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Book news

Confluence – $1.99 at all good e-tailers

Right now, Confluence is $1.99 at all good e-tailers.

As an added bonus, Linesman is $2.99. This means that if you wish, all three books in the series are available for a grand total of $10.97.

As one of our famous music ambassadors here in Australia used to say when he was spruiking new releases, “Do yourself a favour.”

Amazon
Barnes and Noble

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Book news Progress report

Two years since Linesman was published

30 June is the end of the financial year in Australia.  Tax time.  (It’s not the day we need to have our taxes in, it’s the date the last financial year ends, so we can start getting our taxes together.)

Both Sherylyn and I work in industries where end-of-financial-year has a big impact.  It’s a busy time of year for us.

30 June 2015 was also the day Linesman came out.

30 June is also Sherylyn’s birthday.  Best birthday present ever.  Your own book.

Two years already, and it’s gone so fast.  Another two books, and two more on the way.

We’ve decided to celebrate by doing a Goodreads giveaway.

Starting on the 30 June, running till the end of July, you have a chance win all three books.  If you’ve already got them, try a second copy. Or maybe give them away to someone you know who likes science fiction.

Pop over to the Goodreads site in July and enter.

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Book news Writing process

Aurealis Awards

Came home tonight to find we’ve been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards for best sci-fi novel.

It’s such an unexpected honor to be nominated. We’re almost expecting them to come back and say, “Oops, mistake. Sorry.”

Unexpected, but not unwanted. We’re thrilled to be in such exalted company.

Look at the competition.

Congratulations to everyone else for their nominations. (And not just the sci-fi novel. There’s some great stuff here.)

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Book news

Confluence audio book now available on Audible

Now available on Audible.com or other sites like Amazon.

Thanks to Pat and to Bernard for letting us know.

Very much appreciated.

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Book news Progress report

Confluence is now available

2 Dec. Updated to include later links.

Today has been crazy with non-book related issues. So much so that I nearly didn’t write this blog.

Confluence, book three in the Linesman series was released yesterday for us, today for some of you in later time zones.

So far, people have said nice things about it.  Which is a relief, because no matter how much you, the author(s), might like a book, the real test is in what other people think of it.

We’ve tweeted a lot.  (Authors tend to do that around publication day. Surprise.)

We’ve also been featured on some blogs.

To date:

  • SFF World, asking how you know if your side is the right side in a war. Which, let’s face it, most of us don’t. In the Linesman books, we naturally side with the New Alliance, because Ean does. But how do we know it’s the side that should win
  • Plus we’re over on Unbound Worlds talking about why we like space opera
  • Over at the Book Nympho where Anne reviews the book, and hosts our article about music in the Linesman series
  • And we did an author interview over at MyLifeMyBooksMyEscape. where we talk about writing the series, and give a little hint of what’s to come next.

A number of people have asked when the audio version will be available.  Recorded Books plans to record it some time this week.  We don’t know when it will become available on Audible.  (Funnily enough, we do know when the CDs come out, but they always come months later.)

Meantime, if you’re reading Conflunce, we hope you enjoy it.

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Book news

Confluence books arrive

Author copies
Author copies

We received our author copies of Confluence today, which was lovely to come home to.

Most of them are already accounted for, so we’re close to having to order some more.

That’s probably a good thing. We’re also running out of copies of Linesman.

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Book news

Book giveaway. Who wants to win a copy of Confluence?

Advance reader copies, or ARCs. Also known as galleys.
Advance reader copies, or ARCs. Also known as galleys.

The advance reader copies of Confluence arrived on Thursday. These are books but without the final proof read. They have typos. Hopefully not too many.

(I opened the book to a random page and the first thing I saw was a comma that shouldn’t be there. I hope we caught that one in the final proof. )

Beautiful white books with coloured covers. We were expecting plain green covers, as that’s what we’d had for the other two books.  Look at them. Aren’t they great?

We’re giving a book away.

If you want to win, comment on this blog post.  (i.e. Leave a Reply.)

If you’re reading this through Goodreads or Amazon or Facebook or any other feed, please note that you must come to the blog site to comment. Click on this link to get here.  (We’re asking you to come to the blog because last time it was hard to be sure that everyone’s comments got counted. Here they’re all in one place.)

Also, your comment must be on this blog post. Comments on other posts won’t count.

There are no location restrictions. We’ll send the book anywhere in the world.

Competition is open until next Sunday’s blog post (10am Australian Eastern Standard time on Sunday 2 October).

Once the competition closes, we’ll use the wholly scientific method of putting all names into a hat (or in our case it, the big aluminium mixing bowl) and we’ll draw a name out.

So if you want to read Confluence early, comment here.


confluence_giveaway_2Thanks to everyone who entered this giveaway.

We ended up choosing three names.

O. Jimenez, Kristine Friday Ahlskog and trishhenry–we’ll be in touch soon.

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Book news Progress report

First sighting in the wild

The first glimpse of our latest book -- in the wild, as it were.
The first glimpse of our latest book — in the wild, as it were.

It’s just under three months until Confluence is released.

And look, advance reader copies are starting to surface.

 

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Book news Progress report

Getting close to a book

Look, it's a typeset book, with crop marks and all. Just fyi, for Alliance, this is also the version we used to create the copy to read online. We'll probably do the same for Confluence. Just need to get an okay to put it up.
Look, it’s a typeset book, with crop marks and all. Just fyi, for Alliance, this is also the version we used to create the copy to read online. We’ll probably do the same for Confluence. Just need to get an okay to put it up.

The digital proofs for Confluence arrived the other day.  This is a PDF of the typeset book.

It looks like a book.  It’s the last stage before the books are actually printed.  From this we get the green galleys—uncorrected proofs—that we can start sending out to people to read.

We do one final read.  (Optional, according to the publisher, for they have someone doing the final read as well.)  In our case, Sherylyn does the final read.  She does nearly all the editing from the copy edits on.  (It’s great to have two people with different skill-sets working on a book.)

You can’t change anything at this stage, only pick up errors.

Meantime, we have moved onto the next book, and there has been time between our last copy edit and this typeset document arriving, so this is the first read in a long time that we actually have some objectivity reading the book.  Beforehand, we have been so immersed in the story we have no objectivity at all.

There are a few things we’d change. Clunky paragraphs here and there, repeated information. But overall, Sherylyn’s enjoying the read.

Which is nice.

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Book news

Book news

This is just a quick update.  We haven’t given a progress report for a while.

  • Alliance, book two of the Linesman series, has been out in the wild since late February. It’s been well received so far
  • Linesman has gone back for reprints, which is nice
  • Confluence, book three of the Linesman series, has been accepted for publication*. We’re expecting copy edits back in a month
  • We got the final artwork for Confluence early last month, so we’ve been spreading the cover picture around a bit

This means we’ve finished the trilogy we were contracted to do. We don’t know what happens next. That’s with our agent.

Until that decision we’re happily writing a new story about [can’t tell, spoilers]. It’s space opera. Lots of action. A little bit of fun [we hope].  Characters we love.

We’ll see.


* You get three payments for a book. The first is on signing, the last is on publication, and the middle one is what they call delivery and acceptance. This means your editor has finished with any edits she wants for the book and deems it ready to pass on for publication. There’s another round of edits after that, copy edits, where the copy editor checks spelling and grammar, and whether what you wrote works in with the earlier books.