Category Archives: Article

Opinions: Black Library Limited Editions – Options, Not FOMO

In this fascinating blog post about his monstrously successful Kickstarter, SFF author Brandon Sanderson makes a great point about the importance of giving readers a choice of formats and price points. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while regarding Black Library’s ‘Limited Edition’ books, but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on exactly what I wanted to say until I read this blog post. You see, I fundamentally think that premium editions of books are a good thing, as they provide choice – which is always worth having. The problem I have is with BL’s bizarrely inconsistent approach to how and when to release premium editions. So let’s talk about how the point of limited editions should be to provide options to suit customers’ wants and needs, not to encourage FOMO or penalise readers who can’t afford high prices.

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Monthly Roundup – February 2022

Hello and welcome to another Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words, where today I’m going to take a look back through everything I posted in February, and talk a bit about how the month went as a whole. I slowed down a little bit further in February, with just nine new posts and one new site page, but as I’ll talk about later on I think I’ve maybe found a new rhythm for working on the site so perhaps this is going to be the new norm. We’ll see! As usual though, I’m quite happy with what I did get written, and I’ve had a pretty good week when it comes to reading.

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Opinions: On the Black Library Celebration 2022

Another year, another mildly disappointing Black Library Celebration, an annual event which should provide an opportunity to get existing BL readers hyped and encourage new fans to try out some great storytelling, and which should celebrate Black Library fiction as something valuable and enjoyable in its own right. Instead, it inevitably ends up as a safe exercise in box-ticking that does the bare minimum but really only serves to remind readers like me – who aren’t especially interested in the miniatures or the games – that we’re not an audience segment which Games Workshop really cares about. Ok, that’s a bit melodramatic – but if you look at what was available to buy this year and what the coverage of the Celebration entailed…it’s also kinda true.

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Warhammer Horror – The Range So Far

Since its launch in 2019, Black Library’s Warhammer Horror imprint has grown in fits and starts into quite a considerable range spanning novels (and one novella), audio dramas and short stories across both the Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar settings. Having already published something similar for Warhammer Crime, I thought it was about time I put together an article gathering all of the Warhammer Horror range in one place with the publisher’s synopsis for each title along with links to my reviews and author interviews where available. As the range continues to grow, I’ll try to keep this updated so that it remains an accurate and useful hub for anyone interested in Black Library’s horror-focused offering.

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Black Library: What’s Next After the Horus Heresy?

Black Library’s epic, ridiculously huge Horus Heresy series has proven incredibly popular, and for a lot of fans it’s the ‘premium’ BL range, the series that takes top billing and gets readers most excited. For all that it started small and exploded into something utterly massive, as readers we’ve always known that it has a definitive end point, and for almost as long as there’s been the Heresy range there’s been speculation over what Black Library will do once the series has finished – what ‘the next Heresy’ will be. With the Siege of Terra mini-series drawing to a close – at the time of writing there are just two books remaining of the planned eight – and heralding the long-awaited end of the Heresy, that question of what might come next seems more pertinent than ever.

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Monthly Roundup – January 2022

Somehow another month has gone past and it’s already the end of January, which means it’s time for my first Monthly Roundup post of 2022. After the craziness of December when I kept myself incredibly busy with my Advent Calendar series, I deliberately toned things down a bit for January to give myself a bit of a rest, and while I’ve still put together ten articles and two new site pages, it’s been good to slow down a little. While I may not have written as much as I have done in previous months, it’s been a really busy month on the reading front, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking ahead and planning posts that I’m hoping to deliver later in the year.

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Why Reading Goals Are Great

I recently read an interesting article on the Tor.com site called Maybe Reading Goals Are Good, Actually, which suggested that for a lot of us reading is proving harder than usual right now, and that setting reading goals might be a good thing to do. I agree! I regularly set reading goals – you can read about my 2022 goals here. However, the article seems to be based on the assumption that reading goals are a sort of necessary evil, a last resort to turn to when the world gets in the way of everything else. This…I don’t agree with. I actually think that a lot of the article’s conclusions are pretty accurate, just maybe not its assumptions, so I thought I would write my own piece on the same subject to talk about it from a different point of view, reinforcing some of the same messages and offering alternate views on others.

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Preparing For Reign of the Devourer by David Annandale

Here’s a question: what connects Percy Bysshe Shelley, Howard the Duck, a vampire cow and a murderous surgeon? The answer is that they’re all influences author David Annandale drew upon in one way or another when writing his latest Marvel novel Reign of the Devourer, which is out now (in ebook) from Aconyte Books! After reading his recent guest post about the relationship between horror fiction and visual media, I thought it might be fun to ask David to talk a bit about the books, comics and movies that inspired and influenced him while he was working on Reign of the Devourer, and put together a sort of ‘primer’ for the new novel. If you want to get into the appropriate mindset for the latest (mis)adventures of Doctor Doom, these stories are exactly what you need!

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Track of Words in 2022: Plans and Goals

As January is progressing quickly and time is ticking on, I think it’s time to talk about my goals for 2022, and my (loose) plans for Track of Words this year. I’m not really one for setting bold New Year’s resolutions or making too many commitments to big changes in my life, but I do enjoy challenging myself to goals that I can reflect on throughout the year. If you’re interested, you can check out the article in which I talked about my 2021 goals, and then another article in which I reflected upon how well I did meeting those goals last year. For the purposes of this article though, I’m talking about what I’d like to achieve in 2022, and in order to do that I’m going to split things out into three sections: a quick overview of where I see the site going this year, then specific Track of Words goals (i.e. what I’m hoping to specifically achieve on the site this year) followed reading goals (some of which may impact on ToW, others will not).

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Science Fiction Debuts in 2022 – Michael Mammay Guest Post

Welcome to the first Track of Words guest post of 2022 – today I’m joined by science fiction author Michael Mammay, who’s here to talk about debut SF novels coming out this year. If you’re on the lookout for some great new reads, this is the article for you! Michael’s Planetside series comes highly recommended, and his latest novel The Misfit Soldier is due out from Harper Voyager in February 2022! If you’re on Twitter and you don’t already follow Michael, I would strongly recommend you do – he’s a really positive presence, and a great advocate for SF, so enjoy reading his guest post and then check him out on Twitter!

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