The Saga Press edition is finally here!

If you’ve visited my blog before, you probably know that The Red: First Light was originally published in 2013 through my own company, Mythic Island Press LLC. It was my first science fiction novel in ten years, and became the first self-published novel to be nominated for a Nebula award. Last year I received a nice offer from Joe Monti of Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press for rights to The Red: First Light, along with two sequels. Once that contract was signed, I withdrew my own edition from the market, and the novel has been unavailable since then.

But not anymore!

As of today, The Red is on the market again. This time it’s available in hardcover, mass market paperback, and ebook editions, all from Saga Press, and in audiobook format from Audible. The audiobook will be available both in the United States and the United Kingdom. A special note for the UK: the ebook edition will be out shortly, published by Mythic Island Press LLC.

So go get it! The Red is available online, and if things have gone well you should be able to find it in bookstores too. If you do see copies out in the world, I’d love it if you let me know — or post pictures! I’m curious to see what kind of distribution it gets.

Publishers Weekly has included The Red on their list “Best Summer Books 2015.” But if you’re still not sure — maybe you don’t think you’d like military fiction — go visit Amazon. They’ve got the first seventy pages available to read online. That’s enough to let you know if this book is for you. I hope it is. I hope you enjoy it.

And thank you! … for your support and your patience. Readers are awesome.

Find The Red online at these vendors:

Amazon USA

Barnes & Noble

Powell’s Books

Mysterious Galaxy

Tattered Cover

Books-A-Million

It was just past 6pm here in Hawaii, but on the East Coast of the United States, it was midnight…and I received this tweet from @radix42.

Hey @LindaNagata its midnight on the East Coast, so guess what just dropped onto my Kindle Reader? pic.twitter.com/cYgxR8GEeV

— David Mercer (@radix42) June 30, 2015

@LindaNagata I guess that counts as the first "picture of it in a bookstore"…the giant Amazon one!

— David Mercer (@radix42) June 30, 2015

Yes, it does!

The Red is finally back!

There are only two more weeks until the Saga Press edition of The Red is released. These last days before a book drops are a nerve-wracking time, at least for me, facing that big question: how will sales go? Really hoping that all this effort will prove worthwhile!

The Red will release simultaneously in hardcover, mass-market paperback, ebook, and audio book editions. Just a few days ago I received a copy of both the finished paperback and the hardcover, and they are gorgeous books. The team at Saga Press has done a terrific job.

In the meantime, more reviews are posting. Here are two from the past week:

Over at SFF World, Rob H. Bedford says:

Nagata manages to bring many familiar elements together (and few SF frameworks are as familiar or popular as Military SF) into something that manages to echo great stories that preceded it while still engaging in a powerfully refreshing fashion. In The Red, Nagata manages one of the most seamless, enjoyable, and enthralling meldings in SF of that familiar and “new spin.” […] Highly Recommended.

Read Rob’s full review here.

At the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Rich Rosell says:

Nagata’s modern-day-or-not-far-from-it creations seem both plausible and fantastic. That air of plausibility is essential for a genre-straddler like this; there is a believably organic texture to the various hardware, software, and weapons. The meshing of humans with technology–leading, inevitably, to dangerous co-dependence–is seamlessly presented. And man oh man, it is exciting.

Read the full review here.

If you’d like to read the opening pages of The Red, you’ll find them online here.

I hope you’ll consider preordering a copy in your favorite format.

Also consider signing up for my “Occasional Newsletter”, for a reminder when each book in The Red Trilogy releases. Book 2, The Trials, will publish in August, and Book 3, Going Dark, is scheduled for November.

Thank you!

It was Virgil’s private theory that in a world of six and a half billion people, only the hopelessly driven obsessive could out-hustle the masses of the sane—those who insisted on rounded lives, filled out with steady lovers, concerts, vacations, hobbies, pets, and even children. Sane people could not begin to compete with the crazies who lived and breathed their work, who fell asleep long after midnight with their farsights still on, only to waken at dawn and check results before coffee.

Limit of Vision (Tor, 2001)

I’m not a “hopelessly driven obsessive” as described above. I think that’s a good thing. But there is a tendency among writers to admire the “do or die” philosophy. On Twitter I’ll often see writers admonishing one another to “never quit!” — on the theory that your next project could be the successful one.

And it’s true that you never know when things will start to turn around, when rejections will start to become acceptances, and success will become noticed and… Well, who knows how far it could go?

A friend of mine used to describe each new novel as a lottery ticket, and I think that’s accurate.

The thing is, very very few people ever win the lottery. You could bankrupt yourself trying. Same thing with writing: You could bankrupt your health, your life, and your relationships with a single-minded devotion to “making it” as a writer. That’s why I feel very uncomfortable when I hear writers insisting that we should never quit!

Quit if you need to. That’s my advice. And I can say that without hypocrisy, because I did it. I quit. Not utterly, and certainly not irrevocably, but I basically walked away from the game for ten years. (more…)

Yesterday I spent an enjoyable hour chatting with Justin Landon, host of Tor.com’s Rocket Talk podcast, and Marko Kloos, author of the Frontlines series of military science fiction novels. Marko and I both originally self-published our mil-SF novels, and we both went on to sign deals for the books with traditional publishers.

During the podcast we talk about our nontraditional path to publishing, military SF in general, and our own novels in particular. I really enjoyed this discussion, and the insightful questions from our host. The podcast posted today. You can find it here at Tor.com.

Back in February, I posted the news here that two of my stories had been selected for Baen Book’s first annual The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera, edited by David Afsharirad.

This year’s best anthology was released yesterday, and includes contributions by Brad R. Torgersen, Michael Z. Williamson, Charlie Jane Anders, Seth Dickinson, William Ledbetter, Eric Leif Davin, David D. Levine, Stephen Gaskell, Michael Barretta, Derek Kunsken, Holly Black, Robert R. Chase, and Matthew Johnson.

My stories are “Codename: Delphi” originally published at Lightspeed Magazine and “Light and Shadow” originally published in the War Stories anthology. Both stories are set in the story world of The Red, and “Codename: Delphi” features some of the same characters.

VOTE!
Here’s an interesting twist that makes this anthology unusual. Baen Books would like their readers to vote on the included stories and select their favorite. There is a cash prize and a plaque for the winning author, but mostly it just sounds like a lot of fun. Click here to get to the voting site. For security reasons you’ll have to sign up for a Baen ebooks account, but there’s no cost on that and Baen will not share your information. Voting closes August 31, and the award will be presented at DragonCon.

So last night, just shy of 0200, I sent the “final” manuscript of Going Dark to my editor, Joe Monti, at Saga Press. I put “final” in quotes, because I’ll get one more pass at the manuscript after the copyedit, and another chance to tweak things when the page proofs arrive. But for practical purposes, I’m done with The Red Trilogy.

It’s been a three-year project, and now that it’s winding down, I’m starting to realize how much I’m going to miss these characters and this story world. For all the frustration, and the struggle to get the story down, I’ve really loved writing these novels. For all the self-doubt, and regardless how it turns out, I’m glad I took the shot.