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After The Warded Man was published, I began to receive mail from readers who wanted autographed books, but were unable for whatever reason to meet me in person at conventions & signings, or find the signed copies I leave seeded at the local bookstores in any city I travel to. Lots of people live off the beaten path where its all-but impossible for an author to visit.

I wanted to do right by those people, but the idea of getting a PO Box so they could send me their books, and then signing them and mailing them back sounded slow, inefficient, and frankly a pain in the ass for all involved. I gave it some thought and decided a nice solution would be to offer free signed bookplates to any of my readers who might want them.

I spent a pretty big chunk of my own time and money working with the immensely talented Lauren K. Cannon to design the plates, calling vendors to print them, making custom return address labels, buying envelopes and postage, etc. I set aside 500 plates for this purpose to ensure I wouldn’t lose my shirt to keep a promise. The rest of the original print run of 2000 plates was used for appearances, signings, and given to close friends who travel a lot to stick in copies at out of the way bookstores in other countries.

The plates were a great success. Lauren’s design came out even better than I had imagined, and readers seemed to genuinely enjoy getting them. I left hundreds stuck in signed paperbacks of The Painted/Warded Man on store shelves all over the world, in case readers decided to go on to read Desert Spear and wanted a signed copy of that, too. With Dani’s help, we kept up with all the requests in a fairly timely manner, and have gotten hundreds of thank you letters from readers who received their plates.

By late October of this year, I was effectively out of plates, with just a handful left to fulfill requests from the site. I printed thousands more so I could continue to have them on hand for touring and the like. I also figured I would keep the freebie promotion going past 500. Sure, international postage and printing costs add up, but no one was abusing the offer, and I didn’t mind the time and expense if it meant I could give something back to those who have supported me. It felt like I was doing a good deed.

But as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

A couple of days ago, some internet freebie site linked to the page, announcing that I had bookplates ABSOLUTELY FREE. This was picked up by a number of aggregators, and instantly spread far and wide on dozens of sites which basically just do bot searches for free giveaways and then post the results for people looking for a hot deal. One site even had the gall to put up a post pretending to be me, telling people to come and git them free plates! In the last four days, literally hundreds of requests have come pouring in, 90% of them from people who have never read my books and likely never will, but who just want to take advantage of free offers on the internet. Most of them are from countries where my books are not even sold.

Happy New Year.

I’ll be honest, it’s been something of a turd in my soup, and I haven’t been sure what to do about it. The plates were something personal, a special thing between me and my readers. I’m not inclined to spend all my spare time and disposable income shipping them to people all around the world who never heard of me before they found out I was giving away something for free. I’m busy enough as it is. I only promised 500 plates and I have lived up to that, so I am not obligated to keep on, and frankly this seems a good time to stop. I want to do right by people, but not be taken advantage of.

But on the other hand… fuck that. I want to keep the promotion going for my readers who are important to me, and I’m not going to be stop just because I hit some churny waters in the great internet sea and got pulled into a spammy current. So I will figure out a way to make it work.

Dani has been the one who had to wade through the deluge of e-mails, sorting out the “real” requests from the obvious freebie click-throughs. She’s been handling bookplate fulfillment since it started, and says that 99% of the requests from readers have always included a personal note, and not just an address. That let us sort the haystack much quicker and helped ensure that the least requests got lost in the shuffle. If you happened to submit a request with just your name and address and would like to make sure it gets processed, just send us a note.

I’m going to do a little research and see what I can do to the request page dissuade web-bots from flagging it. Hopefully the changes will involve a minimum of “I’m not spam!” steps for my readers.

In the meantime, feel free to keep requesting plates. Just throw up a demon cycle gang sign in your e-mail.

I’ll post the funniest ones on the blog.

Happy New Year!

Posted on January 6, 2011 at 1:45 am by PeatB
Filed under Appearances, Bookplate, Fans, Interviews, Life, Musings, Tech, World Traveler
20 Comments »

Hey all,  just a quick note to say that it looks like the third printing of the US hardcover of The Desert Spear is sold out almost everywhere (Amazon, B&N, most Borders locations, etc.), and with the mass-market paperback scheduled for late February/early March, it is doubtful they will go back on press for a fourth. If you’re in the UK, though, there are no worries. They are on the fifth or sixth hardback printing there, and there are no signs of shortage.

If you are in the US and are looking for a copy, you can still order online from The Book Depository, though I don’t know for how long. Book Depository charges a little more up front than, say, Amazon, but they have free shipping, so it usually evens out.

