New author to the list!
We are more than excited to announce a new novel by Mur Lafferty to the Orbit list! Her announcement is here. We plan to publish THE SHAMBLING GUIDE TO NEW YORK CITY worldwide in Spring/Summer 2013.
Posts Tagged ‘urban fantasy’
How to be a Sidekick, According to Giguhl . . .
We wanted to tell you that we’ve posted the answers to the urban fantasy quiz we created last week to celebrate the new book in Jaye Wells’ Sabina Kane series, SILVER-TONGUED DEVIL, but while writing the blogpost we suffered something of a demonic visitation . . .
We interrupt our usual service for an announcement from Giguhl, the demon/feline sidekick of Sabina Kane, star of the urban fantasy novels by Jaye Wells.
Hello, mortals.
Giguhl, the fifth-level Mischief demon, here. You’ve probably heard of my many accomplishments as the champion of Demon Fight Club and as the coach of the seriously bad-assed Manhattan Marauder roller derby team. But did you know that in my spare time, I am also the official sidekick of an urban fantasy heroine?
Her name is Sabina Kane. She’s half-mage and half-vampire and all sorts of trouble. And without me getting her back and providing color commentary, she’d be totally lost. I get lots of letters from beings who want to follow my hoofsteps into the sidekicking business. They think it’s all glamour and making sweet love to nymphs. Little do they know that it’s actual work. Today I’m going to break down the attributes required of every awesome sidekick . . . (more…)
Kickass Urban Fantasy Heroines: The Quiz
We released Jaye Wells’ new urban fantasy novel SILVER-TONGUED DEVIL (UK/ANZ/US) this month, and to celebrate this and the fact that there’s a lot of love on the Orbit team for all the urban fantasy heroines out there, we created a quiz to give you the chance to test your knowledge against us!
Can you guess which urban fantasy heroines uttered the quotes below? If you recognise one, comment with the number of the quote and the name of the leading lady who uttered it. Try to be the first to get them right! No googling, because that’s just cheating!
We had a lot of fun coming up with these quotes, and we hope you have fun guessing too . . .
- “I took one more thing to bed with me, a stuffed toy penguin named Sigmund. I don’t sleep with him often, just every once in a while after someone tries to kill me.”
- (“What up, peeps?”) I looked at the hairless cat for a moment. “‘What up, peeps?’ You’ve been watching MTV again, haven’t you?” (“Word.”)
- “If the Apocalypse comes, beep me.”
- “This feels a little bit like what a vampire bar would look like if it were a ride at Disney World.”
- “Another werewolf thing. Like most animals, we spent a large part of our lives engaged in the three Fs of basic survival. Feeding, fighting and… reproduction.”
- “She’s a thousand-year-old vampire who’s joined the cheerleading squad. There’s a whole different set of rules in play here.”
- “So here’s the plan. I’ll get us tickets to New Orleans, we’ll go save the world from abstract evil, and afterward we’ll hang out in the French Quarter for a couple of weeks and blow off steam.”
- “I was dragged through Hell, betrayed by my god, left in Jersey, and finished up nearly being drowned by a demon with a bad haircut.”
- “Lycans are allergic to silver. We have to get the bullets out quickly, or they end up dying on us during questioning.” (“What happens to them afterward?”) “We put the bullets back in.”
- “So in the sweltering heat of a July night, I sang a Christmas carol to a room full of fae, who had been driven out of their homelands by Christians and their cold-iron swords.”
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“But the next noise to echo through the hall was one I was pretty sure I recognized. It was the unmistakable sound of the sh*t hitting the fan.”
Clue: There are some TV heroines, some film, and some from novels, both Orbit books and non Orbit books.
EDIT: It’s 26th January 2012 and we’re providing the answers to this quiz, here they are now . . . (more…)
Silver-Tongued Devil: Out Now!
SILVER-TONGUED DEVIL is the fourth novel in the Sabina Kane series by Jaye Wells, and it’s OUT NOW to buy as a paperback or ebook.
The series that Sookie Stackhouse author Charlaine Harris called ‘fast-paced and fun’, these novels follow the assassin Sabina Kane as she tries to end the war between the vampire and mage races. In SILVER-TONGUED DEVIL, a series of sadistic murders threaten to stop peace talks between the vampires and the mages, but Sabina’s investigation soon has her questioning everyone she thought she could trust…
We really enjoy this series at Orbit, and we think that you’ll also love its mixture of humour, action and truly captivating characters. (My personal favourite? The demon ‘Giguhl’, trapped in the form of a hairless cat!) If you haven’t yet managed to read RED-HEADED STEPCHILD, THE MAGE IN BLACK, and GREEN-EYED DEMON, here are several more people who think you should…
A fast-paced trip through a dark and dangerous landscape featuring an unusual take on vampires, mages, faeries, and demons. It hooks you on page one and takes you for a great ride!” – Kat Richardson, author of the Greywalker series
The series is truly fab… a great urban fantasy I would definitely recommend.” – Book Chick City
Wells burns up the pages as if they were soaked in gasoline. Jaye Wells is the next coming of LKH and Kim Harrison.” – Paul Goat Allen, Barnes & Noble Explorations
A seriously wild ride.” (Top Pick!) – RT Book Reviews
Plenty of humour alongside the action and suspense’ – Deathray
Cover launch: The Black Sun’s Daughter series by M.L.N. Hanover
M.L.N. Hanover’s fantastic Black Sun’s Daughter series will be published in the UK for the first time in the New Year, with the first four books in the series coming out monthly from January. If you like Patricia Briggs or Kelley Armstrong or Sherrilyn Kenyon you’re in for a treat with these – I read all four of them in one weekend when I first discovered them.
