Book 4 Delayed to March 2027

Some bad news for this week.  Book #4 in the Inheritance of Magic series, A Progression of Demons, has had its publication delayed.  It’s now going to be released four months later than originally planned, on March 23rd, 2027.

This delay is the decision of my publisher.  I sent in the first draft of Book #4 around the beginning of November 2025, which would have given them 12 months to handle editing, copy-editing, and the rest of the publication process.  Unfortunately they didn’t get started on this process until almost halfway through said 12-month window.  The full story is long and not particularly interesting, but the short version is that they sat on the manuscript for the first 5 months, finally (in response to my increasingly irate emails) began work on the edits in May, and then decided that since they now only had 7 months left, they’d have to push the release date back to compensate.  Even with these delays, the book could still be made ready for publication this autumn – it’s currently at the proofreading stage and I’ll be sending the proof back this month – but they’ve decided not to.

Needless to say, I’m really annoyed by all this.  I don’t always hit my deadlines for my books, but I usually get pretty close, and I work really hard to stay as near to them as possible so that the books can keep coming out on a once-per-year schedule.  Working flat-out to finish a book, sending it off, waiting for months and months with no communication, then finally having my publisher essentially tell me “oh yeah, we just didn’t get around to it” is infuriating, particularly since they didn’t even bother to tell me about the changed publication date (in fact, I only became aware of it because some of you guys noticed the changed release date on Amazon).  The longer the wait between books in a series, then the harder it becomes for readers to remember what happened in the last one, and the more likely it becomes that they’ll drift away and forget about it.  So this sort of delay hurts my sales and readership.

Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about it, so I’m just going to have to put up with it.  I’m still working on Book #5 in the meantime, which (I suppose) is now going to be finished months and months before the publication of Book #4.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get them to publish it in November, so you guys will get two books next year.  If not, we’ll just have to see.