If you have one of the few copies of Dying Is My Business with the misprint I described here, you can now read or download the missing pages as a PDF: Pages 309 – 341
The rest of you can consider this a free, completely contextless, spoiler-heavy excerpt from the book’s climax!
There’s a great new review of Dying Is My Business over at Tor.com! It’s got a lot of good candidates for pull-quotes, but this one is probably my favorite:
It’s a good review, but I feel a little weird about one part of it. The reviewer makes certain assumptions about the characters that aren’t supported by the text, and those assumptions happen to be about issues that are important to me. But I’m probably just being a grump unnecessarily, which has been known to happen. The review is pretty great, and Tor.com is read by hundreds of thousands of science fiction and fantasy fans, which is also pretty great.
So…funny story.
It was recently discovered that a very small portion of Dying Is My Business‘s print run contains a terrible misprint. Pages 309-341 were replaced with pages from a completely different novel! (Carola Dunn’s cozy mystery A Colorful Death, it turns out. No, her book does not contain pages from mine. That’s not how it works.) My novel resumes on page 341, but not where it left off. I’m told this kind of misprint is not all that unusual, and as I said, it affected only a very small portion of the print run, thank goodness.
The bad news is that many of these misprinted copies were shipped out to bookstores. I’ve already heard from a few people who bought misprinted copies, and have seen a few with my own eyes on bookstore shelves.
I’m reminded of the time Tor accidentally printed Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamour in Glass without the novel’s first line. Though I imagine she was fuming inside, she found a way to have fun with it. In a way, her situation was worse because the entire print run was affected, if I recall correctly, and not just a small portion. I also learned recently that something similar happened with a Jim Butcher novel. Only, in his case it wasn’t 30 pages replaced by another book’s. It was 30 pages just flat out missing. I suppose I should consider myself in good company!
Anyway, if you bought a copy of Dying Is My Business, please check to make sure you have the proper pages 309-341. You’ll know immediately if the pages are wrong. The font is different, the page number is on the bottom instead of the top, and of course the characters are entirely different. (One is, amusingly, named Nick. Well, it’ll be amusing to me one day. Not so much right now.)
If you have a misprinted copy, it can be exchanged for a proper copy without charge from the store where you bought it. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Please bear in mind that none of this is the fault of the bookstores. It was a production error, something neither they nor I have any control over. Please be patient with them if they can’t accommodate you by replacing your copy immediately.
For those of you who do not want to part with your misprinted copies, St. Martin’s is working on getting the missing pages to me in a file that can be downloaded directly from my website. I don’t have it yet, but I should soon.
Again, I’m deeply sorry for the inconvenience. I wish this misprint hadn’t happened, but everyone, including St. Martin’s, is working hard to make sure everyone with a misprinted copy can exchange it free of charge for a proper replacement.
If you have any questions, just ask!
Today I’ve got a guest post up on Glamourist Histories author Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog as part of her ongoing “My Favorite Bit” series. I love “My Favorite Bit” because it features so many authors I like, all talking about their favorite chapter, scene, moment, character beat, what have you from their latest publication. And now it’s my turn to share! Here’s a snippet:
On a side note, I’ve been friendly with Mary for years now, since the days when she and her husband lived in New York. I remember sitting with her at a Chinese restaurant after a Fantastic Fiction reading at the KGB Bar eons ago and describing to her a book I had just started writing about the last living descendant of St. George. I remember feeling iffy about the book, but Mary liked the idea and that helped me stick with it. That book, Chasing the Dragon, went on to be published by the amazing, award-winning ChiZine Publications and nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Thriller Writers Award! So, I owe a big thanks to Mary Robinette Kowal for keeping me on track – and for featuring me in “My Favorite Bit”!
Another quick bit of fun news: Dying Is My Business is featured on the Black Gate website. It actually focuses on cover artist Chris McGrath, who deserves every bit of attention he gets, but editor John O’Neill also has some nice things to say about the book. Check it out here.
