…Well, not how it started<\/i>. It started with three things:<\/p>\n Six or seven months after that confluence of events, there was a novel with that joke-line as its title. A month or so after that, the novel was bought. So You Want To Be A Wizard<\/a><\/i> came out as a Fall 1983 book, as you can see from the Locus<\/a><\/i> Magazine<\/a> ad above (from back when Locus <\/i>was only a paper zine). The first reviews were encouraging.<\/p>\n And by the middle of 1984, the publishers were asking, “So, what’s next?” A question I’m still busy answering.<\/p>\n There’s been a lot of water under the wizardly bridge since. In SYWTBAW<\/i>‘s case, this involved a couple\/few publishers, a surprising number of covers, <\/a>a fair number of awards here and there; and lots more books. (I always knew there’d be more, but how many <\/i>more continues to surprise me. Which is a bit funny, considering how much stuff that universe has going on in it.)<\/p>\n So here we are at forty, and looking ahead to The Big Five-Oh with some interest. More books? Absolutely. Young Wizards #11 is in progress at the moment, and YW #12 is in the late concept stages. More covers for So You Want To Be A Wizard?<\/i> Seems inevitable. A TV series, perhaps? (shrug) Stranger things have happened: we’ll keep our fingers (or other manipulatory instrumentalities) crossed. The New Millennium Editions<\/a> in translation? and in international paperback? Working on that right now. The sky’s the limit.*<\/p>\n And meanwhile, to celebrate, just for today<\/i> we’ll have a sale. (Except in the UK. To our British friends, the usual sad apology: the expensive bureaucracy of Brexit has made it impossible for us to sell directly to you any more. Details here,<\/a> with our apologies.)<\/p>\n As has been mentioned before, changes are afoot at Ebooks Direct, <\/a>so this kind of sale won’t be happening again for the foreseeable future. (In fact I thought we were all done with them already. But the number 40 suggested one last opportunity that wouldn’t be recurring, so I thought, “Aah, what the heck? Let’s.”<\/i>)<\/p>\n New things first! <\/b>Today, to mark this occasion, we’re introducing the “All The Wizardry” Bundle. <\/a>This is Ebook Direct’s entire inventory of Young Wizards works; the contents of the bundle are listed on its product page.<\/a> The $29.99 price listed there is for today only,<\/b><\/i> to celebrate SYWTBAW’s<\/i> birthday, and will go up as of 23:59 Hawai’ian time tonight. As always, should you ever lose your ebooks or need to change reading platforms, we’ll change your formats as necessary, or replace the books, for free.<\/p>\n Just click here, or on the image below, for the “All The Wizardry” Bundle<\/a>. (Please ignore the category listings under the “Pay Using…” icons on the product page: they plainly think they’re in a different universe. Kind of an occupational hazard around here…)<\/p>\n The other, older kind of sale folks will have seen here is on the “I Want Everything You’ve Got” Bundle, <\/a>which is the whole Ebooks Direct store\u2014obviously including all the Young Wizards books as well: more than 2.5 million words in 36 DRM-free ebooks. Just for today, in honor of the birthday book, we’re dropping the whole-store price to USD $40.00<\/b><\/a>. <\/b>This, too, will go away just before midnight Hawai’ian time tonight… and it will never <\/i>be lower. So if you want everything we’ve got at that price, don’t wait around.<\/p>\n Make sure you use <\/a><\/b>this link <\/a><\/b><\/i>or the one associated with the image to get the baked-in discount at checkout.<\/a><\/b> <\/b>(If it fails to display correctly, use the discount code “40FOR40” in the checkout’s “discount code or gift code” field.)<\/p>\n Meanwhile? Onward into the next decade. The new A Day at the Crossings<\/i> novel unfortunately won’t make it out before the end of 2023; other work in-house currently has taken priority. But as for early 2024… stay tuned.<\/p>\n And for those of you who’re Young Wizards readers, and have kept this book, and its sequels, alive for pushing half a century?<\/p>\n Thank you, <\/b><\/i>again and always! <\/b><\/p>\n *Though actually, it’s not, is it? As the proverb has it, “Wizardry doesn’t stop at atmosphere’s edge…”<\/p>\n\n
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