Get the “Immortal Clay” sequel: Kipuka Blues

It’s taken far longer than it should have, but: you can now order the sequel to Immortal Clay, Kipuka Blues.

Due to the vagaries of indie publishing (discussed at the bottom of this post), the paperback version is available now. The ebook will be released on 5 April, but most readers can pre-order it now.

To my shock, more than one person has ordered the paperback. One of them picked up Immortal Clay in paper as well. Apparently the books are developing… fans. Fans who are unwilling to wait for the electronic version. Weird.

Anyway, you can find the book on pre-order at many of the usual suspects: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Amazon IT, Kobo. The iBooks pre-order has gone weirdly astray, and while I’m trying to get it fixed you just might have to wait until 5 April to order it.

The Kipuka Blues cover is based on me before my morning caffeine.

The obvious question is, why is the print book available before the ebook? Ebook release can be tightly scheduled, while the scheduling between my on-demand printer (CreateSpace) and the rest of the world is much more nebulous. I wanted enough time to receive a print proof, make corrections, get another proof, and get the book into stores. Weirdly, the first proofs came back… fine. No corrections needed. This means I was able to push the button and launch the print earlier.

As with the Mastery books, I’ve tried to make the Kipuka Blues a physical artifact worth owning. It’s by far the thickest book I’ve published, roughly twice the size of any FreeBSD Mastery book.

In a throwback to the 60s and 70s, the paperback edition is illustrated with black and white line art by the inimitable Brad McDevitt. (Actually, I tell a lie. Virgil Finlay could imitate Brad, but sadly Finlay died in 1971. With any other artist, this would be a guarantee that he’d quit working, but with Finlay I’m not quite comfortable guaranteeing that.)

And here’s the cover from the print edition. It different from the ebook cover in that you can pick it up and hold it. You can get a better look at the art by going to one of the bookstores linked to above.

I’ll start writing IC3, tentatively titled Bones Like Water, as soon as I finish writing $ git commit murder. At an hour a day, it’ll probably be well under way before BSDCan.