A great series deserves great covers, so I hope you’ll agree we’ve done them justice. Little, Brown inhouse designer Hannah Clark’s creative interpretation of my loose brief (which boiled down to “it needs to look like urban fantasy but I want it to be new and different”) has led to this wonderfully fresh and original cover style – thanks Hannah!
Wallpapers for BLOOD RIGHTS by Kristen Painter
This gorgeous art by Nekro was just screaming to be made into wallpapers, so here you are, for all your screens and devices: wallpapers for Blood Rights by Kristen Painter, out now!
Here’s all the wallpaper download links…if anyone needs a specific dimension made, let us know!
1024 x 768 | 1280 x 800 | 1440 x 900 | 1680 x 1050 |1920 x 1200 | iPhone | iPad
Cover Launch: ANGEL TOWN (Jill Kismet #6) by Lilith Saintcrow
Here’s a bittersweet cover launch for you – sweet, because it’s another great cover by Calvin Chu, showing one of my favorite Lilith Saintcrow heroines, Jill Kismet. Bitter because it’s the finale of the Jill Kismet series! I love the graphic feel of these covers, it’s been a really fresh take on the urban fantasy style, and both Jill Kismet & Dante Valentine were well-characterized by the illustrations. In this book we really wanted to refer back to the first cover (Night Shift) and bring the series full-circle with a close-up shot. After the jump, see the whole series together, and a teaser…
Cover Launch: SILVER-TONGUED DEVIL (Sabina Kane #4) by Jaye Wells
Having a long series of books (aka more than a trilogy) is a lot of fun, because over time, just as the reader does, you get a better feel for the character, and it definitely comes out in the cover art. Craig White has been really hitting his stride with Sabina Kane, I feel like each cover has more and more personality. The great photo shoots by Shirley Green with Toni Busker as our model certainly help. Toni is a veteran of many geek projects, and she is super fun to work with as she is always game for climbing about and playing with all kinds of weapons…Actually you may recognize her as a mermaid in the recent Pirates of the Caribbean #4. If that’s not geek cred for a cover model, I don’t know what is.
So, back to the cover at hand – as you can see, Sabina is back and prowling in NYC, and after the jump you can get a little teaser, along with the covers in order…
Cover Launch: THE BUSINESS OF DEATH by Trent Jamieson
People often ask me, how do I find artists for books. And there’s never one good answer…I try to stay on top of established scifi and fantasy artists through places like Spectrum and assorted illustration annuals. I also like to keep an eye on people working more in the fine-art and urban art realm thru mags like Juxtapoz and Hi Fructose. I have a long history in comics (yes I was a Comic Shop Girl) and I pull artists across the divide between comics and books. Agents send me updated work from artists constantly. And facebook, believe it or not, has been a great tool for me to find emerging artists.
The real problem isn’t finding good artists, it’s wishing I had enough good projects for all the fabulous artists I know of! And I love getting people who haven’t worked on a lot of book covers to work on a cover for me, I think it keeps the art really fresh. So I am always walking around with a “dream team” list in the back of my head. And David Seidman was on that list for a while…until I heard that we were going to do an omnibus edition of Trent Jamieson’s Deathworks Series, and I knew he would be perfect for it. I’m not sure where I first saw David’s work. It was either on facebook or it was his Coheed and Cambria picture disk. Either way I just had a gut feeling he would have a fabulous take on these books, which is kind of a little Constantine by way of The Office. Or Office Space, actually. We really wanted to capture the bored sick-of-this-damn-cubicle attitude, while showing a bit of the supernatural. If you want to get a good intro you can read the opener here.
As you’ve been reading over the last few cover posts, I love doing omnibus editions. I like them as a fan, there’s nothing better than getting a big honking bible-sized edition of a series, and as an art director, I love getting a chance to reinvent a character. This redesign started with shooting the right photo reference with Shirley Green. (Often an artist shoots his own reference photo, but the editors and I had such a strong sense of what we wanted that I art directed the shoot then sent the images we picked to David). We had a heck of a time finding the right model. We knew we wanted someone out of the vein of beefcake, someone cool, who could look so very fed up and a bit pissed. And look good in a suit, of course! But we settled on Jonathan Taylor and he was a great model, and totally a geek too, which makes it all so much more fun. Anyway then we picked poses we liked in-house, then sent the winner to David. He & I went back a bunch talking about tone and color, and he produced this fabulous illustration. So enjoy BIG after the jump, along with some shots of the various stages. And a teaser, of course…
Cover Launch: EYE OF THE TEMPEST (Jane True #4) by Nicole Peeler
One thing I love about our Orbit roster is our kickass heroines (often written by real-life kickass ladies)…but they’re not JUST kickass. (Ok, not allowed to say “kickass” for the rest of the post, promise.) Our heroines have unique voices and over the course of a series begin to feel utterly real. Sometimes when I am working on covers I literally hear a voice of a character in my head saying yea or nay. Now, I don’t create the art for Nicole Peeler’s Jane True books in the US, but I know illustrator Sharon Tancredi has got a little Jane inside her egging her on. I was so excited to see Blondie make the cover of Eye of the Tempest, Jane’s fourth adventure, and she looks like a fabulous teammate for Jane. Of course, it is known I have a soft spot for cool tattoos…and to really help our dynamic duo pop, we upped the boldness with a bright shock of red for the title bar. I’m also going to show the back cover, which I rarely do, but you must see the fantastic octopus Sharon created to go with the cover!
After the jump, get to see the US back cover and the requisite teaser text…..and if you haven’t met Jane True yet, you really must pick up the rest of the series…here’s a fabulous review from B&N to whet your appetite…True Love: Nicole Peeler’s Selkie-Halfling Heroine Jane True is Paranormal Fantasy’s “It Girl”