Benedict Jacka

Book 2 in my new Inheritance of Magic series is coming along.  It passed the 60,000 word mark this week, which judging the length of past books probably means it’s about 2/3rds done.

Unfortunately, this also means there’s no way I’m going to make the June 15th deadline.  I always had the feeling it was a bit unrealistic, since it usually takes me a bare minimum of 6 months to write a book (and that’s if I’ve done all the planning and preparation already).  In this case I started writing in January, so June was very unlikely ever to happen.  Given the way things are currently going, August is more realistic.

I’m never happy about missing deadlines – quite apart from the general principle of the thing, it means everything else has to be put back as well.  I can’t start book 3 until I finish book 2, and I can’t start book 4 until I finish book 3, so each delay causes a series of further delays stretching out into the future, which I find frustrating.  Still, given where I am right now, delays matter less than quality.  I want to keep working on this series for the rest of the decade at least, and that means it’s really important that I do a good job . . . particularly with these early books, since these are the ones that’ll do the most to forge reader impressions of the story and the world.  So if I have to choose between being a few months late or putting out a book that I think is below standard, I’m always going to pick ‘late’.

Anyway, the good news is that none of this has any bearing on the release of An Inheritance of Magic itself, which is still coming out in October as planned.  The UK cover should be done soon – I’ll post it up here as soon as I have it so that you guys can take a look!

And the US cover of Book 1 of my new series is done!  Here’s the finished version:

Release date is unchanged;  it’ll be coming out in the US and Canada on October 10th, 2023.

UK version is also close to finished;  I’ll post it when it’s available.

The layout and design for An Inheritance of Magic is now very close to done.  Been looking at cover designs this week – my UK publishers are thinking of going with a gold foil look.  Cover reveals should be soon, so I’ll put them up here once they’re announced!

Some cleanup work on the website for this week – I’ve updated and rearranged the Alex Verus series page.  On a reader’s suggestion, I’ve added a new subheading for the Author Commentaries.  The commentaries were originally intended as a minor side project to pass the time in 2021, but they ended up running to 14 posts and tens of thousands of words, so I figured they deserved their own subsection at last.  I also finally managed to get rid of that annoying bug that made the text overlap, and I’ve updated the FAQ.

Some good news for this week!  My German publishers, Blanvalet, have made an offer to publish a German translation of the first books of my new series.

At the moment Blanvalet are still working through their backlog of Alex Verus books – they’ve been publishing the translated German editions at a rate of two per year.  Volume 9, Marked (whose German title is Der Geist von London), came out in February, and the translated version of Volume 10, Die Verdammten von London, will be coming out in July.  Book 12 is scheduled to be released in the spring/summer of 2024, at which point, having caught up with my old series, they’ll move on to the new one.  Their plan is to put them out about a year after the English versions, so the German translation of An Inheritance of Magic should be released in autumn/winter 2024, and the German translation of book 2 in 2025.

The Alex Verus series has done amazingly well in Germany, so I’m very happy to have the new series come out there so quickly as well.  Hopefully it’ll be as popular as its predecessor!

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I’ve stopped auto-posting links to these blog posts every Friday.  This is because Twitter’s made some API changes that have caused the app I used to auto-post links to my Friday blog posts to stop working.

In theory Twitter allows you to sign up to a free new service for app/API access that would allow me to keep on posting automatic links as before . . . sadly, this would require me to verify my Twitter account via a phone number, which I haven’t been able to do for years since Twitter has a long-standing issue with refusing to recognise phone numbers from India or the UK.  The whole thing is one of those annoying tech support messes with one issue piled on top of another and at this point I really don’t have the patience or time to take however many hours it’d take to sort the whole thing out, so auto-posted tweets aren’t going to be working for a while.  I’ll probably just manually tweet links to my more important posts and ignore the less important ones for the foreseeable future.

After an embarrassingly long time, I’ve finally caught up on all my author email.  If you’ve sent me a message through this website, I should have replied to it by now.  (Unless I managed to lose some, which I hope I didn’t, but it’s hard to be sure.)

I tend to take a really long time to respond to a lot of these messages – months, sometimes – which I always feel bad about, but with all the other things I need to do, answering website emails gets pushed pretty far down the priority list.  But the ‘to be answered’ inbox is finally empty, so let’s see if I can keep it a bit lower-volume this time rather than letting it build up again.

Book 2 in the Inheritance of Magic series is 50% done.  At least, that’s my best guess – my books usually come to around 90,000 words and this one’s now sitting at 43,000 and a bit.  Still not sure if I’ll manage to hit my June 15th deadline, but I’ll do my best!

As usual, the massive lead times in traditional publishing mean that I’m a long way ahead of my readers.  An Inheritance of Magic is coming out six months from now, in October 2023, but by the time it’s published I’ll have finished and edited Inheritance of Magic 2 and I’ll be in the middle of planning out Inheritance of Magic 3.  (No, those aren’t their actual titles.)

It’d be nice if the lead times were slightly shorter, but if it’s any consolation, in the long run it doesn’t actually make much difference – if it takes me 1 year to write a book, then after 10 years the difference between a 12-month turnaround time and a 0-month turnaround time is 9 books as opposed to 10.  The real bottleneck is my writing speed, not the publishing speed.  And the books do benefit from that turnaround time – An Inheritance of Magic is a very, very different book right now to the first draft that I finished back at the beginning of last year, and a much better one.  If I’d been self-publishing I could have had it out ages ago, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good (and wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good a foundation for a series, either).

Oh, and if it helps, you always know when reading one of my books that there’s going to be a sequel, since by the time it comes out said sequel’s been written already.  So at least you know it’s guaranteed to exist!

After almost 12 years, I’ve finally replaced my old author photo with a new one in the About Me section.  I figured that the old image of me was sufficiently out of date by this point that it was about time!