Black Gate

Editor’s Note: Patrice Sarath is offering a copy of The Crow God’s Girl to a lucky Black Gate reader — just post a comment for a chance to win either an electronic copy or a paperback.

Thanks to John O’Neill and the Black Gate team for letting me share some of my experiences in publishing.

In 2007 I sold my first two novels to Ace Fantasy. I was ecstatic. This was a dream realized. I had doggedly achieved publication after years of writing, submitting, shrugging off the rejections, and celebrating the acceptances.

I cried tears of joy when I held Gordath Wood in my hands. It was awesome. The awesome lasted all that year and the next. I had a very quick turnaround for Red Gold Bridge, but I made that deadline because I was a professional writer.

And then…

That was 2009. It was the height of the recession. No one was buying books, least of all the sophomore effort of a new writer.

And so, after the results were in, Ace turned down the third book in the series, The Crow God’s Girl.

The good news after that, and I won’t pretend it wasn’t a crushing blow, was that publishing had changed. No longer was an orphaned book destined to stay that way. Established writers were selling respectably in e-book form, and I knew there were fans of the series out there who wanted to know what happened next.

So I turned to self publishing.

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Thieftaker, the first volume in my new series, The Thieftaker Chronicles, is due out from Tor on July 3, just in time for the July 4th holiday. Why is that relevant? Well, Thieftaker is what I call historical urban fantasy. It is set in Colonial Boston in the 1760s, just as the unrest that will eventually lead to the American Revolution is starting to disrupt life in the city. My lead character, Ethan Kaille, is a thieftaker, a sort of 18th century private investigator who, for a fee, retrieves stolen items and returns them to their rightful owner. He is also a conjurer and an ex-convict with a dark past — he is, in my opinion, the most interesting and complex character I’ve ever written.

The novel begins on the night of the Stamp Act riots. While a mob is rampaging through the city streets, a young woman, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, is found murdered. Some want to blame the mob for her death, but naturally our hero has other ideas, and soon he’s drawn into a web of intrigue that puts him at odds with representatives of the Crown, with leaders of the revolutionary movement, including Samuel Adams, with a rival thieftaker — the beautiful and deadly Sephira Pryce — and with a mysterious conjurer who is far more powerful than anyone Ethan has encountered before. I won’t say more than that, because I don’t want to spoil any surprises. But basically the book combines fantasy, mystery, and historical fiction in a way that I think turned out pretty well.

This book, my thirteenth (I’ve written a dozen novels, most of them epic fantasy, as David B. Coe; and by the way, pay no attention to the omen of this being my 13th published book — nothing to see here…) has long meant more to me than any of my others, and, to be perfectly honest, I’ve been trying to figure out why. Part of it might be the very fact of the pseudonym. I’m trying something new here — writing historical urban fantasy instead of the epic, alternate world stuff that I’ve done in the past. I’m enjoying myself, and I want to keep writing this series. If the first book does well, I can.

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