Black Gate

Catherynne M. Valente has announced her third Prester John novel, following The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World, will not be published by Night Shade Books. In a statement on her blog last week she said:

I continue to think that Night Shade puts out wonderful books and I hope for their success. I did not take this step lightly. But their recent troubles have made our business relationship difficult, and I could not in good conscience proceed with a third book given the circumstances. Obviously I’m being a bit vague – there’s no point in airing laundry in public… What this means is that at the moment, The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World are for the most part unavailable. Some copies will float around for awhile yet, but most of the e-versions are gone. I hope to fix this in the next week – I have relicensed the covers from the excellent Rebecca Guay and Night Shade has been very kind and accommodating with regards to physical copies and digital files…

As for the third and final book in the series, The Spindle of Necessity, I am committed to finding a way to make sure you get to see it. I owe you a finish. Oddly enough, Prester John is my longest series to date, and I want to bring it all to a close the way I planned to from the beginning… Given the market realities, the most likely avenue for this is a Kickstarter campaign to fund a self-published version.

At press time, both The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World are available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, in both print and Kindle versions. But if you’re interested in getting copies, you want want to move quickly.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, US publishers of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Animal Farm, 1984, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and numerous books by Harlan Ellison, Kage Baker, Philip K. Dick, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury, James Morrow, Margaret Atwood, Diane Duane, Jane Yolen and literally hundreds of others, filed for bankruptcy protection today.

Houghton Mifflin, an educational and trade publisher in the United States, acquired Harcourt Publishing in 2007 to become Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The company has 4,000 employees around the world.

It officially filed for pre-packaged bankruptcy this morning, citing debts and liabilities of over $1 billion. The filing is part of a restructuring that it hopes will cut debt by $3.1 billion. The company issued a statement today, saying it:

will maintain normal day-to-day business operations throughout the restructuring process, and we expect no disruptions to our relationships with our customers, agents, authors, employees, business partners and suppliers. Additionally, our plan provides for our suppliers and vendors to be paid in full during and after this process and for our employees to continue receiving their usual pay and benefits.

The company said it still expects to complete the restructuring by the end of June. For additional details, see this article at Publisher’s Weekly.