And so it begins...

The final countdown to the  the release of the new series The Riyria Chronicles is upon us!!  <>

Hey all, Robin here (for those that don't know, I'm Michael's "other half"),  I'm hijacking Michael's blog as he is pretty focused on writing at the moment and I don't want you to miss out on any of the great things Orbit has going on for the new series's release.

We are just 54 days -- see handy countdown clock in the sidebar -- until the release of The Crown Tower and I've been working with Orbit's marketing director on the various goodies he has in store for you all.  I don't want to let the cat out of the bag prematurely, but he's got some nice goodies up his sleeve and I'll be updating you as they go "live."

To that end...the first of these launched a few days ago, and that is that Orbit is running a Goodreads Giveaway for The Crown Tower:

As you can see it's only been open a few days and already we have quite a few people signed up for it.  Free copies are always a good thing, but there's an added bonus in this giveaway because Orbit is going to ship copies to the winner as soon as copies arrive to them.  Based on current estimates this means winners will  get the book almost an entire month sooner than it's official release date.  How cool is that?

Now, Orbit has more than just Michael to concern themselves with, and coordinating the shipping of giveaway copies is no small feat so they set these giveaways to the US to simplify logistics.  I fully support this practice, it means they can do more giveaways for Michael (and other authors), but Michael wanted to make sure the overseas people have a chance to win as well. So here's what we've done...

Michael setup a "parallel giveaway" and it is open to everyone, regardless of  location.  What we plan on doing is matching the ratio of the Orbit giveaway (up to 10 copies) so if you have a 1 in 10 chance of winning Orbit's versions you'll have a 1 in 10 chance of winning our giveaway. But...those that are overseas will actually get two "entries" while those from he US will have only one ticket in the drawing.  We're doing this because a US person can enter in both giveaways but an international person only can sign up for one.

Orbit's copies will be processed directly from New York, so unfortunately they won't be signed.  But since Michael and I will be sending out the winners for the parallel giveaway you can sign up for both.

As I said, this is just one of the nice perks that Orbit has planned, and we'll let you know about the others as they launch.  I can't say enough good things about how Orbit supports their authors in launching their books, and I'm not just referring to Michael here. I've watched the rollouts of Brian McClellan and Mur Lafferty and they were phenomenal as well.

So, if you want to get your hand on The Crown Tower as soon as humanly possible sign up here:

• Goodreads Giveaway - US Only
• Michael's Giveaway - All Countries

And stay tuned for other goodies, coming soon.