The Great eBook Bazaar

This post is a long time in coming, and while it may be a blip on the radar to a lot of folks, it represents a huge leap for me.

The Great Bazaar is now available as an eBook from Subterranean Press!

As you may know, TGB is the small, limited edition novella I published in January of this year with Subterranean. There were only 2,200 copies printed (2K trade and 200 limited), and they quickly sold out. Before long, they were selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars (if you can find it at all), and I get daily messages from readers asking how they can get their hands on one.

This is more than a little surreal to me, because The Great Bazaar, like the Demon Cycle itself, started as a labor of love with little hope for publication—even after I had sold the first three demon books. For a long while, I couldn’t even give it away for free.

There are three gaps in The Warded Man (AKA The Painted Man in the UK), where several years pass for the characters with the turn of the page. This was a deliberate choice, allowing me so show the defining and formative periods in the childhood of my protagonists, and then move quickly ahead to their adventures as adults, so when they make the decisions they make, you understand why. For the most part, knowing what happened in those gaps is unnecessary, and would only have slowed the pace of the story.

But there was one gap I regretted. It came during the three years when Arlen is working as a Messenger traveling throughout the Free Cities. This was an exciting, adventure-filled period in Arlen’s life where he travels from town to town, touching the lives of different people living behind the wards.

I had a LOT of story ideas for those three years, but there wasn’t space to include even a fraction of them in The Warded Man, and even if there had been, it would have robbed Arlen’s race towards destiny of all its immediacy. So I decided to skip those side stories and get to them some other time, putting Arlen, at the beginning of Chapter 17 (Ruins), at the end of a long series of adventures, lightly sketched for the reader, wherein he became worldly, and culminating in him relic hunting in the lost city of Anoch Sun, the next true turning point in his life.

But the road to Anoch Sun was a difficult one, and even FINDING it was moreso. The Great Bazaar tells part of that tale. It is essentially chapter 16.5 of The Warded Man, taking place a few weeks before Chapter 17 picks up the story.

The novella started out as a backup story I essentially wrote for free for a special UK limited edition hardcover of The Painted Man for Voyager. I turned the story in on time, but the special edition was delayed again and again, and was eventually shelved.

I was really bummed about that. I had worked very hard on TGB, and was immensely proud of it. I thought it worked both as a stand-alone introduction to the Demon Cycle as well as a great addition for lovers of the series. I tried to sell it for a song to Del Rey, perhaps as a promotional chapbook to hand out at ComicCon, but they weren’t interested in doing novellas, especially from an unknown author (The Warded Man had yet to be published in the US at that point).

So it sat for months. I made another press to sell it after I turned in The Desert Spear, as the story takes place in Fort Krasia and is a fantastic appetizer for that book, but my options were limited. The big publishers still didn’t want it, and it was rejected from the few fantasy short story markets I submitted it to. I was afraid it was destined to be a lost tale.

But then, unsolicited, I got an e-mail from Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press. He had read and enjoyed The Painted Man, and asked if I would be interested in writing a special, limited edition novella for him.

So I sent him The Great Bazaar. He read it. In days we had a book deal. In less than a month, we had printer proofs. The amazing cover was a piece of art I had commissioned from Lauren K. Cannon for my website, but Bill loved it so much he licensed it from her for the book. A few months later I had a book in my hands, and was glad that at least SOMEone would get to read it. I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be a collector’s item.

But as my readership grows, more and more people have expressed an interest in reading it, and were frustrated at its lack of availability. One reader even wrote to scold me over it, saying “It’s like you’re holding a part of the Demon Cycle hostage for only the people with tons of disposable income to enjoy”.

Yow. That was certainly not my intent. Subterranean isn’t in the business of doing multiple printings of their books, though, so I spoke to Bill to see what we could work out. The eBook option seemed the next logical step.

So now, at long last, the story is available for everyone. So far it is only up on the Amazon Kindle store for download or reading online, but it has been submitted to the iBook store, the B&N Nook store, etc., so it will soon be on an eReader near you. The same will go for my upcoming Subterranean book, Brayan’s Gold, still available for pre-order! It will go up as an eBook some time next year, probably a few months after publication.

And that’s not all! I just inked a deal with Recorded Books, who have made incredible audiobooks of The Warded Man and The Desert Spear with narrator Pete Bradbury, whose silken rumble of a voice could charm the panties from a marble statue. They will be doing audio versions of The Great Bazaar and Brayan’s Gold as well, so whatever your format, print, digital, or audio, the novellas will be available to you.

There are a few other gaps in the series that are… juicy. Fertile ground for adventure. The years Leesha spends training in Angiers, for instance, or the ones Rojer spends playing the hamlets. Jardir earning his stripes as a kai’Sharum. The years of solitude where the Warded Man loses himself as he shuns human contact and lives like an animal, killing and eating demons.

We’ll get to them, I promise.

Posted on December 16, 2010 at 10:56 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Events, Great Bazaar, Interviews, Musings, Pimpage, Sales, Tech, Warded Man, Writing
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