Gold reissue next month

New Cover

The reissue of Gold is tentatively set for April 23. The six-month period for Penguin to reprint the novel before the rights automatically revert to me ends April 13, based on my request Oct. 13. Penguin confirmed receipt of my request and that they have up to six months to decide whether to reissue or let the rights revert to me, but I have heard nothing else from them since then.

In any case, once the six months is up and presuming Penguin does not opt to reissue the book, I will proceed with the plans to publish Gold as an ebook in the KDP Select program and as print on demand with Lightning Source. Pedernales Publishing has once again come up with a great cover and they are ably handling all the formatting.

Old Hardback Cover

Old Paperback Cover

As I note in a Foreword to the New Edition, the world now seems closer to the global financial catastrophe depicted in Gold than it did when the novel was originally published. As the financial crisis that started in 2008 demonstrated, markets are more interconnected and fragile than ever. And in the summer of 2011, the U.S. government came within a hair’s breadth of defaulting on its debt – a calamity that once was the exclusive preserve of fanciful writers of fiction. Gold was in many ways prescient and for that reason is surprisingly relevant today. Some of the technology in news distribution and commodities trading has changed, but the essential dynamic of the markets and the role of information remains the same.

inReads

A new website from DC's public radio and TV station, WETA, features me and The Grand Mirage in their beta content, currently on display. The idea of inReads is to discuss books and culture at the intersection of technology, so they want to feature self-published authors and their ebooks. I think it was my post My Road to Self-Publishing that attracted their attention (click the "indie" tab above), and which is reproduced on the site.

It's a great showcase even if it is still just building an audience. Hopefully, it will get promotion on WETA and get lots of traffic. In any case, I'm grateful to WETA for taking this initiative and for contacting me about it.

Praise from Publishers Weekly

The January issue of Publishers Weekly has just appeared and The Grand Mirage was one of only two dozen self-published works of fiction selected for a review.

"Delamaide provides a fascinating look at a little-examined period: the Great Game period before WWI," the reviewer writes. This reviewer considers British Orientalist Lord Richard Leighton and American spy William Morrison "unlikely heroes," but concludes "this makes them all the more likable."

Unlike the new incarnation of Kirkus Reviews, which requires a payment of several hundred dollars from authors to get a review, Publishers Weekly selects a handful of books for review from the hundreds submitted for listing (for a much more modest fee) in its annual special section on self-publishing.

The positive editorial review, complete with a thumbnail of the cover, can be found on p. 44 of the January edition.

Readers

Many nice comments about The Grand Mirage. A neighbor tells me her boyfriend started it because she had bought a copy for him at my book party and, somewhat to his surprise, I gather, found it "really good" and had trouble putting it down after the first session.

An old friend from grad school says she enjoyed the book and bought copies as gifts for Christmas. A woman in Andrea's book group says her husband has started it and is enjoying it. There's a nice new 5-star review on Amazon that says "Delamaide has told the story so vividly it comes alive."

I think the fact that Mel Parker, my agent, was so enthusiastic about the book and that many men in their 40s or so are liking it indicates that the book has special appeal for a male audience. In retrospect, it's clear that this is not the profile of the initial decision makers at publishing houses.