The Tonk need a rescue

By Holly Lisle

Talyn in PaperbackTalyn debuts in paperback today. With luck, you’ll find it in local indie bookstores, where real people order books, and where support for my work has been strong. If you don’t have an indie store, then you may find it in your local chain bookstore, but computers order the books for chains, and they order to the net, a process that kills most writing careers in three books.

I’m not in danger of having my career killed at the moment, but Hawkspar could easily be the last Tonk/ Korre book. The sale of a third book in the series depends on the paperback success of Talyn. The Talyn hardcover had a small print run, and sellthrough was meager. If the hardcover showed up in your bookstore, it probably did so with one spined-out copy, and if that sold, no more were reordered. That was the story with most of the chains, including mine. With no sales reports in front of me, I have to guess that the majority of sales came from the indies.

There’s a very narrow time window (about a month) in which the book has a chance to succeed or fail. The clock starts today. If it succeeds, it will get another month. If it fails, though, it will disappear from most of the chains at this time in December, and that will be the kiss of death to Redbird, the third book.

If you have been waiting for whatever reason to buy Talyn, now is the time when buying it will make a difference.

If you enjoyed Talyn or the world of Korre, please recommend (read “beat over the head with”) the book to anyone you think might enjoy it. If you can’t find it in your local bookstore, please ask your local bookseller to order it in. Perhaps in quantity.

And if it isn’t available where you are, then you can buy it here from these online indies:

Or the chains online, of course:Amazon is one of the online sales venues of last resort, along with Books-A-Million and Barnes and Noble.

Talyn is one of the two best books I’ve written (I consider Hawkspar its equal) and though I know the odds are against me, I want this world to succeed. If you can help out in any way, my deepest thanks.

And if you do a review or something else that might encourage people to buy, please post a link here. I’ll put a link to this post and links to some of the reviews on the front page.

All articles in this series, in order: