Black Library Weekly – W/C 17/09/18

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. It’s been a slightly unusual week with just a single new release for the whole week, although an impressive competition added some weight to proceedings later on! Let’s break it down and have a look at what happened…

Monday
For just the third time in the last two years (albeit also the third time in three months) there was no Digital Monday short story this week. If you saw last week’s Community article about new ‘commuter audios’ when it first went live you might have been expecting Judge of the Wastes by David Annandale, but the release dates were changed a little while after that post went up – that particular short audio is due on the 8th October now.

With no Digital Monday to get stuck into, I decided I still fancied reading something new – so I dug into the archives (ok, my newly-acquired copy of Servants of the Machine-God) and picked out Of Gods and Men by Andy Smillie. Have a read of my review for more details, but suffice to say it’s a very short story…although it always seems to me with Andy that the shorter the story, the more powerful his writing becomes. Not everyone loves micro-short stories, but I’m a big fan, and I thought this was a clever little story. You can get hold of it as an e-short, but rather than paying 99p for one micro-short I’d suggest picking up the anthology I mentioned – maybe go for the paperback (£8.99 on Amazon) though, as the ebook is for some reason priced at a whopping £14.99.

Midweek
There’s not a lot of Black Library news to come out of the midweek period this week, with just the Warhammer Community post on Wednesday to mention. When I first saw the title of this week’s post – “The Siege of Terra: Secrets Revealed” – I was, unsurprisingly, quite excited, and had visions of it offering real insight into what we’re going to see soon with the Siege. Sadly that’s not quite how it turned out. It’s mostly a recap of what’s already been confirmed, and a reminder that more information promises to be forthcoming at the Weekender in November.

It does mention that “some of you have been wondering if this is the start of a new 50-book series – and we can reveal that it’s not”, but there’s no information beyond that. Not an entirely wasted opportunity, then, and I can see why BL are keen to keep momentum up and engage with fans on the topic of the Heresy, but I can’t help thinking that just a little bit of new information could have been a great way to REALLY get fans talking.

If I can draw your attention to something that I posted during the week, I was pleased to be able to publish a midweek instalment of my regular Rapid Fire series of quick author interviews – in this case George Mann talking about his new Raven Guard audio drama Soulbound. I didn’t manage to get this one sorted for release date, but I’m very happy to have it ready and available to read now. I hope you enjoy reading these quick interviews as much as I enjoy organising them, and I’d be very interested to hear if you’ve got any comments or suggestions about them in future.

Weekend
Just a single release on Saturday, albeit in a range of formats. Robbie MacNiven’s new 40k novel Blood of Iax is available in special edition hardback for £40, or in standard hardback (£18), ebook (£9.99) and MP3 audio (£29.99) formats as well. The special edition, Robbie’s first for BL, is limited to 1,250 copies and while the BL site doesn’t mention anything about additional content, if you look on the GW website it suggests the book also includes a short story called Blood and Bone. If you read Robbie’s Advent Calendar short story A Brother’s Confession then you’ll be familiar with the main characters from Blood of Iax, but for a bit more information you can read what Robbie had to say about the book in another Rapid Fire interview, by clicking here or on the banner below.

Not a release as such, but a surprise for Saturday was a competition to ‘win the Black Library’ – which actually means to win a copy of every single physical BL title currently in print. That would be nice, right? There are two ways to enter – the first is to place an order via the BL website for £40 (or equivalent) or more, while the second is to send in an email to a specific address just providing your contact details. The competition is running until the 31st October, and you can enter (using each method, I think) once a week between now and then – with the draw taking place on the 2nd November.

Have a read of the terms and conditions here, and then go crazy – there’s no reason not to at least send those emails, even if you can’t afford to spend the £40. The total value of the prize is £3,600, which is an impressive amount! If whoever wins is a Track of Words reader, I would LOVE to see the box(es) that the prize arrives in!

Thoughts on the week
As I mentioned earlier, a strange week. I’m not sure I can remember many (if any) weeks with just a single release of any sort, although I suppose you could argue that with the Blood of Iax SE there was actually two…but that’s splitting hairs. Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m always happy to celebrate the release of a new book – and I enjoy Robbie’s writing, so I’ll look forward to reading Blood of Iax. It’s a bit of a shame that there wasn’t more to celebrate alongside it this week, but that shouldn’t take away from a book which (from Robbie’s interview) sounds like it gives a really interesting range of perspectives on the realities of the current 40k timeline.

About the only other thing to talk about is the competition which, judging by the reaction I’m seeing online, looks to be pretty popular. Competitions run by Games Workshop and its various sub-companies often fall into the trap of feeling a little exclusive – buy an expensive Forge World model for the chance to win an even more expensive model – so the chance to enter this particular competition simply by sending an email is a nice touch. I suspect I already own the majority of the BL titles currently in print – and I’m sure plenty of other fans are the same – but it’s still quite exciting to think of winning such massive prize!

Oh, and I love the fact that on Facebook BL have gone with the tagline “Win the Black Library…before Ahriman does”! That’s a nice touch 🙂

As usual, to finish off this section here’s a quick roundup of everything I’ve been posting this week:

• The Lords of SIlence by Chris Wraight
• QUICK REVIEW: Of Gods and Men by Andy Smillie
• RAPID FIRE: George Mann Talks Soulbound
• Sin of Damnation by Gav Thorpe
• QUICK REVIEW: Sanguis Irae by Gav Thorpe
• RAPID FIRE: Robbie MacNiven Talks Blood of Iax

Coming up…
As far as I can see there’s nothing on the Coming Soon page of the BL website, which presumably means that we’ll be seeing some paperback releases. Including, I suspect, something I’ve been looking forward to for A LONG TIME! Should be interesting…

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.