1. Lee and Miller sold five Liaden Universe® novels to Toni Weisskopf at Baen Books through the offices of Jennifer Jackson of the Maass Agency. The question has been, which book will be the sequel to Dragon Ship. The answer is: They all are.
2. Fifteen Liaden novels (aka all of them), divided into four Sequences are now available from Audible.com. For those who may wish to sample the material, or the narrator, or both before purchase, Audible has generously provided a free hour sample of the first book in each of the four Sequences. Handy links: right here.
2a.. We hear from Mr. Feldberg at Audible that, yes, it is his intention to acquire the audio rights to Necessity’s Child.
3. There’s a new splinter/story up at Splinter Universe. Here’s the link.
4. There was error at the bindery which resulted in some signed sheets being bound into the wrong edition (by which I mean wrong-ISBN, since the signed and unsigned editions bear two distinct ISBNs) of Dragon Ship. This has, as you may well imagine, Caused Some Problems. The quickest to recover is Don Blyly, who, now in receipt of Simon and Schuster’s fix (no, I don’t know whose fault it was, who’s fixing what, or exactly what the fix is — don’t, I beg of you, ask me to explain any this; I’m reporting, here.), is continuing to ship pre-ordered books. He lets us know that he has another 100/150 unspoken for signed editions, so if Amazon has failed you — about which more in a moment — contact Uncle Hugo.
4a. Amazon, evidentally neither as clever nor as accommodating as Uncle Hugo’s, is having head explosions all over the known book-selling universe. It’s cancelling orders; sending unsigned books to people who ordered signed books; sending signed and unsigned books to people who only ordered signed books; sending signed books to people who didn’t order signed books. None of that — not one detail of that — can we the authors fix for you. We are very sorry for the mix-up. But honestly? It has sorta palled, even as black comedy. Be it written that, by this point in the play, we are informed of the problem.
5. Yes, we are also aware that the advertisement for Necessity’s Child that ran in Locus (and the art on the catalog pages at BN and Amazon) displays “Final Art to Come” on the cover. No, we don’t believe that the final cover will display this message. If it happens that we’re wrong about that, then we’ll have the opportunity henceforth to refer to that novel as Necessity’s Child: Final Art to Come. Which has a nice, academic ring to it.
6. It’s a cool and sunny day down here in the south. I’ve finished my breakfast, the coffee’s gone and I need to go into Saco to take on supplies.
Here ends your Thursday morning Advert and Intelligencer.
Housekeeping note: The wifi here at Temp Headquarters went out just as I was about to post the above at 9:15ish, so I have already accomplished #6, above. On my way to Saco, I cruised by Camp Ellis, and Wormwood’s (which actually isn’t on the way to anything, but I digress). I did see two cats, so apparently the gentleman from Away has not yet gotten his way.
I was caught in the Amazon mix-up. So I followed your tip, and ordered a signed copy from Uncle Hugo’s (who were just as helpful as always).
I *also* sent a customer complaint to Amazon via their web site. Their initial response by email was not very satisfactory — it boiled down to “item page says ships in 1-to-2 months, so what did you expect?”
Not liking that answer, I clicked my way along ’till I found the “call me” button for customer service. The very helpful lady I spoke with was appalled at the ongoing mess, and said she’s taking the following actions:
1. Sending me a free copy of the UNsigned edition for overnight delivery. I should see this tomorrow.
2. Flagging my pending order for the signed edition for fastest possible shipping when the books finally arrive.
3. Did a fast web search to find your post here, snipped out the Amazon-related bit, and “sent it up the customer service ladder to see what we can do about it, because this is clearly affecting many other customers too.” This last part was done while I was on the line with her.
I have no clue whether this will help anyone else, but Amazon’s quality response has inspired me to leave my order with them un-cancelled.
Best of all, the authors get 3 hardcover sales out of it and I get my copy plus two Christmas gifts!
Thank you for your persistence!
I do hope it will help other readers, some of whom, judging from comments, are getting pretty dern frustrated.
Someone should really write a book titled “Final Art to Come” just to see how thoroughly it could screw things up. I mean someone that could actually get it published. Maybe I should suggest it to Scalzi.