Best Served Cold

It has been a while since I have posted about my campaign for more unabridged audiobooks. I have not abandoned my quest, but I have not made much progress either. I did hear back this week from one of my favorite new fantasy authors, Joe Abercrombie, about the bogged down negotiations for the audio rights to his works.

About a year or so ago, I picked up The Blade Itself, Abercrombie’s first book and the first of his First Law trilogy. I am not sure why I picked it up. The title, the cover, the back cover spiel, the first few pages? Something grabbed me about it and overcame my reluctance to struggle with my reading glasses. As soon I had returned home, I was hooked.

Since Abercrombie is English, his books come out there first, followed by as much as a year later here. By the time I finished the first book of this trilogy, I was jonesing for the next. I hooked a British friend on the series just to get him to import the next two as they came out on that side of the pond. Now with the coming of his new novel, Best Served Cold, it seems that I will have to call my dealer friend again.

I have to call him in because there are still not plans to release his books on audio. Apparently, negotiations are still going on over his first trilogy. Do they want to lose customers? Though I would strongly prefer to listen, my stronger preference is not to wait. From Joe Abercrombie:

I believe they’re still fiddling with rights issues relating to the First Law audiobooks, and I wouldn’t have thought anyone will be doing a Best Served Cold until they’ve seen how the others go down. So no news at the moment, I’m afraid. I’ll certainly put it up on the blog as and when there’s any movement, though.

Best, Joe Abercrombie

I have to give Abercrombie a ton of credit. He has responded personally, quickly and candidly both times I have written him about audiobooks. Very few authors that I have attempted to contact have bothered to reply. Unfortunately, as Abercrombie emphasized in a previous email, authors, especially new ones, have little say in the decision to produce audio editions of their works. That leaves the publishing industry in the driver’s seat, guessing where the market might be.

I have pestered his US distributor without response. I even submitted a request to Audible’s customer service. Somehow I see this as a fruitless venture.

Unfortunately, Abercrombie will have to hear from me again. I forgot to ask him his stand on the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature. Well, it will have to wait. Abercrombie’s works are not yet for sale in the Kindle store.

Tags: abercrombie, audible, audio, audiobooks, campaign, unabridged

This entry was posted on April 2, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under large print. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.