean Williams has been absolutely accruing stellar reviews for The Grand Conjunction. You can drop over to his LJ to read them in full, but here’s a taster. Terra Incognita says: “This is a tale of unimaginable span. … It doesn’t seem possible that a series of books could do or contain more. The Grand Conjunction concludes a grand achievement. Five stars.” Bookgeek says: “breathless space combat and desperate gambits…a truly jaw-dropping piece of SF extrapolation and large-scale thinking”. Sean’s Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is the first ever computer game tie-in novel to debut at #1 on the New York Times hardback list, and is being reissued in mmpb very soon (through Titan). Sean has also written an article over at Death Ray about the joys of juggling original work against the greatest franchise in the world to promote it. Sean recently launched the South Australian Writers’ Festival and will be off to present an award at the 25th Writers of the Future bash later this month. You can also catch him at the WFC in San Jose later this year. And no, he doesn’t sleep!

Though it’s still winter in Queensland, the days are bright, blue and around 27 degrees Celsius. Hard to stay inside when it’s so glorious, but I’m a disciplined writer on a mission (I am!) to finish Transformation Space. September brings a few (work) outings for me though, including The Brisbane Writers Festival and Gen Con Oz. By the time they’re over, I should have a copy of Mirror Space in my hands.

Talk soon!

MDP

Orbit Publisher Tim Holman has some data on trends in fantasy cover art in the US. The results may surprise you. Tattoos out? Dragons in?

(drumroll please)

It was an incredibly tight race, with Rise of the Fallen, Book Seven, The Pre-Antepenultimate Battle in second place, but in the end the Cyborg Faries put down the Fallen.

So there you have it. Our fearless art director is warming up her Photoshop as we speak, but before she can start we need two more key cover elements: the author name and the reading line.

Author names are straightforward enough (if you’re having problems, heed Dr. Ronald Chevalier’s advice).

The reading line is a more delicate matter — for that we need the top-line description of the book that will inform everything. The best reading line will give the reader a hint about what to expect in the book – even if that hint is wholly inaccurate.

Suggestions below.

Writers – like actors — have a kink in the brain. It’s a kink that means we are at the same time deeply and intimately involved in the process of being human while standing outside that process watching it happen. It means that we can never truly be at one with our own lives because we can’t ever totally lose ourselves in the unconscious moment. A part of us is always conscious, always watching, analysing, pulling the moment apart so we can put it back together again as fiction.

You can join the conversation here.

Jeff Somers’ latest Avery Cates novel, The Eternal Prison, is out this week in the US, and to celebrate Jeff’s launched an old-school text adventure game. Think Zork with swearing. You can play the game here.

Anybody who reads Brian’s post, please note that we did actually sign this contract on purpose. It wasn’t an administrative error (like the first one).

Terry says:

The Gypsy Morph is the third book in the new Genesis of Shannara series and pretty much wraps up the time period covered by the first trilogy.  Lots is happening.  The old world, which is ours some eighty years in the future, is ending.  The survivors of multiple catastrophes are facing a firestorm which threatens to wipe out everyone who’s left.  A small band of Men, Elves, and other species is making its way to a safehold somewhere in the Pacific NW.  Leading them is a boy called Hawk, who was the Gypsy Morph of the Word & Void series.  His little band of street kids, called Ghosts, are linked with two Knights of the Word who have allied themselves with the survivors seeking the safehold refuge.  But dangers lie in wait along the way, and an army of once-men led by demons are in pursuit.

This series is my take on how our world might destroy itself and what those who survive might do to rebuild.  It is also a direct link to the start of the Shannara series.  I plan to write somewhere around ten books to cover the thousand year period involved in this saga.  Assuming I live that long, it should satisfy those readers who have been asking ever since Sword of Shannara, “When are you going to write about the prehistory, the old world before the First Council of Druids.”  Shannara is now in its 32nd year of publication, and has some 14 or 15 books to its oeuvre.  But the books I am writing now are among my favorites, and so far readers seem to agree.

The Gypsy Morph [UK |AUZ] is available this month from all good booksellers.

Sean Williams , however, stepped out of his cave to accept the Peter McNamara Award for Excellence at The Australian National Convention in Adelaide. The Peter Mac is awarded at the discretion of the convenors for a particular achievement in speculative fiction or related areas. This award may take into account a body of work or achievements over a number of years; it can also be for a work of non-fiction, artwork, electronic or multimedia work, film or TV, or that which brings credit or attention to the speculative fiction genres. The award was originally known as the Convenors’ Award for Excellence and was renamed in 2002 after Peter McNamara (d 2004), publisher, editor and the original Aurealis Awards convenor, shortly after he was diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Ian Irvine  is working furiously on the first book of his new fantasy trilogy for Orbit, which he will be delivering later this year. The first book of his Well of Echoes quartet, Die Geomantin, is now out in Germany with the others to appear at four-month intervals. And The Destiny of the Dead, the final in Ian’s Song of the Tears trilogy and in his 11-book Three Worlds sequence (for now) has been well received. This from SFX: “Unbelievably, Ian Irvine has managed to increase the pace in this final volume in the Song of the Tears series… For sheer excitement, there’s just no one else like Ian Irvine around at the moment.”

Glenda Larke says she is starting on the last book of The Stormlord Trilogy, and wondering if she will pull off the miracle of meeting a deadline. Fortunately, both her agent’s and her editor’s response to Book Two was so good, she is inspired… At least, she is hoping her desire to write seven days a week is caused by inspiration, and not appalled desperation at the thought of completing 180,000 words in six months.

We’re all terribly excited about Trent Jamieson’s signing. Trent already has a fine reputation as one of Australia’s premier short story writers, and his move to long form has been long awaited. This series will be a treat!

I’ve just got back from the Supanova Pop Expo road trip where I met a bunch of inspiring actors, writers and comic artists (including having a fan girl attack and scoring my own signed copy of Watchmen from Dave Gibbons),and am hunkered down finishing Transformation Space (book 4 of the Sentients of Orion)  for all those readers who came to the Borders stall and asked me about it.

See you next month

MDP