A lovely comment on a previous calendar post reminded me that I need to put up the June calendar before I head off for New Zealand. So here’s Lorlen:
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For the last few weeks I’ve been busy getting ready for coming SF conventions – preparing workshops, taking photos for slideshows, arranging transport, lining up our cat/house sitter, confirming panels, arranging meetings and meals, warping looms and researching weaving techniques…
Yeah, that last one seems unrelated to the rest, but it is relevant, as you’ll see.
The first convention I’ll be attending happens next weekend in Auckland:
… where I’m going to be the International Guest of Honour. This will be the first time I’ve been an international GoH. (At Imaginales I was one among many author guests.) I’m flattered, excited and a little bit nervous. I’ll be talking on panels, running a writing workshop, doing a speech/presentation and more.
The weekend after that I’ll be back in Melbourne, at:
… which, as you can see, has a craft theme. I’ll be talking on panels about craft in books as well as the craft of writing. I’ll also be running a very basic bookbinding workshop in which participants make useful and fun things out of con bag contents, and doing a weaving demonstration – which is why I’ve been warping up looms and researching weaving. Ironically, I think the weaving demonstration may have taken more preparation time than anything else I’m doing over these two weekends, but it’s been a lot of fun and a great reason to expand my knowledge of weaving. It’s also great when my non-writing interests and writing intersect. Which they also do in the Millennium’s Rule trilogy, but that’s a whole other blog post.
They are going to be two amazing, fun weekends and two very different conventions.
The release date of The Traitor Queen (in August) is slowly and steadily drawing near. I now have a cover to show off:
Fabulous, as always. I think this is my favourite cover for this trilogy now.
Orbit posted a Cover Reveal last week, with more information, and you can go to the The Traitor Queen page for a blurb.
I usually add the first chapter as an extract about a month before the release date (August). I’ll do a blog post linking to it, and tweet about it. And I’ll definitely be blogging and tweeting when the book comes out (in August).
Did I mention that the book is out in August? Well, it is. That’s less than three months away!
On Saturday the winners of the Aurealis Awards were announced, in a fabulous ceremony held at the Independent Theatre in Sydney. The awards are always a great opportunity to dress up and hang out with other Aussie sf writers, editors and enthusiasts and celebrate our local talent. It was great to catch up with familiar faces, and especially nice to meet and chat to a lot of people I’ve only met briefly before, or only through the internet.
A big congratulations to both winners and shortlisted authors. For the results pop over to the Aurealis Awards site. I didn’t take any photos but there are always a couple of people snapping away.
I’ve been steadily working away at the early chapters of Thief’s Magic, which is the title this first book of the Millenium’s Rule has decided it wants. I’ve also been dress shopping in preparation for the Aurealis Awards this weekend. (Nothing of mine is up for an award, so I’m going to hang out with and cheer on my writerly friends.
But neither are particularly worthy of a blog post so I wasn’t going to do one this week. Then something exciting arrived the the mail yesterday, so I decided to do an early In the Mailbox report.
Looky-look:
It’s a new foreign language edition – the Brazilian edition of The Magicians’ Guild! Woohoo! Welcome to my worlds and stories, readers of Brazil. I hope you enjoy them.
I have to admit, I’ve been a bit intimidated by reader expectations when it comes to sketching Tayend and Dannyl. My worry wasn’t that they wouldn’t look like what reader’s pictured – I’m not psychic! – but that they’d look so different that readers would be bothered by it. One of the reasons I’m doing ink line drawings is to keep details fairly vague so there’s still some opportunity for the viewer’s imagination to come into play. (The other is speed – I don’t have time to paint the full colour figures I’d love to do.) I’ve also found that drawing characters is like writing them, in that they sometimes turn out a little different to what you intended.
I know fan art out there has influenced me when it comes to Tayend’s appearance. Though I reread the Black Magician Trilogy, prequel and sequel last year, I don’t recall any detailed description, just that he was good looking and wore the fancy garb of an Elyne courtier. He’s shorter than Dannyl, but that goes without saying – Dannyl is tall. I took inspiration from traditional Indian costume for his clothing, and the hair of the friend who posed for the reference shot.
I think this pressure got to me, as I completely messed up Dannyl’s nose and mouth and had to draw them twice, and I now suspect his head is a bit big! And I have to remind myself: I never said this would be easy.
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In the last month only two parcels have arrived for me. The smaller contained this:
That’s the Italian version of The Rogue.
The second parcel was much larger and contained the small paperback version of The Rogue, which means it must be available now, or close to it. The books, when unpacked, were dubbed ‘the Tower of Rogues’:
Which sounds like a fantasy book title.
It’s been a couple of months since I checked the availability of my books as ebooks in Australia. I was hoping to find that missing books had finally been ‘fixed’ but didn’t really expect to see any changes. Well, it turned out there were changes, but almost none for the better.
