Going Dark. No that’s NOT my planned career path. It’s the title of the final novel in The Red Trilogy, with another amazing cover by Larry Rostant — and Going Dark is well on its way to publication.

My first drafts tend to be pretty solid, but my initial ideas for a new novel are not. I was reminded of this when I was reading an email I’d written last year, when Going Dark was just getting started. The direction I had in mind for the book at that time changed radically as I worked my way past the opening, and the story is a lot better for it.

Right now I’ve got editorial notes on Going Dark from Joe Monti, my editor at Saga Press, and for the past few days I’ve been working on final revisions. I’m happy to say, the requested changes and additions are fairly minor. But it’s always the case in this process that as I get close to the final-final updates, I’m amazed at the difference even small changes can make. The final polish of a novel is always exciting.

I haven’t yet posted a back cover description for Going Dark, because that needs work. But here’s the tagline:

“No Real Allies, No Fixed Enemies, No Certain Battlefields”

Sound exciting? I hope so!

The Red Trilogy has been a big project. Though I’d written ten prior novels, this is my first real trilogy — not that I planned it that way. It just sort of happened — and now it’s nearly done. For me, anyway! I hope not for you. As the books are published, I hope you’ll come along for the ride. All three books are due out this year. Here are the dates:

The Red — June 30

The Trials — August 18

Going Dark — November 3

Yes, you can preorder!

If you read the books, if you like them, I hope you’ll let other people know. Buzz matters.

And if you’d like to get a look at the opening scene of the first novel, find it here on my website.

Okay, back to those revisions…

This is certainly a once-in-a-lifetime honor, so I’ll note it here: The Red is on Publishers Weekly list of “Best Summer Books 2015 (SF/ Fantasy/ Horror).”

Publishers Weekly is an industry magazine important to book buyers at stores and libraries, so fingers crossed that this will help sales when the Saga Press edition is released June 30.

The ARCs are here!

ARCs, or Advance Reader/Reviewer Copies, are early versions of an upcoming book that get sent out a few months ahead of publication to reviewers, and to other writers or well-known people who might offer a quote that will help publicize the book.

The ARCs for The Red went out a couple weeks ago, but my copies arrived late yesterday.

There will be a simultaneous hardcover edition, but the copy I have is an “oversized” paperback — the sort commonly seen for political thrillers. So with luck, this Red Thriller should fit right in.

The Saga Press edition of The Red releases in June. You can read more about it here.

Updated on February 8, 2021 to show current book cover

I think of my novel, Limit of Vision, originally published in 2001, as the book-no-one-has-heard-of. Certainly, it occupies a weird place in my mental landscape, in large part because it was written in the great, oxygen-deprived emotional void that followed the publication of Vast.

I can’t talk about Limit of Vision without talking about Vast. Vast was a special book to me. It took everything I had to give as a writer. It was edgy, nontraditional science fiction, something I knew at the time would appeal mostly to the hard core of the genre. It was the book I was born to write — that’s how I felt, and I’m not going to argue the point now. But Vast, of course, was a market failure and very quickly out of print.

The experience left me with a sense of futility, but I forged on anyway and wrote Limit of Vision, a near-future biotech thriller that takes place primarily in the Mekong Delta. The novel sold to Tor for a much larger advance than I’d ever had before. Even so, in the wake of the failure of Vast to find a larger audience, I was not brimming with confidence.
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My ebooks have been available through multiple vendors including Amazon, Kobo, Book View Cafe, Barnes & Noble, and my own publisher website Mythic Island Press.

But for those who prefer iBooks, I’m now offering some of my books there, and will likely be adding all of them before long.

So far, I’ve uploaded Memory and three of the nanotech books. Take a look at them here.

I’d also be interested to learn where you buy your ebooks, and why. I know a lot of people don’t like to buy from Amazon, but because of inertia, habit, and convenience, that’s where I get most of mine. How about you?

This popped up on Twitter yesterday:

Cover art for The Red:First Light by @LindaNagata – delighted to be asked by @SagaSFF to do this trilogy #BookCover pic.twitter.com/PMKw7vdrBq

— Larry Rostant (@LarryRostant) January 12, 2015

CLICK THROUGH TWICE TO SEE IT IN FULL!

