Third post within 24 hours, because apparently I blog in flurries…

The deadline for Hugo Award nominations is March 31, just a few days away. For those eligible to nominate, I hope you’ll consider Going Dark in the best novel category when filling out your nomination ballot. The Trials is also eligible, if you’re truly enthusiastic. 😉

Another suggestion is a vote for my editor, Joe Monti, in the Editor/Long Form category — but not just because he had the courage and enthusiasm to publish me. In 2015, Joe launched Saga Press, a rapidly growing and much praised line of science fiction and fantasy, at a time when other SF imprints are disappearing. Click here to see some of the books published by Saga Press in their first year, 2015. Scroll through the pages and you’ll be able to see some upcoming titles.

Saga Press is an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

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

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!

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.

It’s awkward to have a post on an expired sale as the lead post on my blog, so I thought I’d write a brief update on where things stand with the ongoing project, just to have something fresh here.

Over the past months — and especially the last few weeks — I have been consumed with writing a first, very rough draft of the third book in The Red trilogy. I’d hoped to finish it last weekend, but alas, no. Then I was sure I would finish it by the end of the week. Nope!

I do have excuses, though. On Tuesday the copyedited manuscript for The Red: First Light arrived from Saga Press. (Read about what a copyeditor does here.) Yes, that book has been copyedited before, prior to its initial publication. So of course the copyeditor only found some stylistic elements to “fix,” right? For example, there was much debate about how to present the initials “L. T.” when soldiers are pronouncing them “ell-tee.” I settled on the solution in the previous sentence, following a reference in the Chicago Manual of Style. Others counseled me to just go with “LT” — and that’s what the copyeditor decided. I don’t have any huge objection to this. I just hope it gets pronounced the right way when people read it.

So, it was all just technical stuff like that, right? Uh, well, no. Let’s just say, “Mistakes were made.” Not many, not obvious, but given how many times the manuscript has already been looked at… ::sigh::

So I spent much of the week processing copyedits and entering the changes into a copy of the manuscript. I’m almost done, and plan to send the manuscript back to Saga Press on Monday, but the process has consumed a lot of time that would have normally gone to staring at a computer screen wondering how to end book three…

Which brings me to the next excuse for not having finished quite yet — a new idea introduced itself, a means to add another level of drama and tension to the last big scene… but I’m still working out the motivation behind one obscure character, and that’s holding everything up. It’s gotten frustrating. To say the least.

At this point, I think I need to write “an” ending and then get started on the revision so that I can ultimately write “the” ending because things do change between drafts. Wish me luck!

Saga Press — the new publisher of The Red: First Light — is a new imprint of Simon and Schuster. Their first books won’t be out until next spring, but today they made this announcement:

New York, New York, October 8—Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, announced today that all e-books from the forthcoming science fiction and fantasy line will be sold without DRM.

“The science fiction and fantasy community were early adopters of electronic formats, and have enthusiastically embraced DRM-free content while showing great respect for authors’ works under copyright. In launching our imprint, we are pleased to offer this convenience to our readers and test the waters of DRM-free publishing,” said Joe Monti, executive editor of Saga.

This is terrific news. My ebooks have always been DRM-free for the convenience of readers who might change devices, or need to make back-up copies. So I’m very pleased to know that my novels to be published by Saga Press will be DRM-free as well.

Here’s more on the topic, from Joe Monti, my editor at Saga Press.

And here’s another post in which Joe talks about the start-up process behind Saga Press.

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.