Amazon – All books except Voice of the Gods
iBookstore – All books except The Black Magician Trilogy, Priestess of the White and Voice of the Gods
Kobo – All books except Voice of the Gods (but look under “Canavan” not “Trudi Canavan”)
Angus&Robertson – All books except Voice of the Gods
Borders – All books except Voice of the Gods
Dymocks – No books available
eBooks.com I have no idea what’s going on here. There are multiple listings of the same books, some in US dollars, some with ‘not available’. There doesn’t appear to be a way to tell it you’re an Australian customer.
In summary, Priestess of the White is now available on the Amazon US site, but that’s the only good news. The only book of mine published by HarperCollins Australia that’s still available in iBookstore is Last of the Wilds. All six books by HarperCollins have disappeared from Kobo. The eBooks.com site is so confusing that if there’s no improvement by the next time I do one of these checks, I’m going to remove it from the list to save customers a headache and disappointment. I’ve taken Amazon UK and Barnes and Noble Nook off the list because the sites won’t let you buy books from Australia. Which goes to prove that the ‘if it appears on the site it’s available’ advice is wrong.
Why has the situation has got worse, not better? Well, it could be any one of the reasons I dug up when researching this post.) Books ‘fall off the system’. Publishers are too busy to monitor every one of the thousands of titles they publish, especially when the book can be there one moment, and be gone the next. Ebook retailers are handling millions of titles as bulk stock and won’t notice (or care) if a couple slip off their site. Authors are too busy writing the next book to be monitoring their ebook titles and don’t want to take up too much of their publishers time – especially when they seem to be constantly under siege these days.
So if you’re in Australia or New Zealand and have been trying to get hold of my books as ebooks, I sympathise with your frustration. Be assured that the digital rights of all of my books in all english territories were sold years ago. All we can do is wait until someone sorts out whatever technical glitch is making them fall off the system.
Oh, and buy more books, so the publishers have the money to pay someone to chase these things up!
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Once again, I must add that I am not interested in a debate on pricing. That’s a topic for another place and time. To keep any feedback to this post on subject I won’t be approving whiny complaints about the cost of ebooks. The purpose of this post is to keep Australian readers informed on where they can buy my books as ebooks.
Another month over and here in Australia it’s my favourite season of the year: autumn. A few days ago I sent my corrections to proofs of The Traitor Queen back to the publisher. That’s the last I’ll see of it until my author copies arrive, probably a month before the release in July. From here on I’ll be focusing on writing the first book of Millennium’s Rule, so it’s like saying farewell to not just The Traitor Queen, but the sequel trilogy and to Kyralia and the characters that live there. Well, except for these character sketch calendars.
I’ve not shown a villain yet, so here’s Regin as a young novice:
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Click on the image to get to a full size version. As before, if you don’t know how to download and set images to be your computer screen wallpaper, seek the help of your usual source of computer advice.
Well, that year went fast! It doesn’t seem that long since I wrote my last Aussie awards post. It also doesn’t seem all that long since I sat, on the other side of the planet, refreshing Twitter over and over as each winner of the 2010 Aurealis Awards was announced. Awards season is a good time to find out what other Aussie sf writers have been doing (always lots), look back on what I’ve contributed (seems like very little in comparison – just one book: The Rogue).
The Aurealis Awards
The shortlist for the peer judged Aurealis Awards was released last week. Lots of very talented, hard working and dedicated people on that list. Back when I was a much faster reader I used to use the shortlist as a must-read guide to Aussie fantasy. (Now I give a wistful sigh and go back to my To-Read Bookcase.)
Here’s the media release with details and the list of finalists.
The Ditmars
The other national Australian SF awards, the Ditmars, is now open for nominations. Like the Hugos, they are a popular vote style awards system linked to a convention. You must be “natural persons active in fandom, or from full or supporting members of Continuum 8, the 2012 Australian National SF Convention” to nominate. Supporting memberships are usually much cheaper than the full rate, allowing people who can’t make it to the con and aren’t involved in fandom to nominate, and the definition of being active in fandom isn’t overly strict.
You can find more information about the convention and the awards, including the link to the nomination form, here.
Trudi Canavan is an Australian fantasy writer and the author of the international bestseller, the Black Magician Trilogy.
The Traitor Queen is the final volume of the Traitor Spy Trilogy, which takes up the action a generation after the events in The High Lord.
The Rogue is the second volume of the Traitor Spy Trilogy, which takes up the action a generation after the events in The High Lord.
The Ambassador’s Mission is the first volume of the Traitor Spy Trilogy, which takes up the action a generation after the events in The High Lord.
Set hundreds of years before the events of Black Magician Trilogy, this stand-alone novel can be read as an introduction to, or an addition to, the story of Kyralia and its magicians. Learn More
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