Artist is the awesome Larry Rostant.

As it turns out, the covers for both The Red and The Trials are up at Simon & Schuster’s website. The images are small, but you can find them here.

Surf on over (does anyone still say “surf”?) to Book View Café, because from now through January 1, 2015, you’ll find a lot of ebooks on sale at 50% off, in many different genres.

Included are mysteries, historicals, romance, science fiction, fantasy, and probably a few others. Epub and mobi formats are available and everything is DRM free. Forty-eight authors are members of Book View Café, and most of them have something on sale.

I’ve got three books included in the sale: Memory (nominated for the John W Campbell Memorial Award), The Dread Hammer (scoundrel-lit fantasy), and The Bohr Maker (Locus Award – Best First Novel). Find them on this page.

So please visit! There are four pages of discounted ebooks. I hope you find something you love.

Okay, I called it at approximately 6:30pm: it’s rough, it’s ugly, but it’s a first draft of book 3 of The Red trilogy.

So… yay!

It will get a lot better as time goes by. 🙂

You can get 50% off the ebook edition of my novel Skye Object 3270a at Kobo. The sale runs through Monday. To get the discount, you have to use coupon code SAVE50.

Skye Object 3270a is the only middle-grade/young-adult novel I’ve ever written. It’s set in the Nanotech Succession story world, taking place in the same setting as my adult novel Deception Well — though it doesn’t have a direct connection with that story.

Read the opening online here — and if you’re acquainted with younger readers who like high-tech adventure, please let them know.

Skye Object 3270a is also available in a print version.

Over the past few months, many of you have asked Whatever happened to The Red: Trials? This was the sequel to my 2013 self-published novel The Red: First Light and had been scheduled to publish last May. It has not been published (yet) and now I’m finally free to say why. So here’s the story:

Last spring I got to talking with my long-time agent. Naturally, we hadn’t had much business with each other since I started self-publishing, but one thing led to another, he read The Red: First Light, loved it, and asked if he could auction that book along with Trials, and an as-yet-unwritten final novel in the trilogy.

I thought about it. I talked the idea over with my husband. I added up what First Light had already earned, and I estimated what I might expect to earn in the next year or two. The finances convinced me: an auction was worth trying, so long as it was a walk-away deal. My agent agreed: if I didn’t get an offer I liked, I would continue on my own.

In fact, I planned to continue as before, publishing The Red: Trials according to the original schedule, but during the auction period I was asked to hold off on releasing it. On reflection that seemed a reasonable request, so I agreed. It was a gamble though, because I was giving up a wonderful publicity opportunity. Fortunately, the gamble proved worthwhile.

The big news: Now that the contract has been signed, I am very pleased to announce that The Red series has been acquired by Joe Monti, Executive Editor at Saga Press, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Joe has been very enthusiastic, and I am all approving of the marketing direction he has in mind. I see this deal as a fantastic opportunity to get my name out in the world and more widely known, which should help push sales of my backlist, which might lead to me earning a reasonable income from writing for, essentially, the first time ever. My husband has always been the primary breadwinner around here, so the opportunity to give back to him means a lot to me.

For now, The Red: First Light has been withdrawn from sale pending the release of the forthcoming Saga Press edition.

I’m not turning my back on self-publishing, but after almost five years at this game, it felt like the time had come to try something different. I think that’s the key, to keep trying new things, and this is the right thing for me, and for my family, at this time.

I do have one regret: I know I’m disappointing several of you who’ve let me know that you’re eagerly awaiting Trials. Be assured that it will be published, just a little later than initially planned and under the slightly modified title The Trials. I hope you’ll stick with me until then. And I do want to thank all the readers and reviewers who supported the original edition, and made this step forward possible for me.

I’ll be sending out my newsletter at rare intervals, as always, so if you’d like a notification of the publication date of the Saga Press edition of the series—or occasional news on my other books and writing—please sign up using the form in the right column of this page.

And in the meantime, I have a lot of other novels! If you haven’t read them yet, check out Memory or The Bohr Maker. Both are good places to start if you’d like to get to know my work.