As reported elsewhere.

Attention: Subscribers to Fledgling and Saltation, Fans of Theo Waitley, Friends of Liad, and All the Ships at Sea

Now it can be told.

Baen Books will be publishing the dead tree edition of Fledgling and, when it’s ready, Saltation. That’s the short form and it is Wonderful News Indeed.

The slightly longer form is that subscribers to Fledgling and/or Saltation will receive their books as promised. Baen will supply a portion of our advance in books, enough to cover the subscriptions, which we’ll sign and mail from the Cat Farm and Confusion Factory – that’s 1,200 volumes for Fledgling, and up to 1,000 Saltations.

The rest of the books will go into Baen’s regular distribution channel and will be available from your favorite bookstore. For those who prefer ebooks, both novels will be available through Baen Webscriptions.

As with any negotiation, there was some give-and-take involved. Part of this negotiation revolved around the form in which the books will be published. There exists the possibility – the language is in the contract – that Baen will decide not to publish a trade paper edition. If they make that decision, then subscribers will receive hardcovers.

Publication dates are not yet in hand; as soon as we have them, we’ll shout them from the rooftops. We did want to give this wonderful news to everyone who supported us and our work as soon as we were certain ourselves.

We’re very grateful to Toni Weisskopf at Baen, and to Jenn Jackson, our agent, who both did master class piloting in order to bring this one safely to port.

Short note:

we're home from Boskone and have been.

Boskone report: things went wrong, things went right. We saw quite a few of the folks we'd anticipated seeing, met some new readers, and had a blast with our two nights of partying on Friday and Saturday. Sorry you couldn't all be there. Alas, Pandemonium Books was unable to represent us at the con, afterall, and so we depended on a mash-up of Friends of Liad booksellers to get Liaden Universe Companion Number 1 (mass market size) and some other stuff (including some otherwise out of print chapbooks) out for readers.

Had a very special couple hours last Sunday, starting out with the 11 AM "panel" consisting of us -- Steve, Sharon, and the Friends of Liad, talking about 20 years of the Liaden Universe. I didn't get a count on the room, but we were in a good size room which was respectably filled for that early on a Sunday -- so there were maybe 50 people overall, what with arrivals and departures. Not only that --- but we gave out FoL business cards, and lots of URLs for folks who didn't know about some of our projects, so that was good. It was good to get some of the laughs we did, because they'd could only have come from advertent readers. Some of the readers had never seen us at a con before, including a number of Baen Barflies out for the first con or forst east coast con. Welcome ot the FoL fold, gang!

Immediately after that good thing, at noon I dashed downstairs where I got to be moderator for a panel consisting of GoH David Weber, GoH Bruce Coville, Patrick Neilsen-Hayden of Tor, and myself, on the topic of "influences." Ought to tell you more about this, and maybe will continue when time permits (which it does not at the moment). Mentioned influences: R. Zelazny, E. Cameron, R. Heinlein, Ted White, L. Alexander, Robert E. Howard, many others. The panel ran out of time before we got to audience question -- we could have gone for another hour!

Much of the week has been spent trying to tie up loose ends, not all that successfully. I have caught up some of the Dragon Tide orders, and some of the work on new SRM catalog pages; I think what I haven't done is find my new in-town office, even though I inspected some.

This week I had to put in an order for a reprint of Dragon Tide. Cross fingers, due in next week, along with a bunch of other chapbooks getting smaller reprints.

More soon. After I clean the deck. It snowed overnight.

So yes, some stuff is going on. Some of this has been in the works for months... we try not to get too far ahead of ourselves in announcing things since experience shows that things sometimes change with little warning... things are like that!

but....

One thing:

you can see our webscription page now... if you've a mind to. ... I'll note that the more people who click on the link, the higher up it goes in the search engine count. Since there's about 81000 things to choose from under Liaden, a click above will make it easier for folks to find the new things and give the old ones a rest...

Another thing:

yes, we've been asked (and have agreed) to do a Liaden story -- a novella -- for Jim Baen's Universe. No, it won't come out in March.

Boskone: still no program schedule for that, sorry. We're trying to figure out where we'll eat, being we have word from some fans that there's not much eating within walking distance. Hints, anyone?

Meanwhile, the low temp i saw myself was -11 F... just at sun up. Right now my handy dandy electronic outside thermometer tells me we have a sizzling +2 now that the sun is beating down on the back deck. Twenty minutes ago, when the shade was still in force, it was -2 F.


Version 2.4 ... sigh...

Late in the day the temperature got up to 7.8 degrees but has fallen back to 3 degrees F...and I've updated a couple our web pages to link to the Baen webscription page cited above. We're looking for a low of about 10 below zero and then a milder day tomorrow, followed by snow late tomorrow night and into Friday.

This is a good news post, a slight rewrite of a note posted to the Friends of Liad mailing list last evening,
just before our late, celebratory dinner. It is good to have a good news post, eh?

So yes, here at the Cat farm and Confusion Factory we're greatly pleased to tell you that, through the perseverance of our agent and the goodwill of folks who recently suffered a great loss, the
first ten Liaden Universe(r) novels will be appearing as Baen ebooks, with
the first volume (Korval's Legacy) currently expected to go on sale within 60 days or so.

The details of timing and packaging are still being worked out by indomitable Toni Weisskopf and Arnold Bailey, but we've already sent the text of the books on and expect that progress will be reasonably swift.

We want to thank all of you who have given us suggestions, both for Baen and for other ebook publishers; as well as those who championed an SRM Publisher expansion into the ebook field. We looked very carefully looked at many options.... and we're sure we will be quite happy to have our Liaden novels available electronically once again, and feel that Baen offers the best combination of access, focus, and compatibility for our needs and the needs of our many ebook-reading fans.

We also want to acknowledge our special thanks to Toni Weisskopf for permitting us to announce this to the Friends of Liad mailing list before the news was available elsewhere.

Oh yes, one more thing -- please feel free to spread the word to every Middlesex village and farm... and to all those SF fans you know, too.

Steve and Sharon

version 1.2