Ambergris Novel and Story Collection Sales
I’m happy to report that, through my agent, I have sold my novel Finch to editor Victoria Blake at Underland Press in a very, very sweet deal. Other authors to be published by Blake’s new venture (she’s a former editor at Dark Horse) include Brian Evenson. I have also sold Finding Sonoria & Other Stories to Jacob Weisman at Tachyon Publications. We love Tachyon, and I feel this is a very good match.
Finch will be completed by September and published in spring 2009. Finding Sonoria & Other Stories has yet to be scheduled, but will include some previously unpublished work as well as the best of my published fiction since 2004.
Here’s a brief description of Finch:
A crime noir set in the fantastical failed state of Ambergris. The gray caps, mysterious underground inhabitants, have re-conquered the city and put the human inhabitants in camps, controlling them with strange addictive drugs. Remnants of the Resistance are scattered, martial law in place. Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, his wife dead, must solve an impossible double murder while trying to make contact with the rebels and sussing out the real agenda of his mysterious girl friend, Sintra. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.
The cat is becoming something else.
The lizard watches intently from the windowsill.
Something is about to happen.
And they both want to know: who is Finch, really?
March 12, 2008 at 3:28 pm
[...] VanderMeer has announced that he has sold a new Ambergris novel. Excellent news. And there’s a short fiction collection coming from my good friends at [...]
March 12, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Congrats, Jeff!
March 12, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Congratulations on both sales, and looking forward to seeing both in the flesh at some point. It’s kind of weird that your Ambergris books will all have come from different publishers. I’d imagine that makes it slightly harder to sell each to readers, as the books can’t quite lean on each other as they would if they were perceived more readily as connected, but it’s not as though you’re churning out a series of sequels that need to have uniform spines.
It’s probably good that someone new is taking Finch on. I thought Shriek didn’t get the push it deserved, somehow–it’s neither fish nor fowl, in a way, and seemed to fall through the cracks a little bit. Maybe a publisher that doesn’t scatter so many titles across the landscape each year can devote more attention to this next one.
I’m just spitballing, of course. I may be completely off base. I do hope, though, to someday see a collection of a dozen or so near-identical Ambergris titles in grubby mass-market versions on a bookstore shelf, with wildly inappropriate dragons and rocket ships on the covers, so I can tell some whippersnapper of the year 2045, “Hey, give this VanderMeer guy a chance. I know these books look cheesy, but there’s a reason they keep coming out with all these different editions of the old classics.”
March 12, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Finch sounds awesome. Is it the same book as The Zamilion File or Fragments from a Drowned City? Or does it take place before/in-between those books?
March 12, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Spencer: Good question. It takes place before Zamilon File but incorporates part of ZF. In fact, I’m not yet sure if ZF will be subsumed by Finch or not. Fragments has been so pilfered from for Shriek and Finch that I’m now reimagining it as a kind of dying fall–the conclusion to the series, but probably more of a novella than a novel.
James: The biggest consideration for this book was that, as a full-time freelancer, I needed to sell it in advance of finishing it in order to live off of the advance while working on it. I fully intend to, and will, work with Bantam, etc., again. I have excellent relationships with all of my editors. But it is also true that City of Saints and Shriek are very different from each other, and Finch is different again. A lot of factors went into the decision to go with Underland. I wouldn’t say that Tor fell down on the job, but that Shriek, to reach its full potential, needed to find as much of a mainstream audience as a genre one, given the nature of the novel. (Meanwhile, Shriek continues to sell steadily in trade paper and City of Saints continues to be a monster in tp.) But I will have no such issues with Finch, or with the novels I’m doing after Finch, because Shriek is pretty much the apex of the experimentalism I want to pursue in novel form for now. Finch is the kind of novel you can pitch in one or two sentences to readers and booksellers. Shriek never was, even though I think it’s my best book.
March 12, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Thanks for the reply – I’m looking forward to rereading all of the previous Ambergris fiction before Finch comes out!
March 12, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Congratas!
March 12, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Ooops, typo. Congrats.
March 12, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Either way works for me–thanks!
