Benedict Jacka

As of this week, we’ve just passed the two-year mark for the release of Fated!  Last year I did a ‘First Anniversary’ post, where I looked back on everything that had happened since Fated’s publication.  Now it’s the second anniversary instead of the first – what’s happened since then?

In a lot of ways my second year of being a published (non-children’s) writer has been less eventful than the first.  In 2012, I had three books come out at three-month intervals – Fated, Cursed, Taken.  It would be nice to be able to keep releasing books at that pace, but unfortunately I write MUCH slower than that – the only reason Orbit and Ace were able to publish so many of my books so fast in 2012 was that I had Fated and Cursed written and edited well before 2012 arrived.  In 2013, I had only one book published, Chosen.

One book a year is, unfortunately, a lot closer to my actual writing rate, as borne out by this year’s work – the main writing I did in 2013 was Book #5 of the Alex Verus series, Hidden.  That said, I’m hoping to go a little bit faster than that in future.  Hidden wound up taking twelve months total – three months planning, six months writing, and another three months editing and rewriting until I got something me and my editors were all happy with.  For book #6, I’m shooting for nine months rather than twelve, and I’ve got a deadline to motivate me – the first draft of book #6 is due in by the end of June.

On that topic, the big news for this last year for me has been the contract for books #6 and #7 of the Alex Verus series.  It’s always a huge relief as an author when deals like this get settled – no matter how well sales seem to be going, you’re never quite sure how the publishers see it.  Now that the contracts are done and signed, there are going to be Alex Verus books coming out all the way into 2016, which feels weird to write (very far ahead, isn’t it?) but which is good.  Means I can focus on the writing without having to worry about the series being suddenly cut off!

The second piece of news publishing-wise for 2013 was the release of the Tantor audiobooks for the Alex Verus series.  I’ve been getting “when are the audiobooks coming out?” questions for what feels like forever, so it was nice to be able to finally answer that with a positive.  There are some tentative plans for UK audiobooks in the works, too, but nothing definite yet – I’ll post when I have more news.

So while there hasn’t been a huge amount of news for the past year, there’s still been a fair bit, and all of the news has been good.  The Alex Verus novels are still going and still selling, the work on writing more of them is going well, and my publishers are happy enough with them that they’re contracting for more.  Enough to give me reason to be optimistic about the next year!

Had been planning to do an Ask Luna column for today, but got distracted – the current book’s going slower than usual and it’s taking up all of my time.

I hit these blocks from time to time.  Usually it happens either when I haven’t planned out the story in enough detail, and need to stop and work it out, or when I have planned out the story in detail and realise that it needs changing.  (The second one’s much worse.  This delay is the first kind, luckily.)

It’s not really an emergency though – it’s happened before, it’ll happen again, and I’ve gone through it enough times to be used to it (and I doubt it’ll stop me hitting my deadline).  Still tends to make it hard to focus on anything else, though!

And fourth and last of the set, Chosen is out in audio format this coming Monday!  As with the previous set, it’s published by Tantor, and you can listen to a sample on their website.

(Yes, it’s still US-only.  No, I don’t know when the UK audio books will be coming out.  I’ll post it up here as soon as I have any news, I promise.)

In other news, Hidden is all edited and sent off for proofing.  I’ll probably do a preview post on it some time in the next month or two.  Meanwhile, I’m busy on Alex Verus #6 – three chapters in at the moment, and it’s going well so far!

The US cover for Alex Verus #5, Hidden, is finished!  Here it is:

They definitely seem to be doing a colours-of-the-rainbow theme with the US covers.  I suggested green for this one (given which character the book focuses on, it seemed appropriate) but I guess they preferred red.  We’ve already had orange, purple, blue, and yellow, so I’m assuming green’ll be the colour for number 6 . . . or maybe indigo, or pink, or whichever the seventh colour of the rainbow is.  I’ve got a feeling it’s pink, but I’m not sure they’d want to use that!

I’m just finishing up the copyedits on Hidden this week.  Once they’re done it’ll go in for proofreading, and it should be released this September in both the US and UK.  Amazon have the UK release date as 2nd September, but I’ve no idea if that’s accurate or not.  I’ll post here when I have a release date confirmed.

As some of you might remember, the big news last month was that the Alex Verus series was finally being brought out in audio format by Tantor.  Since then two more have come out:  Cursed was released on January 6th, and Taken just came out this week, on January 27th.  That just leaves Chosen, which will be coming out next month on February 17th.