If you are a brick & mortar store shopper, you can go to borders.com and plug in your zip code in the “Reserve/Check Inventory” search box on the right side of the page, and maybe you’ll be lucky enough to find one of the few remaining copies at a store near you.  (bn.com has a similar feature but for the most part hasn’t had the hardcover since August.)

If any of my readers work at bookstores that have TDS in stock, let me know and I will pimp your store!

Posted on December 21, 2010 at 4:59 pm by PeatB
Filed under Desert Spear, Sales, Writing
5 Comments »

This post is a long time in coming, and while it may be a blip on the radar to a lot of folks, it represents a huge leap for me.

The Great Bazaar is now available as an eBook from Subterranean Press!

As you may know, TGB is the small, limited edition novella I published in January of this year with Subterranean. There were only 2,200 copies printed (2K trade and 200 limited), and they quickly sold out. Before long, they were selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars (if you can find it at all), and I get daily messages from readers asking how they can get their hands on one.

This is more than a little surreal to me, because The Great Bazaar, like the Demon Cycle itself, started as a labor of love with little hope for publication—even after I had sold the first three demon books. For a long while, I couldn’t even give it away for free.

There are three gaps in The Warded Man (AKA The Painted Man in the UK), where several years pass for the characters with the turn of the page. This was a deliberate choice, allowing me so show the defining and formative periods in the childhood of my protagonists, and then move quickly ahead to their adventures as adults, so when they make the decisions they make, you understand why. For the most part, knowing what happened in those gaps is unnecessary, and would only have slowed the pace of the story.

But there was one gap I regretted. It came during the three years when Arlen is working as a Messenger traveling throughout the Free Cities. This was an exciting, adventure-filled period in Arlen’s life where he travels from town to town, touching the lives of different people living behind the wards.

I had a LOT of story ideas for those three years, but there wasn’t space to include even a fraction of them in The Warded Man, and even if there had been, it would have robbed Arlen’s race towards destiny of all its immediacy. So I decided to skip those side stories and get to them some other time, putting Arlen, at the beginning of Chapter 17 (Ruins), at the end of a long series of adventures, lightly sketched for the reader, wherein he became worldly, and culminating in him relic hunting in the lost city of Anoch Sun, the next true turning point in his life.

But the road to Anoch Sun was a difficult one, and even FINDING it was moreso. The Great Bazaar tells part of that tale. It is essentially chapter 16.5 of The Warded Man, taking place a few weeks before Chapter 17 picks up the story.

The novella started out as a backup story I essentially wrote for free for a special UK limited edition hardcover of The Painted Man for Voyager. I turned the story in on time, but the special edition was delayed again and again, and was eventually shelved.

I was really bummed about that. I had worked very hard on TGB, and was immensely proud of it. I thought it worked both as a stand-alone introduction to the Demon Cycle as well as a great addition for lovers of the series. I tried to sell it for a song to Del Rey, perhaps as a promotional chapbook to hand out at ComicCon, but they weren’t interested in doing novellas, especially from an unknown author (The Warded Man had yet to be published in the US at that point).

So it sat for months. I made another press to sell it after I turned in The Desert Spear, as the story takes place in Fort Krasia and is a fantastic appetizer for that book, but my options were limited. The big publishers still didn’t want it, and it was rejected from the few fantasy short story markets I submitted it to. I was afraid it was destined to be a lost tale.

But then, unsolicited, I got an e-mail from Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press. He had read and enjoyed The Painted Man, and asked if I would be interested in writing a special, limited edition novella for him.

So I sent him The Great Bazaar. He read it. In days we had a book deal. In less than a month, we had printer proofs. The amazing cover was a piece of art I had commissioned from Lauren K. Cannon for my website, but Bill loved it so much he licensed it from her for the book. A few months later I had a book in my hands, and was glad that at least SOMEone would get to read it. I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be a collector’s item.

But as my readership grows, more and more people have expressed an interest in reading it, and were frustrated at its lack of availability. One reader even wrote to scold me over it, saying “It’s like you’re holding a part of the Demon Cycle hostage for only the people with tons of disposable income to enjoy”.

Yow. That was certainly not my intent. Subterranean isn’t in the business of doing multiple printings of their books, though, so I spoke to Bill to see what we could work out. The eBook option seemed the next logical step.

