Matthew Hughes's Blog: barbarians of the beyond - Posts Tagged "archonate"

At long last, and after heroic efforts by web page designer extraordinaire, Bradley W. Schenck, the Archonate ebookstore is now open for business:

At the moment, I’m, selling my first two Archonate novels, Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice, at $2.99 apiece. As soon as it’s formatted, I’ll also be offering Nine Tales of Henghis Hapthorn (collecting all of the Hapthorn stories), at the same price.

Next up will be Template, a standalone Archonate space opera, and a collection of all the Guth Bandar stories. They’ll also be priced at $2.99 apiece and should be on sale next month.

Please tell your friends.

The collection of Henghis Hapthorn short stories, Nine Tales of Henghis Hapthorn, is now available from the Archonate bookstore in mobi and ePub formats, again at the reader-friendly price of $2.99. A pdf version will follow soon.

Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice have been selling nicely.

I'll be putting up the standalone space opera novel, Template, and the complete Guth Bandar collection next month.

My standalone space-opera, Template: A Novel of the Archonate, is now available on Amazon. By tomorrow it will be up on Kobo and my own webstore for $2.99.

In a day or so, I'll follow with The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories, a collection of nine short stories and novellas featuring my corpulent master criminal of Old Earth in its penultimate age.

My space opera short story collection, The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories, is now available at the Archonate Bookstore, priced at US$2.99 (£2.02)

It's also working its way through the publishing process at Amazon and Kobo.

Here's the blurb:

In Old Earth’s penultimate age, the corpulent master criminal Luff Imbry moves through the halfworld like a full-fleshed shark. Thief, forger, confidence man, and sometimes go-between, he maps out his illicit operations with exquisite care then carries them out with courage and panache. But, often, things don’t go as Luff planned, and he must call upon a talent for improvisation and a ruthless will to survive.

This collection brings together seven short stories and novelettes previously published in Postscripts, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the anthology Forbidden Planets, plus two novellas formerly only available in limited editions. It offers Luff Imbry in all his moods and guises.

As part of my new venture into self-publishing my backlist, I'm taking advantage of the CreateSpace/Amazon connection to turn some of my ebooks into Print-On-Demand paperbacks. Amazing to me, these POD titles will not only be available from online bookstores, but can be ordered by actual brick-and-mortar bookstores in North America and Europe.

The first titles out will be the short story collections 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn and The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories, which have been selling pretty well as ebooks. They should be through the production process before the end of May.

Doing the paperbacks has slowed down bringing out the Guth Bandar story collection and one of my trunk books. But I'll probably get to that after I've relocated to Athens at the end of the month.

The Entropy Pump blog has posted a review of my first Archonate novel, Fools Errant: " It’s a sly and witty travelogue that sports a fool as the main character (thought not a foolish one) who, instead of seeing the wonders around him, looks at the world as something that is out to get or least annoy him."

A fair summary of Filidor Vesh, at least at the start of the novel. Here's the first chapter.

As I posted here recently, I'm using Amazon's CreateSpace subsidiary to offer some of my self-published ebooks as print-on-demand paperbacks. The first two titles are the short story collections 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn and The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories.

They're now available from Amazon and directly from CreateSpace's estore. Through the wizardry of my excellent webmaster, Bradley W. Schenck, if you go to the new paperbacks section in the bookstore on my website, the listed titles will appear. If you then click "add to cart," you'll be taken directly to CreateSpace's estore (they pay me a higher royalty than does Amazon).

Most amazing to me, though, is that recent changes in the book distribution industry mean that you could also walk into any brick-and-mortar bookstore in North America or Europe, order the titles, and they'll come in just like any other published book. Plus your bookseller will make a little.

I like booksellers. Anything that keeps them in business is all right with me.

I've sold a new adventure of Raffalon the thief: "Stones and Glass," a 15,000-word novelette, will appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, probably in the next year.

For those wondering where Raffalon fits into the Archonate universe: in my first Archonate novel, Fools Errant, the protagonist Filidor carried with him on his wanderings a book entitled The Edifications and Discourses of Liw Osfeo. The place names and settings of the Raffalon tales are the same as those of the Osfeo book. As to whether or how those locations relate to Old Earth in its penultimate age, you'd have to ask that book's author.

I will write more Raffalon stories as time goes by. When I have enough of them, and the first-use rights have all been accounted for, I'll put them into one volume and self-publish them as an ebook and a POD paperback.

There aren't enough Osfeo tales to justify their own collection, so they will be included in a round-up of non-Archonate sf stories that I plan to put out in e- and POD-formats down the road.

Another Raffalon story, "The Inn of the Seven Blessings," will appear in the cross-genre anthology, Rogues, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, and to be published by Bantam Spectra next year.

Last year, I introduced a new character in the Archonate universe. Erm Kaslo is a “licensed confidential operative” (combination private detective, bounty hunter, bodyguard), who lives on Novo Bantry, one of the long-settled worlds of The Spray. He’s a hardboiled version of Henghis Hapthorn who faces the same dilemma as Old Earth’s foremost freelance discriminator: he discovers that the fundamental operating principle of the universe is about to switch from rational cause and effect to sympathetic association, or to use the vulgar term, “magic.”

I took Hapthorn up to the point where the change was just about to happen, and left him to decide whether he wanted to live in a universe ruled by wizards. I’m going to take Kaslo right through the transition and into the collapse of technological civilization and the beginnings of the age that Jack Vance described in his seminal work, The Dying Earth.

I’m writing Kaslo’s story as an episodic novel. I’ve now written four episodes. The first, “And Then Some,” appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction last year. The other three – “Sleeper,” “His Elbow, Unkissed,” and “Phalloon the Illimitable” – have now been bought by John Joseph Adams for the on-line magazine Lightspeed. He’s also bought the reprint rights to “And Then Some,” which will kick off the serial (because that’s what it is) in September.

Eventually, when the story’s been told and all the episodes have run in Lightspeed, I’ll put them all together and self-publish them as an ebook and a POD paperback.

I’m looking forward to this. I like writing hardboiled crime fiction, and taking a guy like Kaslo through an apocalypse ought to offer plenty of scope.

Recently, Paizo Press reverted to me the paperback rights to Template: A Novel of the Archonate, a stand-alone space opera that is the book I most often recommend to new readers who want an introduction to my work. It also represents the only time I've consciously tried to write a "Jack Vance novel," although the themes and concerns embodied in the story are my own.

With the paperback rights returned to me, I've run the work through CreateSpace's print-on-demand system, so it's now available via my webpage bookstore for $12.99. It should start showing up on the various Amazons in the next few days. Down the road, it will even be orderable from brick-and-mortar bookstores all over the place.