If you watch TV and movies, you might think the life of a writer is nonstop glamor: jet-setting book tours, adoring fans, prestigious college gigs. But a lot of times it’s about the nitty-gritty: filing estimated taxes, wrestling with Track Changes in Word, dealing with contracts and rights.
Don’t get me wrong—I actually kind of love the nitty-gritty. It’s a balm for when the creative part of the job starts to feel like a slog, like I’m plodding along putting one word after another with no end in sight. The nitty-gritty feels like getting stuff done.
This is an admittedly long way of getting to the point of this post, which is that I’ve already had a few people reach out to me to note that they can’t currently get ebook copies of The Aleph Extraction and The Nova Incident. Never fear, this is not a bug but a feature! I’m currently in the process of getting the rights for those two titles reverted.
Allow me to translate from authorspeak: when you sign your publishing contract, you—the author—grant certain rights to the publisher as a term of the contract. That’s what allows them—the publisher—to sell the book, on your behalf, whether in physical, digital, or audio capacities. But most publishing contracts also stipulate points at which a writer can ask for the rights to their works to be “reverted”—that is, to say, returned to them to do with as they will. Sometimes it’s after a certain amount of time, sometimes there’s a threshold of sales below which reversion can be requested—every contract has its own terms.
In most cases, it’s also a process that involves some back and forth between the author and publisher or some specific period of time. After all, if the publisher is holding inventory of physical copies of a book, it generally can’t (or doesn’t want to) just flip a switch and have to trash all those. Likewise, it takes some time for those books to get back up for sale: there’s layout to be done, new cover art in most cases, fixing typos that might have slipped through the cracks of the previous edition, and so on.
All of that is under way right now so never fear, The Aleph Extraction and The Nova Incident will return. I certainly have no intention of them being lost and gone forever.
I’m sure some of you will also be wondering what this could mean for the future of the Galactic Cold War series. This process makes matters a little more convoluted for the moment, as Angry Robot continues to hold the rights for The Bayern Agenda and The Armageddon Protocol1 and The Caledonian Gambit is still at my initial publisher, Skyhorse. (That’s not even getting into the audiobook versions, which are still published by a variety of companies—but they should continue to stick around for the moment.) And, of course, my non-Galactic Cold War sci-fi novel, Eternity’s Tomb is still coming in November!
So, while I don’t have any immediate (or imminent) announcements, when and if I do, I’ll certainly share them on my mailing list or here. In the meantime, if you’re jonesing for those two volumes, you should be able to still get the audiobook or, hopefully, find a friend with the physical copies to borrow. Or you can always reach out and maybe I can find a way to help. Thanks, as always, for reading: whether it’s the creative side or the nitty-gritty, you reading the stories is what makes it all worthwhile.
Don’t ask: like I said, contracts all have their own peculiarities.↩