Couple of announcements. First, for those readers who live in Germany, the German version of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms — Die Erbin Der Welt — is available now from Blanvalet! To that end, the publisher has generously offered to do a giveaway of 5 copies via Darkstar Fantasy News, a German review/fan site. These folks did a great interview with me recently (here’s the English version), so if you want a copy — and, uh, you speak German — hop on over and check out their giveaway!
And in other German news, good news — after some behind-the-scenes discussion regarding the preliminary German cover of book 2 (you can see it in the Darkstar interview), Blanvalet has agreed to make some changes to it, reflecting the protagonist, Oree Shoth — who is a black woman. As I’ve mentioned before, the German covers weren’t meant to represent anyone actually in the book, and were basically just random hooded women. Thing is, having random white women on the covers of books featuring brown and black women… well. Yeah. So they’re making the covers of books 2 and 3 more representative. And while I would dearly love for book 1’s cover to have been representative as well, I’m glad the Blanvalet folks have been both apologetic and flexible about this issue regarding the forthcoming books. It just wasn’t something they’d thought about. But they’re listening to me, and that makes me very happy. More on book 2’s new cover later.
They’ve asked for my input on book 3, too, which stars Sieh. Note again that the covers are not meant to be representative, so a direct rendering is unlikely… and given the aesthetic pattern of the covers thus far, there will probably be another hooded figure, seen only from the nose down. I’m fine with that; I think the German covers are quite pretty, race issues aside. But in an excess of wishful thinking, I sent them the model for my mental image of Sieh in his “young man” shape, which is this guy:
…please pardon me while I mop the drool off my keyboard.
This is Korean pop singer/actor Rain, also known on these shores as Stephen Colbert’s nemesis. In my head, Sieh doesn’t look quite like this, but Rain comes close.
(…Yeahno, they’re not gonna put Rain on the cover. I imagine he’d charge a hefty appearance fee, at the very least. But a girl can dream, can’t she?)
Oooh… book three stars Sieh? Fantastic! I just finished the first book last night, and it is seriously full of all kinds of awesome. Great characters and story, and you have such a *damn* cool writing voice; I absolutely loved everything about it! Book two has been pre-ordered, and I did a little fangirl *squee* when I saw the recent post saying book three was completed.
That’s great news about the German covers! I’m so glad they’re listening to you.