Tom Lloyd

So it looks like the publication date for Dusk Watchman is going to be July 2012 and, pretty reasonably, some people have wondered 'what the hell? it'll have been two years since Ragged Man' so I thought I should explain the situation.

The book was delivered in August and it's with the editor now. While that might mean that it would be possible to publish earlier, life isn't quite so simple and without trying to sound like I'm complaining about the situation, I ain't Pat Rothfuss and I don't get the level of priority that would make a publisher want to move around their schedules to accommodate it earlier. The Gollancz list is a full one, and I mean REALLY full, so shunting something earlier isn't so simple and I'm told the sales folk are currently pitching April titles to booksellers. So April would have been the absolute earliest it could have been moved to and booksellers are busy folk so they don't appreciate some middle-tier author jumping around like that. If I had the fanbase of Pat Rothfuss (to use the easy comparison) then there are tens of thousands of people waiting eagerly for the new book and less confusion all round when it gets move. Checking my track record, when a book has been shifted a few months it's just caused confusion and a very slow first few weeks of sales because many people don't realise it's out and often computer systems don't have it listed as published yet.

So that's part A – moving a book forward is complicated. Part B is a more simple answer – I suck. Firstly, it wasn't a book I ever thought I could write in 12 months as ideally I would have. It's 235k long, I don't write that fast and contracting it out to a writing machine like Brandon Sanderson isn't exactly an option! So I was always contracted to write it in 18 months, but my brain went into a sulk after I finished Ragged Man. I'd had to plan major parts of Dusk Watchman while I did that and I was exhausted so I effectively didn't write for six months. I did some short stories and got the collection up to the 100k target I had for it by finally finishing the last long one, but I didn't get much done on the novel so I needed to extend my deadline three months to compensate. And as I knew at the time but couldn't do much about, handing a book in at the start of May makes publishing life easy – doing so when people are off on holiday in August/September and Frankfurt's around the corner, a bit of a pain.

So sorry for the wait folks. According to my readers thus far (editor's opinion pending, but they paid me at least!) it'll be worth waiting for and a worthy ending to the series. There should be something released beforehand, whether it's free stories or the ebook of God Tattoo & Other Stories, and give current progress the next novel shouldn't be nearly so long to wait for, but many people will want that ending and they're going to have to wait longer than they should.