Nov 13 2015

It’s about The Skystone…

The original First Edition cover of The Skystone, from Viking Press, 1992.
The original First Edition cover of The Skystone, from Viking Press, 1992.

I heard a report a couple of weeks ago, while I was attending the annual Surrey Writers Conference, that my first novel, The Skystone, had gone out of print. Several people in attendance there had been trying to buy the book from the Chapters/Indigo bookstore on site and had apparently been told that it was unavailable because it had recently gone out of print. It was a misunderstanding, a misinterpreted comment by someone on the Chapters/Indigo staff, but that’s how rumours get started, and unless they’re scotched pretty damn quick, they spread far and fast.

Naturally, I was perturbed because I had heard nothing that would substantiate the rumour–and you can be sure I would have expected to be told, long before anything that important actually happened. And so I decided to talk to the folks at Penguin, once I got home from the conference. But Murphy’s Law took over as it always does, and the small space of time I had available before going into hospital four days after returning home, slipped by before I could make contact. As soon as I got out of dry dock, though, I got on the phone to my favourite acquiring editor, Adrienne Kerr, at penguinrandomhouse.com, and asked her what was going on… I took her by surprise just as much as the news had initially surprised me, but she promised to find an answer for me quickly, and she did.

It transpires that the book, The Skystone, now in its 20-somethingth Canadian printing, is Out Of Stock and between printings, but approaching the 25th Anniversary of its initial publication here in Canada, it is still selling and most definitely not Out Of Print, so it will be reprinted and available in Canadian book stores again soon.

That knowledge is reinforced by the fact that my next novel is a prequel to The Skystone, and it deals with the discovery of the original skystone meteorite and the making of the Skystone Dagger by Publius Varrus’s grandfather, Quintus Varrus, during the reign of the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century. To back up the launch of the new book, which is called Vulcan’s Laughter, the publisher plans to reissue the entire Dream of Eagles series in trade paperback format with new cover art predicated on the British editions by Sphere Book.

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