I’m pretty excited about it. These two sales are the bedrock of my financial freedom for the next year. Which means more short fiction, too. It’s the first time I’ll start on an Ambergris novel every morning for months without having to do other stuff…until the afternoons, when I have to manage the three-ring circus that is generating content for Amazon et al. LOL!
Jeff
March 12, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Ooh, nice one. I’m very excited. Ambergris for me has a place in my heart right next to Viriconium. It just has that ambience of not quite knowing what it’s about that makes me crave more.
It’s also probably something I’d like to game at some point. M John Harrison is adamant on that point but I get the feeling that it might not bother you so much.
March 12, 2008 at 7:00 pm
It really doesn’t bother me any more than doing a movie would bother me. If it’s for commercial use, I want a slice of it, but that’s all. I mean, I understand Harrison’s point, but if it’s in a different medium, I’m fine with it. I don’t feel like it changes the essential nature of the fiction itself. Where I draw the line is in people writing fiction in Ambergris. That seems to me to step over a fundamental line.
JV
March 12, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Congrats! The description sounds awfully keen, sort of a Mushroom Noir.
March 12, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Very cool, as I was beginning to wonder, based on the hints given here and there in your previous posts, as to when Finch would be released.
March 12, 2008 at 10:14 pm
That’s awesome news, Jeff! Congrats on the sales! I just can’t wait for more of the mystery of the graycaps to come to light.
March 12, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Congratulations!
March 12, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Congratulations!
March 13, 2008 at 1:51 am
Congrats, Jeff! That must be an incredible relief. As always, if you need another first reader, count me in.
March 13, 2008 at 3:46 am
Congratulations! Can’t wait to read them.
March 13, 2008 at 5:51 am
Cool. It is good you can have some financial freedom.
Just out of curiousity, do the anthos you do pay off at all, or do you do much better with your own original fiction?
If this is something you don’t like to talk about though, no worries.
March 13, 2008 at 6:49 am
Brendan: It depends–i.e. you can make money on an antho. But I always make tons more on my own novels and such. You do the anthos for love, most of the time. Fake disease guide was an exception to this. But you also get to work with such diverse groups of writers and meet so many interesting people doing anthos that there are all kinds of subsidiary benefits that result indirectly in making money (although that’s the least interesting side effect of it all).
Thanks for the congrats!
JV
March 13, 2008 at 7:58 am
Sure :)
So, that makes me wonder why so many publishers put out anthologies if single-author collections/novels sell better.
Not that I am complaining of course, because the anthologies are great for readers and the authors who are in them.
March 13, 2008 at 8:12 am
Congratulations!
Now when are your Collected Minutes coming out?
March 13, 2008 at 8:27 am
Thanks, Felix. Hopefully…never. Although the fake minutes with which I used to make my bosses heart attacks might be entertaining. Sometimes I’d give them a copy different than what I sent the client…
Brendan: Don’t get me wrong–you do make money off of anthologies, but not as much. The advance is split between you and the authors, so unless you’re making twice as much for the antho (which can happen) than for your fiction, you can’t possibly make as much money. It’s not to do with sales, necessarily. The publisher doesn’t care how you’re disbursing the money if their advance is not significantly different from the one they’d pay for a novel. Single-author collections don’t usually sell too well.
JeffV
March 13, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Congratulations for the sales, and “bon courage” for the awful amount of work on your desk.
(you amaze me. You do).
March 14, 2008 at 2:46 am
What excellent news. I’ve got copies of Shriek and City of Saints and Madmen, and both books swept me away. I am looking forward to more Ambergris. Congratulations on the sales.
March 14, 2008 at 9:46 am
Thanks!
BTW–dealing with a computer virus, so not posting more until I can get to another computer or fix this one.
jeff
March 24, 2008 at 1:24 pm
dearest mr. vandermeer: i just finished reading shriek and i was desperately sad that i could not have read the unexpurgated early history of ambergris! or at the least (duncan’s) cinsorium! really i was heartsick at completion so i have thrilled to hear of finch! shriek really is a masterpiece. thank you!