achievement unlocked: book deal.

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been more quiet than usual on the blog and the TwitFaceSpaces lately. There’s a reason for that, of course, and I’m free to share it at this point.

My awesome agent Evan Gregory of the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency has sold the publication rights to Terms of Enlistment and its sequel, Lines of Departure, to 47North.

<insert Kermit flail>

What does that mean for the near future of the book series?

I have pulled all my self-published copies of Terms of Enlistment from the online sources where they were available. It is no longer on Kobo, B&N, or iTunes, and I won’t be able to offer any copies directly anymore. It will be available on Amazon’s Kindle store, but temporarily as a pre-order.

On May 14th, Terms of Enlistment will be re-released by 47North in Kindle edition, and at that point it will be available on Amazon.com again; a print and audio version will be produced soon thereafter. Those of you who were kind enough to leave reviews will be happy to hear that the 47North edition will keep all the reviews and star ratings of my self-published version. I will work with the team at 47North to make any changes and edits they find necessary (no matter how hard you think you’ve looked, there are always still typos somehow), but overall it shouldn’t be drastically different from the version that’s currently available.

As a result of the deal, 47North will also publish the sequel, Lines of Departure, this time simultaneously in print, Kindle, and audio formats. I am delivering the final manuscript of Lines of Departure by the end of next month, and I’ve been told they are aiming for a release in early 2014, possibly January.

I realize that some of you may be irritated at the fact that Book #2 will be delayed when I had already announced that I’d bring it out in May. It will, however, be a better book because the team at 47North will provide the editorial guidance, along with the production, marketing, cover design, publicity, and other support that will allow me to fully concentrate on my writing schedule and make sure it’s the best version of the novel it can be. As much as I know my stuff, I’m still just a one-man team, and for Terms of Enlistment, I’ve had to do not only the writing, but also all the editing (and there were many editing passes), cover design, marketing, ebook formatting, direct sales, support, accounting, and everything else that comes with putting out a novel. All the time spent on those things was time that had to be subtracted from my ability to actually write the books! With the novel and its sequel going to 47North, I can now concentrate on the sequel and the next two books in the series, as well as future projects.

To make sure that there’s stuff for you to read while you wait for Lines of Departure, I intend to bridge the gap between releases with short stories and a novella in the Terms of Enlistment universe, which will appear alongside Lucky Thirteen on the Kindle store in (hopefully) regular intervals.

So there’s the big news item of the day. The Terms of Enlistment books finally have a publisher, and I have both the time and the financial security to spend my days writing instead of being my own publishing house. I was getting sick of answering all these different phones and doing different voices for the sales, tech support, marketing, and editing departments.