![]() ![]() They did much more than that, too, including giveaways and offering me a spot in their “A Glimpse of Darkness” project. Just last summer, to promote book three, Del Rey dropped the ebook prices for books one and two book one is still at 99 cents right now. With Child of Fire they didn’t just send out ARCs to reviewers, they sent out Advanced Reader Editions–essentially, a copy of the book that looked like the final book, full-color cover and everything. What actually happened was that Del Rey gave me a ton of support. Seriously, Del Rey has been nothing but great and I wanted to be sure to cover this because there’s always someone out there who says “I liked this series but the author got screwed!” Man, it sounds like your publisher really worked you over. With Circle of Enemies, the ebook sales have been unexceptional, and the print book sales have been awful. Game of Cages had much lower initial orders, for the obvious reason, and there was never a reason to go to a second printing. Ebook sales that first year (2009) were about 3% of that. Child of Fire had a print run of 30K but sell-through was slightly below 50%. For a couple of years now, mass market sales have been in decline for a lot of authors, and ebook sales for my titles haven’t picked up the slack. When sales of Game of Cages came out lower than the first book, my editor explained that book three would have to show an upward trend for the series to continue. (That means that Del Rey thought it would go to auction and they wanted to avoid that by going straight to the expected top price, sort of like the “Buy it now!” button on eBay.) Unfortunately, it underperformed and each book since has done worse. I sold Child of Fire (then called Harvest of Fire) to Del Rey in early 2008 in a pre-empt deal. Well, Pretend Questioner, let me address that in a very long blog post : Based on the sales of Circle of Enemies, Del Rey has decided not to offer me a contract to write more Twenty Palaces books. Check out my books page for new entries into the series.) Self-published novellas seem like a viable path forward, and that’s what I’m trying. ( Third update: This cancelled series is sort of uncanceled. ( Second update: Disabling new comments hid the old comments, which I didn’t want, so comments are back on again.) What’s more, I don’t really want to keep talking about it. ( Update to this post: I’m shutting down comments because it’s been over a week and they’re still coming. ![]()
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