Following up on yesterdays post…
If you go to the series page on Amazon for The Nine Suns you will see changes. Where there had once been an eight books series has been reduced to five, with the two books appearing completely new titles...which is true in a sense.
Books Four – Six (Revenge of the Winter Queen, People of Judgment, The Young King) have been combined into a single volume called Return of the Young King. Books Seven and Eight (Lord of the Crookside, The Treasure of Okhenaar) are now combined as well into a single volume called The Boundless Empyrean, which also includes new content originally meant to be Book Nine of the series, but now making the final third of the combined volume.
But why, you may ?
Both story cycles were originally meant to be single full-length novels, that's how they were plotted and conceived. And that’s how they were written...but they were subsequently split up and published across to multiple volumes. To understand why, we need to go back about fifteen years.
I have been working, on and off (these days definitely on) as an indie writer for about fifteen years. When I first dipped my tow into that pond, it was still a new and somewhat unsettled frontier. The attraction of taking you work directly to the reader without gong through the usual publishing gatekeepers was obvious...but on the other hand no one was quite sure how to make a success of it. I’ll leave aside all the usual debates about genres and so on (hint: you can never go wrong with vampire romance) but one idea that was current at the time was that readers didn't like big books. If you wanted to succeed and make money, publishing lots of shorter novels as part of a series. Get ‘em hooked, was the thinking...lots of two and three dollar novels, or even .99 cents.
It made a certain amount of sense at the time – Kindle Direct had only just launched and no one was quite sure what to ake it of. It seemed like the good idea of the time, and bandwaggoner that I am, I went along. Hence the breaking up the original novels into smaller volumes.
How times have changed. A lot of water passed under the bridge between now and then...I basically cut back on writing for about six years for a number of reasons (health and financial problems, my father passing away, family issues that required multiple trips overseas, and so on.) When things finally settled down, it was clear that the indie book landscape had settled a bit, with a better of what worked and what didn’t. If you are exclusive to Amazon (which is what I am, at least for now) then Kindle Direct is going to be a big part of your income stream. And since KDP pays you by the number of pages read, bigger books do better.
So the stars were aligned, you could say. Reediting Books 4 - 8 and putting them back to together as they were originally meant to be, and add in what would have been Book 9 at the end was both artistically beneficial and fiscally prudent (or at least I hope it is!) Also, I took the opportunity to do a full edit of the entire series, tweaking things here, nipping and tucking there. And there are new covers.
Take a look below. Dive back into the Nine Suns. And if you do pick up one of my books, remember to leave a review!
