THE RISING HORDE: Volume 2 Draft Cover; Edits Are In

Well, Jared Rackler has produced a pretty eye-popping and evocative draft cover for the second volume of The Rising Horde. Click on the image to the left and enjoy.

And, better news–I received the edits from Lynn O’Dell, and things could have been a lot worse. She’s not usually the kind of editor to gush to her clients about how great their work is, but she gave me a high five for The Rising Horde, which was awfully nice. Now it’s up to me to cruise through the edits, make the requisite additions, deletions, and corrections, and fire it back for her to deliver to one of her proofreaders for a final review. I expect I’ll be done with my part today or tomorrow, so that’s easy. The final proof could take as long as three weeks, since the manuscript is still so damn long–Lynn was only able to remove about 9,000 words, brining the total word count down to 177,000+ (from its formerly robust 186,000+ words). So far, I’ve not found the reduction compromises the story in any way.

Just the same, this ensures the product will be released as two books. I can’t reasonably deliver an 800+ page book to Lightning Source to print and distribute, since the costs would be quite high; no one is likely to be interested in paying $24.95 for a soft-cover book. And this way, I can effectively link the paper and electronic versions together, which helps ensure sales tallies are more accurately calculated, and that there’s a corresponding relationship between the two selections.

All that said, the worst case release date for the ebooks will be May 15, 2012 with the paper editions coming out about a month later. But I do expect them to be released sooner. It all depends upon when the final proof is released to me. After that, I pull the trigger.

Hope everyone is having a great day…we’re looking at temperatures in the 70s here in the New York City area.