Hello and welcome to the latest instalment of Black Library Weekly, my regular look at what’s been happening in the world of Black Library. This week has been remarkably similar to last week, with another quiet start leading up to a weekend full of interesting new releases. Let’s take a look at what happened, starting from the beginning as usual…
Monday
I spoke last week about my surprise at the absence of a Digital Monday short story, and also my amazement that Black Library manage to publish SO MANY books, audios and short stories each year. I was perhaps even more surprised to see another Monday go by without a new short story, however – so not only is this the first gap I’ve seen in the release schedule for at least a couple of years, but it’s also two weeks long.
The more I think about it, the more I think it boils down to expectation management. Over the years we’ve been conditioned to expect a short story every Monday, in the same way as we expect one or more books or audios every weekend. BL don’t publish a public-facing strategy or anything which commits to this sort of release schedule, but over time it’s just come to be expected. That’s cool, but it does stand out when there’s a gap, and no communication as to what’s happening. If I’m being super picky it would have been nice to see something from BL, either on their Facebook page or on the Community site, just to reassure us and say something like ‘don’t worry, we’ll be back as usual next week’. That is, assuming Digital Monday is going to continue to be a thing. Hopefully we’ll find out either way soon…
Midweek
There have been a few bits and pieces of BL-related news popping up online this week, across a few different channels – all author interview-related. Nothing earth-shatteringly important or mega exciting, but worth mentioning nonetheless. I’ll start off with the usual Wednesday post on the Warhammer Community website, which this week was a short interview with Nick Horth about his new novel Callis & Toll: The Silver Shard. It’s always nice to get a little more insight from the authors regarding their work, and while there’s not too much in the way of revelations here it’s still interesting to hear from Nick. It’s a great book, too, so do check it out if you fancy some Age of Sigmar fun.
Next up, on Thursday there was the opportunity to watch an interview with John French over on the Warhammer TV channel on Twitch. If, like me, you weren’t free at the time to be able to watch that as it was broadcast, you can always subscribe to Warhammer TV and check it out at your leisure. I can’t tell you anything about the content as I haven’t watched it, but knowing John there will be lots and lots of good stuff in there – I assume it will cover his Horusian Wars series, and maybe even some Horus Heresy stuff too.
Over on the Black Library Facebook page on Friday it was announced that Chris Wraight will be the next BL author answering fan-submitted questions, following on from Josh Reynolds and John French (whose answers haven’t yet shown up, I don’t think). You’ve got until the 2nd August to head over there and post your questions in the comments, and then we can all look forward to Chris’ answers in the not too distant future.
Finally, completing a quartet of author interview-related happenings, Graham McNeill confirmed earlier in the week that he’s going to be doing a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) on the 27th July at 8pm. This should be good, as Graham’s got a whole load of experience with GW and BL, and knowledge of the lore – so head over to this post for more information, and get either get your questions ready in advance or check back a little later to read all of the answers!
Weekend
Once again there were lots of releases up for pre-order at the weekend, providing plenty to talk about. First up is The Horusian Wars: Incarnation by John French, which is available in hardback (£18), ebook (£9.99) and MP3 audio (£29.99) formats as usual. In case you’re not familiar with this, it’s the second in John’s Horusian Wars series, after the excellent Resurrection, following Inquisitor Covenant and his warband as they hunt down radical inquisitors and battle all sorts of creepy cultists. No special edition this time, which is a shame – not least because the Resurrection SE was gorgeous – but that’s a longer conversation for another time. I picked up a copy of Incarnation at BL Live last month, and can confirm that it’s really, really good – check back soon for a review, but until then you can have a read of my latest Rapid Fire interview with John right here.
Next up we’ve got a new Flesh Tearers audio drama, Hunger by Andy Smillie – available in CD (£12) and MP3 (£9.99) formats. Andy has spent quite some time slowly building up an impressive body of Flesh Tearers work, not least the recent-ish and very excellent Assassination of Gabriel Seth, and while that (brilliantly titled) audio was really, really good it was also quite short, and it’s been some time since the last full-length Flesh Tearers audio drama (2013’s Blood in the Machine, I think). Hunger nicely fills that void, being a decent hour-and-a-bit long and voiced by the usual excellent cast, including Andrew Wincott – from The Archers (!) – as Gabriel Seth. Keep an eye out for a review pretty soon.
The last few releases are quite exciting, being the latest Print on Demand titles from BL – this time it’s Gav Thorpe’s classic Last Chancers series, made up of 13th Legion, Kill Team and Annihilation Squad. It looks like they’re going to be the usual mass market paperbacks (i.e. the smaller size that generally only the Heresy titles are released in these days), with each one priced at a decent £7.99. According to the BL website they will be available to order up until the 18th August, so that gives you a little under a month to decide whether you want to get them. Although, if you don’t already have them – and if you’re a 40k fan – then you DO want to get them. Trust me.
Not convinced? Have a read of my Forgotten Texts review of the first ever Last Chancers short story, simply entitled Last Chance, which was first released WAY back in 1998. If you need yet more proof of why you really, really do want to read these books, check out the first part of my 20 Years of Black Library interview with Gav for some cool insight into the genesis of this series.
Thoughts on the week
I know I talked earlier on about Digital Monday releases, and wondered whether we would see them return at all…well, I may have omitted a small detail on that front. On Saturday morning, as I was checking to see what the weekend’s releases were, I spotted a couple of interesting things on the BL website, the first of which was a link to a new short story. That happens quite often actually, when the Monday’s release is temporarily displayed on a Saturday morning, almost always – like this week – with a circular link which just returns you to whatever page you were originally on. It’s quite handy, though, as even though you can’t buy the short story it at least suggests that there will be one. In this case I’m going to avoid mentioning the title or author, to keep a little suspense for Monday (and now I really hope this is released, and we’re not just being teased) but I will say that it’s a Kill Team story. Should tie in nicely with the big new game release, eh?
That wasn’t the only unexpected release to pop up either – I was surprised to find a working link to a brand new Age of Sigmar (short) audio drama entitled Guns of the Black Eagle, by CL Werner. As I suspected, the link was only temporarily live, and was soon removed from the BL site. I’m not sure whether it’s due for a Monday release, part of an audio week, or what – but it looks cool, and I’m not so mean as to withhold information about TWO stories from you, am I?
Other than those interesting glimpses of what’s to come, I’m pretty happy with the week’s releases – despite the absence of a new short story on Monday. I don’t think there’s a whole lot else to say on that front, except to return once again to the point I made at the beginning, and in last week’s post, about how impressive it is that BL continue to release so many products. It’s been a fair while since anything was released that I personally didn’t enjoy, so to churn out this many high-quality products…I don’t know how they do it. I’d be really interested to know if anyone has any thoughts on whether they would prefer fewer releases, in order to be able to keep on top of them, or if everyone’s happy with as many releases as possible in order to pick and choose what they want to read/listen to. If you’ve got thoughts or comments on that front, please do let me know!
Here’s the usual roundup of what else I’ve been posting this week:
- Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris by Chris Wraight.
- QUICK REVIEW: Altar of Cyrene by Lucien Soulban.
- QUICK REVIEW: Elucidium by Simon Spurrier.
- RAPID FIRE: John French Talks The Horusian Wars: Incarnation.
Coming up…
It doesn’t look like there’s a full new release scheduled for next week, with the only title that’s showing up on the BL website being War for Armageddon: The Omnibus – which to be fair does look pretty cool. It will be interesting to see if that’s the only release, or if anything else pops up out of the blue as well…
As always, if you’ve got any thoughts or comments on the week’s news and releases please do get in touch via the comments section below or on Facebook or Twitter.