Mark Lawrence: December 2018

Saturday, 22 December 2018

A sense of scale!

I was looking at the figures on the sales figures list for bestselling SFF authors over on the Wertzone, and decided to make an infographic scaled by Agatha Christie's sales figures for her detective fiction.

It takes the six bestselling SFF authors of all time to match Christie's record, and it should be noted that this really includes a huge chunk of real world horror/thriller writing from Messrs King, Koontz, and Crichton. George RR Martin sits in 10th place on that list with less than half of Crichton's sales.

So, despite the exciting surge in mainstream acceptance of SFF seen in the last decade or two, fantasy, particularly of the sword swinging variety, is still a small fish in the book ocean!

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Friday, 21 December 2018

One Word Kill ... the early copies are here!

Pre-order for the win!

UK
US

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Sunday, 16 December 2018

A Year in Numbers ... Eight!

It has been a very good 2018 all told! Following on from similar posts at the same time in 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 I record a year of ups and less ups. I take a minute to do the sums and raid the scrapbook.

High points include the release of Grey Sister. Grey Sister turned out to be my eighth novel in a row to make the Goodreads Choice Award semi-final and became my first since the Broken Empire books to make the final ten! Another high point was when Red Sister made the finals of the David Gemmell Legend Award!

And on the 19th of December my Book of the Ancestor short story, Bound, goes on sale. Snag a copy on Amazon!

2018 has seen last of the Broken Empire special edition from Grimoak selling out, with all of the initial 1000 gone, and the announcement of the special edition omnibus for The Red Queen's War. You can pre-order a copy here.

April next year sees the arrival of the third and final Book of the Ancestor, Holy Sister, and the first of my sci-fi series, One Word Kill. Pre-ordering both would be a mark of genius!

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse card game kickstarter finally delivered! Hoorah for Gallant Knight Games! See the game here and maybe get a deck for Christmas!

I also did my first writing for a computer game, crafting lore and legend and characters for the recently released multiplayer game, Ashen!

Lies, damn lies, and statistics to follow:

I now have almost 250,000 Goodreads ratings and over 600,000 'books added'! The numbers boggle my mind.

Prince of Thorns passed 75,000 ratings and my Goodreads follower count has exploded from 11,475 to 39,489 in 2018!

& some Amazon stats

The blog got its 2.5 millionth hit in 2018, though I have been neglecting it somewhat. Must try harder!

Blog traffic since inception.

I'm still on Instagram. Pintrest, and Tumblr!

And finally, Twitter, where I've broken the 20,000 follower barrier!

Which is really very small beer in the world of tweeting. My biggest follower (Joseph Morgan has 2.5 million followers!)

Many thanks to all my readers for keeping me going! I hope you all have happy holidays!

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Saturday, 15 December 2018

My reading in 2018

I've broken my record for recent times and read a staggering 16 books this year. Go me!

And yes, some bloggers read 250+ books a year. I have no idea how they do it or how they absorb so many stories so quickly. I still have elements of these 16 books rolling around my thoughts, if it were 250 I think my head would explode!

See my 2017 reading here.

The Best Book I read in 2018 (Due out 2019)