So now, at long last, the story is available for everyone. So far it is only up on the Amazon Kindle store for download or reading online, but it has been submitted to the iBook store, the B&N Nook store, etc., so it will soon be on an eReader near you. The same will go for my upcoming Subterranean book, Brayan’s Gold, still available for pre-order! It will go up as an eBook some time next year, probably a few months after publication.

And that’s not all! I just inked a deal with Recorded Books, who have made incredible audiobooks of The Warded Man and The Desert Spear with narrator Pete Bradbury, whose silken rumble of a voice could charm the panties from a marble statue. They will be doing audio versions of The Great Bazaar and Brayan’s Gold as well, so whatever your format, print, digital, or audio, the novellas will be available to you.

There are a few other gaps in the series that are… juicy. Fertile ground for adventure. The years Leesha spends training in Angiers, for instance, or the ones Rojer spends playing the hamlets. Jardir earning his stripes as a kai’Sharum. The years of solitude where the Warded Man loses himself as he shuns human contact and lives like an animal, killing and eating demons.

We’ll get to them, I promise.

Posted on December 16, 2010 at 10:56 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Events, Great Bazaar, Interviews, Musings, Pimpage, Sales, Tech, Warded Man, Writing
14 Comments »

We all have our childhood heroes. Sometimes it’s an actor or sports star. Sometimes it’s an author or a director or a musician. An astronaut, or historical figure. Sometimes, if we’re really lucky, we get to actually meet that person.

One of my heroes, maybe the biggest, was Terry Brooks. It was a HUGE thrill for me to meet Terry at ComicCon a couple of years ago, and an incredible honor to have him write this blurb for The Warded Man:

“I enjoyed THE WARDED MAN immensely. There is much to admire in Peter Brett’s writing, and his concept is brilliant. Action and suspense all the way; he made me care about his characters and want to know what’s going to happen next.”

A few months ago, I got to do a Live Web Chat with Terry (click here for transcript) , which was a blast, especially because Terry and I were on a conference call during the chat, joking and laughing the whole time. Terry is a riot.

Back in June of this year, Terry’s editor and the Editorial Director of Del Rey books, Betsy Mitchell, asked me to take part in a special gift for Terry. To celebrate his 35 years with Del Rey Books (I believe his book The Sword of Shannara was one of the first published under the Del Rey imprint by Lester Del Rey himself), they were putting together a hand-made scrapbook of signatures, letters, etc., and invited me to add a page.

It was a huge honor and a chance to say a lot of things to Terry that I had always wanted to say, but never been able to say to his face. They sent me two pages in case I messed one up, and I used them both (and messed both up with my godawful handwriting). Before sending them off, though, I took the liberty of scanning them (click to enlarge):

That was in June, and after a while, I forgot all about it. Then, just the other day, I got this response:

—–Original Message—-

From: Terrence Brooks
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2010 5:09 PM
To: Peter V. Brett
Subject: The Big Book of Kind Words

Just received my book of appreciations over the Thanksgiving weekend and wanted to tell you how much your entry meant to me.  I am excited for this new generation of fantasy writers that I have been privileged to read and comment on, yourself included.  To have you offer a submission to this book – a Betsy Mitchell/Del Rey secret endeavor that blew me away – really seems appropriate for an author like myself who wants to see the magic continue.

I am still in recovery after reading what people said.  Many thanks, Terry.

I have reached Nerdvana. If I am in any way helping the magic continue, it is because Uncle Brooks and Grandpa Tolkien taught me my first tricks.

Posted on December 14, 2010 at 10:38 am by PeatB
Filed under Fans, Life, Musings, My Reviews, Writing
5 Comments »

Have I mentioned how much I love Google Alerts? For all the thousands of pirate download sources for my books that leave me sour and annoyed, it brings me gems like this that make it all worthwhile.

Longtime readers may recall a piece of fan art I posted eighteen months ago or so by a young  artist from the UK, Nicadom, who had just finished reading The Painted Man and was feeling inspired:

Well, just the other day, google pointed me to a new piece from Nic, this one based on a scene from The Desert Spear:

Not only is this awesome in and of itself, but it’s also really amazing to watch Nic’s skill and talent grow. This digital painting is kickass. Thanks, Nic!

OK, enough bloggery. Back to The Daylight War…

Posted on December 13, 2010 at 2:40 pm by PeatB
Filed under Desert Spear, Fan Art, Fans, Warded Art
5 Comments »