Just a quick note about this.
We ship all signed hardcovers and paperbacks by registered mail / post to prevent losses in transatlantic shipping. (There were a whole lot of losses before we started doing this. Now it’s very, very rare to lose a book in transit, as registered mail pretty much keeps a given shipment under lock and key until it leaves your local post office.)
As of July 21st, the Irish postal system, An Post, has increased its rates across the board, and registered mail costs have therefore gone up slightly as well. As a result, all our physical books’ prices are going to have go up slightly too… as (to simplify things) we normally set an all-inclusive worldwide shipping cost for each book, and include it in the book’s price. Our apologies for the increase.
Meanwhile, the physical-book side of the store will be expanding considerably in the next week. There’s only so much storage space in our little house, and Peter and I have jointly decided that we may as well do something proactive about all our authors’ copies. Neither of us can see why we need more than a couple copies of each edition. But each of us has, for the most part, ten copies of every book we’ve written, in every edition, sometimes more… and with sixty-five-plus novels between the two of us, honestly, who needs all those? There are hundreds of them around the house, taking up room that could be occupied by…well, by more books. Ones we didn’t write.
So the tiny “boot room” at the back of the house, normally full of exercise equipment, laundry paraphernalia and gardening junk, is being reorganized to house all the books we don’t need as we prepare to sell them off. These are almost all in mint or near-mint condition and will come to you signed and personalized. Some of these books are quite, quite rare and impossible to find through the normal used book channels, in this or (in some cases) any condition. So if there’s something in the way of a physical book from one or the other of us you’ve been looking for, this would be the time to bookmark this collection page — which lists all the hardcovers and paperbacks on offer — and visit or revisit it occasionally over the next week or two.
You can also add this URL to your favorite feed reader, if you like. It’s the Atom feed from the hc/pb collection page:
http://ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com/collections/signed-hardcover-and-paperback-books.atom
Please note that this feed will show you books that are out of stock but might come back in again. Not until we’ve dug through all the various storage boxes and extracted all the books from them will we be absolutely sure what we’ve got, and this will take a while. In some cases we know already that all the copies of a particular book are gone gone gone, and when we know that, we’ll remove the book’s page completely from the store. Until that happens, though, its listing will be allowed to remain in the store but will show “SOLD OUT” in the order button. (I’m going to add another “only show books in stock” feed if I can get the store’s logic to do that.)
One word of warning. Normally we give notice by a posting on Twitter or at my Tumblr when an unusually rare book becomes available. When this happens (especially if it’s a Star Trek book, it seems) whatever inventory we have is normally gone within hours if not minutes. So if you see something you like, seriously… don’t wait around. Move fast. There are some truly committed collectors out there.
And just to complete this train of thought: I was going through a box that seriously shouldn’t have had any books in it and found, tucked away in a corner, two copies of the 1983 SF Book Club first hardcover edition of The Wounded Sky. (Cover by Boris Vallejo, who was apparently unclear at the time that this was a glass spider we were working with.) Not incredibly rare, but very hard to find in good condition. I think there are more, but here are these two copies for those who might want them. Price, as always, includes postage, packing&handling, and signing & personalization.