News from the Farm!
Welcome to News From The Farm, the sort of monthly newsletter from me, James Oswald, author of books and stuff. If you're scratching your head wondering how this thing ended up in your inbox, it's possible you might have been hoping to win a book, or you have friends with a bad prank habit. Panic not, you can unsubscribe without hurting my feelings. There's a link at the bottom of the email.
January is finally done. Almost as long as March 2020, which is still actually ongoing. I've never really minded winter, but this January has been particularly hard - in turns freezing cold, then wet and muddy, then freezing cold again. February brings new hope - more light in the mornings and evenings, the first show of snowdrops and the promise of life beginning again.
February also brings a new novel - What Will Burn hits the shops (if any are open) and the internets (which never close) on the 18th.
Regular reminder - the reply email address comes straight to me, so if you've any burning questions you want to ask, observations you want to make, offers of film production or the like, feel free to get in touch. I try to answer every email that needs answering, even if it sometimes takes me a while. Oh to have minions to do all these things for me.
But if you do get in touch, for whatever reason, please spare a thought for my inbox and delete the contents of the original email (this newsletter) that appends itself to your message. My poor old Mac Mini is getting old, and struggles with multiple large files.
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One Good Deed
This book is still available for free for anyone looking for something to read. Putting it all into one easily-downloadable file is still on my to do list. Sorry about that.
After the last newsletter someone got in touch, either by email or on the twitters, to tell me they'd managed to create an epub file. Unfortunately, the message disappeared soon after and I couldn't find out who to respond to. Whoever it was, thank you for doing that, but before I make the book available that way I'd like to give it a thorough once over for typos and other errors, since it's never been properly edited. It's finding the time to do that rather than creating the epub file that is the problem!
One Good Deed - landing page
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Competition Time (again)!
Well, sadly the missing box of proofs never did turn up. Happily I have managed to secure an additional six copies to give away to lucky newsletter subscribers. Once more, I've put all the names into the magic hat* and come out with the following winners:
Melanie Wood
Sally Carter
David Phillips
Richard Wilkinson
Christine Maclean
Janet Graham-Russell
Congratulations to you six, commiserations to the rest. I'd love to be able to give everyone a copy, but then how would I feed myself and my fold of Highland coos?
If you didn't win, don't worry. There'll be more competitions in the future, and the next one will probably be for a signed hardback of the actual book. Keep subscribed, or you might miss out!
What Will Burn is published in Hardback, eBook and Audio in the UK and in eBook in the US and Canada on February 18th 2021
*not an actual hat, or magic.
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Writing News
This month is mostly about What Will Burn, for obvious reasons. As mentioned above, to coincide with publication on the 18th, I'll be putting the second chapter up on the website for anyone to read soon. You can find the first chapter here. My publishers are going to serialise some of the audiobook as narrated by the excellent Ian Hanmore, and I'll post a link to that as soon as I have one. All the information you could possibly need about the new book is on its dedicated page on my website here.
The US and Canada eBook editions have been loaded up to Amazon, iBooks, Kobo and Barnes & Noble now, and should all be available to pre-order. Again, you'll find links on the website to all the purchase options (click on the cover image for the link). My North American chums get the wonderful JT Lindroos cover, too.
In other news, my editor is happy with the suggested title for Con Fairchild book three - Nowhere To Run. I've done a read-through of the first draft and have a plan of how I'm going to whip it into shape. I'd have got started on that, too, but I've been a little busy of late.
It's strange, given how many books I've had published now, but I always forget how time consuming the publicity side of things gets in the run-up to publication day. There are written interviews to answer, articles to write, events to prepare for and participate in. It's all great fun, and part of the job, but it does distract from the actual writing, at least for a while. Things have been a bit different, what with lockdown restrictions in place, but the jury's out still over whether that means more work for me or less.
McLean book twelve is still no more than some barely-legible squiggles on my whiteboard and a couple of thousand words in my 'thinking with my fingers' word document, but my mind's beavering away in the background. As soon as Con Book Three is off, I'll start writing in earnest. I'm already thinking ahead to what will come after that. Will it ever end? I hope not.
I have an idea for a title for book twelve, and my editor was cautiously positive about it too. He needs to run it past the marketing folk before agreeing to it, though, so you'll have to wait until the next newsletter before I spill the beans on that one.
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Insta!
One of the things my publisher has had me do is to record a few short promotional videos for the new book. Apparently these are going on the Headline Publishing Instagram page, but since I don't have an Instagram account, I can't see whether they are there or not. There's a lot of short videos from other great authors up there, so probably worth your checking out even if you can't find my beardy self there yet. Here's the link.
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