Hammer of Fate will soon be ready to go to print, ready for my heroine Adelais to be sent out into the world on 1st June.
Publishers Second Sky (an imprint of Bookoutoure/Hachette) sent out ‘Advanced Review Copies’ of Hammer of Fate in February, and the first reviews are coming in. I’m particularly pleased with this one: ‘There is something about a good fantasy book that always grabs me and lures me in, holds me hostage until I can finish it, and then leaves me pining for more. … I can only urge you to pick up this book and thrive in it…’
If you’d like to pre-order an ebook, it’s available here.
The final stages:
Editing is hard work. The finished book will be the end product not only of years of writing but of four cycles of editing:
Firstly my editor makes ‘structural edit’ suggestions, related to plot and characterisation. We then hand the agreed changes to a ‘copy editor’ for more nuanced revision. Line editing follows. Hammer of Fate is now at the final, proofreading stage when we discover infuriating glitches. Like runes, which are important to the plot. Kindle transposes them, turning the rune bjarkan, for example, from a correctly typeset ‘ᛒ’ into ‘B‘. The rune’s esoteric meaning of renewal becomes just ‘buh’. I am so glad I have a publisher to help.
Book 2 in the series has just finished the copy editing phase, and by my count the edits on the first two novels in the series have taken me about 110 full days of work since October. All this editing has left Book 3 on a cliff edge, with a key character facing a very tricky situation and begging me to ‘please please please come back and write me out of this’.
No pressure, then. You’ll find more about Hammer of Fate, including the publisher’s description here. Sign up to my newsletter here to hear announcements about subsequent releases in the Rune Song series.
I’m posting great news that I shared with my mailing list last week (sign up if you want to be the first to know!). Since finishing Draca I’ve been writing in a new direction; the ‘historical fantasy’ domain of authors such as George R R Martin (Game of Thrones), Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher), and Mark Lawrence (The Book of the Ancestor). A character had come into my mind as if she had always been there, waiting for her story to be told; a courageous young woman, raised as a pagan but incarcerated in a nunnery and forced to kneel to a foreign god. The words flowed. One book became two, then three. The trilogy acquired a name: Rune Song.
Last August Bookouture, the digital-first subsidiary of publishing group Hachette, acquired the world-wide English language rights to the series via my agent Ian Drury at Sheil Land. However they embargoed announcements until they launched their new imprint for the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) genres, Second Sky. That was last week’s hot news in the publishing world, and I’m now free to share my own excitement.
The first book in the Rune Song series, Hammer of Fate, will be released on 1st June in print, ebook, and audiobook formats. Two other titles will follow during the summer.
Jack Renninson at Second Sky told the press ‘it took me just one evening to blaze through the brilliant first book in Geoff’s new trilogy. Adelais is an astonishing heroine – angry, defiant and immensely charismatic – and the dangerous world that she inhabits seems vividly and completely real. This story is an incredible achievement and I’m certain that fans of exciting, character-driven fantasy will be hooked.’
There’s a slightly fuller description of Hammer of Fate and an extract here.If you want to make Second Sky (and me) very happy, the ebook of Hammer of Fate can be pre-ordered now for just £1.99 from Amazon UK or $2.47 from Amazon.com. Print and audio book pricing will be announced later.
Welcome to the world of Adelais de Vries, a woman who some adore as an angel and others hunt as a witch.
She may be both.
Happy reading!
