Look what arrived the other day:
Yep, my advance copy of The Magician's Apprentice!
Now, as you can see, it's a trade paperback. I thought the book was coming out in hardback first, but I might be wrong. I might have been told otherwise and forgotten. (It's been a busy few months.) It might be that some places will get paperback and other hardback.
My publisher has shut down for the holidays so I can't email to check, so I did what I usually end up doing when I need to find out when one of my books is due out - looked it up on bookshop sites. First I looked up the book on Amazon UK and Amazon US. They list it as hardback, due out Feb 5th and 23rd respectively. But on the Borders site it's listed as paperback.
Then I looked up some major Aussie bookshop sites:
- Angus & Robertson - not listed.
- Borders' Australian Site - has no search function
- Dymocks - listed (yay!) as hardback
- Collins Bookstores - listed, as paperback (jan 09) AND hardback (feb 09) AND audio (feb 09)
That last one was odd. Usually hardbacks come out before paperbacks. Next I went to a few specialty bookstores:
- Galaxy - both hardback and paperback listed for Feb 09
- Infinitas - both but no date
- Minotour - lists it but doesn't say what binding it is
So I'm afraid I can't clarify whether the books is going to be paperback or hardback right now. But I do have a trade paperback in my hands. Perhaps Australia is going to be getting paperbacks, while the rest of the world gets hardback first. That would make sense - hardbacks don't always sell that well here, with our smaller population.
Right now I don't care, because I finally have the result of over a year and a quarter's hard work in my hands, and it's mine, all mine!
Foreign language editions of my books are always fun to receive. There's something quite trippy about seeing a book so familiar to me changed into one that is filled with words I can't read. It's like it came from an alternate universe, written by that universe's version of me. But no, it merely came from a mysterious land on the other side of this world. A place I'd love to visit one day.
"Hardback to the Future" is an article predicting the next six months of speculative fiction reading matter, and along with some exciting new titles I was rather chuffed to find this lovely write-up about The Magician's Apprentice: