Prince of Thorns celebrates its fourteenth year in print!

Prince of Thorns has been on the shelves for 14 years!

The book is now the same age as Jorg himself is in the majority of the book 😮

Worldwide Prince of Thorns has sold over 1,000,000 copies... and the UK paperback has reached at least 32 printings.

I'll take the chance to say thanks - thank you to my readers (and my publishers) for letting me spend the past 14 years writing stories, and more than that - living in them. It's been an unexpected privilege.

In other news, I now have a Patreon. Check it out!

I've given out literally hundreds of free signed books on it via the monthly giveaway.

Check out the 13th, 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st birthday round-ups. 

I now have 19 books on the shelves!

  

The most recent addition was The Book That Held Her Heart, in April.

Plus we have the short stories, Overdue & Returns & Tabula Rasa.

Collected in Missing Pages in a single volume, available in ebook, paperback, and glorious hardcover!

It's worth noting that I also have short story collections for The Book of the Ancestor (Tales of Abeth) and The Red Queen's War (The Red Queen's Ward).

Being a numbers guy as well as a words guy I like to keep track of things and record them for when I'm doddery and old, looking back at my 'glory' days.

In the past year my books have added 53,133 ratings on Goodreads!

The site has recovered somewhat, so I can show you the first page of my author dashboad as I've traditionally done.

Prince of Thorns -- 3.83 -- 121,408

King of Thorns -- 4.18 -- 69,621

Emperor of Thorns -- 4.22 -- 56,712

Prince of Fools -- 4.05 -- 34,802

The Liar's Key -- 4.24 -- 21,473

The Wheel of Osheim -- 4.31 -- 17,825

Red Sister -- 4.16 -- 61,756

Grey Sister - 4.35 -- 37,455

Holy Sister -- 4.31 -- 30,743

Road Brothers (both versions) -- 4.27 -- 3,327

One Word Kill -- 3.75 -- 20,845

Limited Wish -- 4.04 -- 7,848

Dispel Illusion -- 4.23 -- 6,207

The Girl And The Stars -- 3.81 -- 12,377

The Girl And The Mountain -- 4.14 -- 6,647

The Girl And The Moon -- 4.23 -- 5,213

The Book That Wouldn't Burn -- 3.98 -- 36,177

The Book That Broke The World -- 4.02 -- 12,256

The Book That Held Her Heart -- 3.83 -- 4,581

This blog continues to chug along. Blogs seem to be a dying means of communication, with most people prefering the immedacy of social media. The blog cruised past 5 million visits (since startup) this year..

   

 There seems to have been an uptick in traffic this year, but closer study reveals 1000s of visits to pages where there is no reason for such (competitions that were over years ago etc), so I suspect that bots are at play.

Twitter seems too big to fail, so my quest to conquer it crawls on! 

And I have put more time into Bluesky, which seems much nicer. Still, the time invested in Twitter keeps me there, but it will be a cold day in hell before I pay for it.

My follower numbers have increased from 37,300 to 37,500 with a considerable dip between those two peaks as folks exited for Bluesky, where my followers went from about 400 to 9,700.

It's also worth noting that this year has seen the release of the individual 10th anniversary special edition of Prince of Fools from Grim Oak Press (US). 

You can now pre-order the special limited 10th anniversary edition of The Liar's Key from Grim Oak Press - leather bound goodness with interior art from the original cover artist Jason Chan.

Where things stand with my special editions:

Grim Oak Press

The Broken Empire omnibus - SOLD OUT

The Red Queen's War omnibus - SOLD OUT

10th anniversary Prince of Thorns - SOLD OUT

10th anniversary King of Thorns 

10th anniversary Emperor of Thorns 

10th anniversary Prince of Fools

10th anniversary The Liar's Key (pre-order)

Book of the Ancestor omnibus (pre-order)

Broken Binding

10th anniversary Prince of Thorns - SOLD OUT

10th anniversary King of Thorns - SOLD OUT

10th anniversary Emperor of Thorns - SOLD OUT

If you want to see how they appreciate, try buying a copy of the sold out editions on ebay.

Well, that's my annual stock-take. Over & out, until next year.

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Patreon

These were the signed books I gave away to folk on my Patreon last year:

We also have an active discord.

For higher tier Patrons I do consults and chapter critiques.

Also social media follows, early signed copies of upcoming books, and tuckerisation into new novels.

In addition, I have a collection of unpublished work including 7 books and numerous short stories that tier 3+ patrons can access.

So ... check it out!

Patreon is a great way to support authors and get involved in their work at a deeper level.

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The Bookshop Coincidence!

Back in late 2023 I started writing something, and in early 2024 that something was a complete book, called The Bookshop Book. 

In this post in late 2024 I was offering folk on my Patreon access to it.

The book centres on a bookshop called ... Books.

The name is explained not as a lack of imagination on the owner's part but by the fact that the proprietor's surname is Books, and Books's Books felt rather too much for him.

All good so far.

Today a Facebook advert alerted me to a new TV series called Bookish about to drop 2 days from now. Here's a still from the trailer:

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that the bookshop (around which this series is set) is called Book's.

Moreover, it turns out that it bears this name because the proprietor (the star of the show) is a Mr Book...

So - I now expect that when The Bookshop Book hits the shelves in 2026, if Bookish turns out to be a popular show, I will be accused of copying from it.

And the point of this blogpost is simply to flag the coincidence at work here. 

Ironically, The Bookshop Book is tangentially related to The Library Trilogy, and in both works I talk about how the Library uses the currents of coincidence to bring interested parties together and manipulate the world. Coincidence?

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