August 2012 Archive

Little Boxed Sets on the Hillside

As of today, 30th August, The First Law, a series that pulitzer prize winning author Junot Diaz, no less, described as “the best fantasy trilogy in recent memory” (and he’s famous for his well long memory) should be available throughout the UK in a magnificent boxed set.  Yes indeed, three parchmenty B-Format mass market paperbacks united in sweet harmony within a wonderfully designed war-chest of purest cardboard.  RRP is £27.00, but you may have noticed that a small amount of discounting tends to go on in British bookselling these days, and I observe that amazon.co.uk, for example, have this item on sale for a mere £13.23, a 51% discount.  Why, at that price you’d be a fool not to become the envy of your extensive social circle by buying five and arranging them in an eye-catching pyramid, like this one:

Alright, I’ll admit, I can’t expect everyone to be enough of a true fan to invest in their own First Law Boxed Set Pyramid, even at the ludicrous, knock-down price of £66.15 including free delivery for the entire thing.  Many of you, I must concede, will already own these books.  What may be of more interest is that you can now buy the boxed set on e-book for the even more ridiculous price of £9.99.  Yes, I work that out to be somewhere around 1.5p for every 1,000 words of ultra-high quality genre-defining fiction.  Obviously it doesn’t come in a box, though.  Or perhaps it comes in an electronic box, I’m not sure…

LATER NOTE: Seems to be some confusion on Amazon, with a couple of different entries, some available, some not.  The one which is currently shipping is at the slightly less excellent price of £18.90.

Read more | 36 comments | Posted in announcements

The Dark Knight Rises

Hmmmm.  Good, but definitely not great would be my feeling, which I think is probably what I’d have said about all the entries in this trilogy. It all looked cool, kicked along and had some great set pieces, a reasonable twist in the plot too.  It was pretty much all rosy up until about the […]

Read more | 65 comments | Posted in film and tv

Ninefingers Sculpture

Occasionally folks send me things they’ve done that are related to my books, and if they’re good, maybe I post them here.  David Jennison is a character artist for Sony Online, and this is his vision of Master Ninefingers: Click on for considerable extra detail.  It’s always great to see an artist using their skills […]

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Red Country Facts and Figures

Yesterday I finished going through page proofs of Red Country and sent a handful of changes back to the publisher, most of which were simple swaps of a new word for one I’d used twice in close proximity.  Amazing how these things persist to this point after all the rounds of editing.  But that means, […]

Read more | 31 comments | Posted in announcements, process

Book Trailer and First Review

Good news, good news.  Those lucky, lucky people at Fantasy Faction (who organised a fantastic event up in London last Friday with me, Peter Brett and Myke Cole, incidentally) have had the opportunity to read a proof of Red Country, and have posted the first review of the book.  If you’re really sensitive to spoilers […]

Read more | 53 comments | Posted in news, reviews

Red Country Artwork: Colour me Bad

We’d pretty much arrived at a final cover in terms of elements and arrangements, but there was some concern that the colour was too close to the previous books, and we needed to take things in a slightly different direction.  So Laura cooked up a few different colour treatments… I and my editor then argued […]

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Proofs

Ah ha.  Look what just dropped onto my doormat. Why, it’s only an uncorrected manuscript proof of Joe Abercrombie’s latest, Red Country.  I can’t wait to read it.  Except of course I already have.  About thirty times.  Still, it looks most handsome I must say.  There are only 90 in existence, this time around.  Not […]

Read more | 28 comments | Posted in process

The Blade Itself for £1.99

My guess is it’s likely that most regular followers of this blog have already had the profound pleasure, education, and indeed revelation, of reading The Blade Itself.  But just in case the gloom of your life remains unilluminated by its scintillating brilliance, I note that amazon uk are for the next month or so running […]

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Red Country Artwork: Design

Maps and knives present and correct, now comes the time for virtuoso designer Laura Brett to put her dark arts to work and combine the two.  This is actually quite a drawn out process, with a lot of steady input from me and my editor, so I won’t show every step along the way, but […]

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Westerns

Red Country is finished!  Or at least my final changes are made.  Page proofs will no doubt appear some time over the coming weeks for a final read through, but basically it’s done.  One always feels one could perhaps do a little more, tweak something here, something there, but the last run through was mostly […]

Read more | 37 comments | Posted in reading