Through the Publishing Wormhole, to You!

One 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