Through the Publishing Wormhole, to You!

by wjw on November 30, 2015

Praxis04-650One of the great injustices in the world is that my Praxis books have not been available as ebooks outside of North America.

As a crusader for justice, I have set out to right this wrong!

Not that it was easy.  I had first to retrieve the rights from my U.K. publisher, which never exercised them. (And in fact might have been unable to.  Ebooks did not exist in the U.K. when that contract was signed, and instead there was some ambiguous language in the contract allowing the publisher to utilize forms of technology that might, at some point, exist in the future, without specifying what they were.  In any case, my U.K. publisher exercised no forms of technology outside of the printing press.)

Once I got the rights back, I had to find a text file free of DRM, which took quite a while.  And then edit it.  And then put a cover on it.  And then upload it to sites that were not exactly friendly to writers not wanting to sell in the U.S.

The first book in the series,  conveniently called The Praxis, is finally available to those of you living outside the U.S. and Canada.  You may find it at Amazon.co.uk, iBooks, Kobo, and Google.  (Or so I hope.  See below.)

(If you’re an Amazon customer living outside the U.K., you should be able to find the book on sites dedicated to Australia, New Zealand, India, or wherever it is you live.  It’s a simple search away, folks!)

By the way, I’m not entirely sure about the iBooks and Kobo links.  Because I live in North America, I’m not allowed to view the page for my own book on those sites!  BECAUSE THEY ARE STUPID!  I get that I can’t buy the book from here, but I don’t see why I can’t at least look at it to make sure that the site works, that the cover copy is correct, and that the right cover art is showing up on the page.

(So anyway, could someone from abroad please check those links and make sure they work?  And send me the correct ones, if they don’t?  Thank you.)

The book will not be found on Barnes & Noble, because they will allow me to sell in the U.S. and not in the U.K., but not the other way around.  BECAUSE THEY ARE STUPID.  And it also won’t be found on Smashwords and Baen, because they won’t separate sales by country, they just sell to everybody.

And of course if you do live in North America, the books have been available here for ages, so you should just go forth and buy the books if you haven’t already.

While I’m sorry those of you living abroad have had to wait, I’ve at least tried to make it worth while.  The new volume is revised and (very slightly) expanded.  I corrected a lot of typos from the original dodgy scan, burnished the prose to a brighter glow, and fixed some technical errors I made in the original draft, either because I didn’t have the time to do the research, or because my research led me to some less-than-up-to-date science.

The next two volumes in the series, The Sundering and Conventions of War, will be arriving in the next period of weeks.

Just to whet your appetite, I offer a sample of rave reviews collected when The Praxis was first published:

“Walter Jon Williams has succeeded in creating the perfect contemporary space opera, revved up and ready to take the SF genre by force with all the artistry and panache one could ask for.”

                                                                        —Enigma

“This is a hugely fun ride. It has empires crashing, civil wars, aliens, humans, scheming clans, plucky young heroes and villains fighting battles in huge starships— what more can you ask for?”

                                                                        —Alien Online

“Walter Jon Williams has been compared to writers as diverse as Patrick O’Brian and Jane Austen; both comparisons, bizarrely, make sense. This is classic space opera, elegantly written and beautifully plotted.”

                                                                        —Guardian

Brian November 30, 2015 at 6:57 pm

You could use a VPN service to view these websutes as if you were in some country other than the U.S.

James November 30, 2015 at 10:18 pm

iTunes in Australia has it. Kobo seems to have it, but not sure if that was the Australian store…

Clyde December 1, 2015 at 1:58 am

From Japan the iBooks, Google, and Kobo links work. The prices are all over the show (¥750, ¥970, and ¥719 respectively).

wjw December 1, 2015 at 2:07 am

Thanks! The price I input was the same in all cases. How the various forums translate that into local currency is, unfortunately, entirely up to them.

Gary Gibson December 1, 2015 at 4:18 am

Got it as £3.98 on Amazon UK, £4.49 on Ibooks UK, £4.03 on Kobo UK. That’s while viewing my UK-based website accounts for each of those from Taiwan, should that make a difference.

Ingvar December 1, 2015 at 4:43 am

I can confirm that you have at least one sale of Dread Emire’s fall through the UK Google Play store. The Kobo and Amazon stores show me a page with the expected book on it, whereas Apple’s iBooks store kindly invites me to download iTunes (which may or may not work on my Linux laptop, but I am not interested in having it installed there).

David W. Goldman December 1, 2015 at 5:53 am

Ah-ha! So is there now a new way to dock with a tumbling spaceship???

Finn Brophy December 1, 2015 at 6:25 am

Well the Amazon.co.uk version works, and is now purchased! Costs about €5.60 (depending on the €uro Value)

Malgorzata Wilk December 1, 2015 at 6:38 am

The iBook link doesn’t work for me. Google Play store from Austria is 8,71 Euro, Kobo 5,58 and Amazon.de 5,65. We all have to work with stupid politics of publishing houses. I have registered my kindle at the German website. Which means I’m not allowed to buy any ebooks from amazon.com and probably any other amazon sites than the German one.
Sitting in bed with a cold now wondering what to read. Now I have an idea. At the beginning of this century I was writing book reviews for a Polish internet SF magazine and had the pleasure to review a couple of your books, Walter. I enjoyed them tremendously. Thank you.

wjw December 1, 2015 at 5:48 pm

David: there was nothing wrong with the old way!

I don’t know what to do with iBooks. I’m sure what they do makes sense when they’re selling music files.

Malgorzata, I remember you well!

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