You might notice that the audiobooks are being released an awful lot faster than the print and ebooks were.  Apparently it’s a lot faster to get a recording made than it is to have a book edited, copyedited, re-copy-edited, and proofread.  Which shouldn’t be a surprise really, but it’s the first time I’ve had audio copies of my books made !

In other news, the Tantor pages have audio samples of all four of the books, so you can have a listen on their pages here:

Fated
Cursed
Taken
Chosen

Oddly enough, I haven’t actually listened to any of the books yet.  It’s not because of the publisher or the narrator, it’s just that the idea of listening to somebody else read my books just feels really weird.  I have a very specific idea of how all of my characters sound in my head, and listening to someone else’s take on it is incredibly strange for me – it’s kind of like listening to a recording of your own voice.  But for those of you who’ve bought the audio versions, I’m curious – do the characters sound like you imagined them, or different?

Running a website can be weird.

I do all the day-to-day maintenance of this site myself – a friend of mine designed the layout, but the posts and any additions to the pages are all written by me.  Generally, it’s worked pretty well, and it mostly just does its job in the background without me needing to keep fixing things.  But while I don’t really run into any problems administering the site, I keep tabs on the access stats via a log file analyser, and some of the stuff I find out in the process just makes me scratch my head.

For instance, if anyone tried to guess the most common location that people access this website from, they’d probably guess the USA, and they’d be right.  But if they tried to guess the second, third, and fourth countries on the list, they’d almost certainly be way off.  It turns out that said countries are China, Thailand, and France, respectively.  I have no idea why, but I’m guessing it involves spambots.

Speaking of spambots, before running this site, I never realised just how heavily websites in general get attacked.  I haven’t calculated exactly how many spam comments I get per day, but the amount of spam comments this site gets per week is greater than the number of human-generated comments that that this site has had in the past two years.   The spam filter catches over 99.9% of them, but the sheer number means that some still get through.  (On which subject, don’t put links in your comments.  The spam filter does its best, but URLs of any kind in a comment are a major feature of spam mail and . . . well, if your comment isn’t getting posted, that might be why.)

Every now and then, though, you get something that’s just bizarre.

In this case, it’s one of the Encyclopaedia articles I wrote the best part of a year ago, Advanced Divination (Part Three).  It’s a fairly standard page, right?  Nothing really out of the ordinary.  Definitely nothing to make it stand out from all the other posts and articles I’ve written.

Yet for some reason, that one page is viewed more than any other page on this website.  In fact, that one article’s been viewed more than all the other sixty Encylopaedia articles put together.  Just in the first three weeks of this month alone, it’s had tens of thousands of page views, and for the life of me I have absolutely no idea why.  And along with the views comes the spam – I finally turned off comments on that entry just because that page alone was getting triple-digit numbers of spam comments on a daily basis.

I honestly can’t figure out why that page would be accessed more than every other one.  I can’t think of any legitimate reason for people to be doing this, so my best guess is that a bunch of bots have locked onto it and are loading and reloading it over and over again, but I have no clue why.

But if any of you guys have any theories, I’d love to hear them.

And it’s 2014.  Happy New Year!

With the new year ticking round, the big news for me is that I’ve started the next book in the Alex Verus series, number 6.  (Yes, there are going to be at least three more Alex Verus books after Chosen.  In case you missed the news, here’s the post.)

Alex Verus #6 had a bit of a delayed start – I’d originally been hoping to have begun two months ago, but the time I’d scheduled in for working on the new book was taken up by the extensive revisions to Alex Verus #5, Hidden.  Still, those are all done and dusted now, and my publisher’s happy with Hidden version 2.1, so I can quit worrying about it and focus on number 6.

One thing that’s worked out a little differently this time round is that I’ve ended up planning out the book a lot less extensively.  For Taken, Chosen, and Hidden, I had the first third of each book plotted out before I even started writing.  This time, for whatever reason, it just hasn’t worked out that way, and despite being nearly ten pages into the new book I only have the vaguest idea of what’s going to happen.  The funny thing is, this is actually much closer to how things were when I started the series – back when I began Fated, I really didn’t know where the book was going or how long it’d be.  It does mean I have to think on my feet a lot more, but in a weird way it feels a bit like going back to my roots.

Planning or no planning, though, the book’s going well, and if all keeps to schedule it should be finished by summer and released some time next year – exactly when is anybody’s guess, but Hidden is coming out in September, so number 6 should be out no more than a year after that (and hopefully a little less).  We’ll see how it goes!