"Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: the Author's Cut" in the Ebooks Direct Store

It’s been in the works for a good while now, so it’s a pleasure to announce that the new revised ebook edition of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses — which anticipated CSI-style forensic drama and introduced it for the first time into an SF/fantasy setting — is now available in the Ebooks Direct store.

The new edition of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses comes with an afterword that talks about the evolution of the book, and also with the worldbuilding notes that set up the histories of the sheaf of universes where the story’s set.

From the afterword:

As usual, when you look at a work almost ten years after you’ve written it, you find things that the almost-ten-years-on writer really wants to fix. There are little edits all through this edition, and some material that was edited out in the original edition has been restored; but in particular, the last few chapters have been rewritten to try to clarify exactly what the heck is going on.

Previous readers of my work will know that I have no trouble at all playing Cosmic Conkers – i.e., banging two universes together and seeing which one breaks first — but this situation was big and complex even by my standards.  I hope the revisions satisfy both old readers returning to a favorite work, and new ones reading it for the first time. (In particular, some readers have mentioned that they’ve never read the book because the original cover gave them the idea it was a romance. I hope the new cover will have remedied this.)

…Every now and then people ask me when I’m going to do another book in this worldset. Until now the answer had been, “I’m not sure where else I can go with this.” Now, though, after the revision, I begin to see some ways forward. We’ll see how this realization plays out over the next year or so.

— While it’s always dangerous to ask a writer what his or her favorite book is, I have to admit to having a real soft spot for this one — maybe because I spent more time working on the project than on almost any other in my career: so I’m delighted to be able to relaunch it now, in this new and improved version, in e-format. You can read an excerpt from an early chapter here, if you like.

Right now the book is available in the two main ebook formats: .ePub (for the Nook, iPad and Sony Reader) and .mobi (for the Kindle and all MobiPocket-friendly readers). And people who have devices that use both formats can also pick it up in a bundled download that contains both the .ePub and the .mobi files.  We’ll be adding more formats to the selection at the Ebooks Direct store over the next week or so, and in mid-December we’ll be launching the book in the Kindle Store at Amazon and other online facilities.

Enjoy, all!