Jay Kristoff – Literary Giant

Super exciting news, droogs!

Folks who follow me on insta and twitter will know I’ve been hinting at a new project for a little while now. Today, I’m chuffed to announce that I’ve sold my new fantasy trilogy to the awesome folks at St Martin’s Press and Harper Voyager UK, the same crew who brought you the NEVERNIGHT CHRONICLES!

Here’s the spiel I sold it with:

EMPIRE OF THE VAMPIRE

Twenty-seven years have passed since the last sunrise, and for almost three decades, the creatures of the night have walked the day without fear. Once, humanity fought bravely against the coldblood legions, but now, we exist only in a few scattered settlements—tiny sparks of light in a growing sea of darkness.

Gabriel de León is the last of the Silversaints, a holy order dedicated to defending realm and church, now utterly destroyed. Imprisoned for the murder of the vampiric king, Gabriel is charged with telling the story of his life.

His tale spans years, from his youth in the monastery of San Michel, to the forbidden love that spelled his undoing, and the betrayal that saw his order annihilated. Most importantly, Gabriel will tell of his discovery of the Grail—the legendary cup prophesied to bring an end to the eternal night.

But the Grail was no simple chalice; it was a smart-mouthed teenage urchin named Dior. Their journey with a band of unlikely allies would see Dior and Gabriel forge an unbreakable bond, and set the broken paragon on a road to redemption.

But now, the Grail is shattered. And with the cup of the Savior destroyed and the last Silversaint awaiting execution, what can bring an end to this unholy empire?

Empire of the Vampire is an illustrated dark fantasy epic; the bastard lovechild of Interview with the Vampire, The Road and The Name of the Wind.

___________

FAQ

Holy shit, vampires?

Fuck yeah. Vampires.

When’s it out?

Fall, 2020. It’ll basically take over from NEVERNIGHT in my rotation.

How many books?

Good things usually come in threes. 🙂

Is this series tied in with your other fantasy work?

No. EotV is a completely new thing. New world. New mythos. New (anti)hero. New everything. Except me, I guess. I’m still here.

Wait, did you say illustrated?

I did indeed. I’m a special snowflake who insists on making my publishers’ lives difficult, see. I like the idea of creating a book that’s beautiful, and having that beauty serve a purpose in the story. But to tell you much more than that is a spoiler.

EMPIRE OF THE VAMPIRE will feature original illustrations by none other than the amazing Nan Fe. Fe popped up on my radar after she created some amazeballs NEVERNIGHT fanart (her illustration of Cassius from NEVERNIGHT below was actually my inspiration for Gabriel). I fell in love with her style, traded her a few human souls and convinced her to be my co-conspirator on this beast. Fe’s aesthetic is perfect for this story–bloody, sexy, and dark af. And she’s a badass bitch to boot.

So fanartists take note – we do notice all your amazing work!

Anyway, it’s. Going. To. Be. Amazing.

Check out some of her stuff:

So is this a graphic novel?

No. “Graphic novel” is typically another term for “comic book”, and this ain’t that. There’s nothing wrong with comics, but EotV is a long-form novel with some illustrations. I imagine there’ll be around 15-20 illos per book.

Is EMPIRE OF THE VAMPIRE a YA book?

NO. EotV has the same publishers as NEVERNIGHT.  I know some people insist on saying NN is YA, but respectfully, my publishers and I disagree. St Martin’s Press and Harper Voyager are adult imprints. EMPIRE OF THE VAMPIRE is an adult book. Like NN, it contains violence and explicit sex and protagonists with extremely dubious morality. Yes, one of them is a teenager. The book has definite crossover appeal, same as NN.

But it’s not YA.

Please understand, I don’t say this to disrespect YA vampire stories, or creators who tell them. I’m a YA author myself, and love writing for younger readers as well as adults. Mad props to Stephanie Meyer and Twilight – even if it’s not your jam, you can’t deny what Ms Meyer accomplished with that story. I’m a stan of the Vampire Diaries (Team Damon 4 liiiife, dont @ me). I loves me some Angel and Buffy. I just want people to know what they’re getting into before this blood-filled murder train leaves the station.

Will there be pre-order offers and special editions and all that good stuff?

Almost certainly. Patience, my friends. I’m glad you’re excited. I am too. 🙂

Jay, do you ever sleep?

Sleep when you’re dead, droogie.

Droogs! Five things!

1. We have an official cover for DARKDAWN in the UK and Aus/NZ, once again created by the mighty Kerby Rosanes and his Black Pen of Doom(tm). BEHOLD THE AWESOME:

Cover art

Full jacket art

2. The awesome folks at Waterstones are once again offering an exclusive edition of DARKDAWN with black sprayed edges. These black-edged versions will all be signed by yours truly. Once again, they’re going to be in strictly limited quantities, and as of our announcement about them yesterday, they’ve already sold 75% of their planned stock. So get onnnnn it.

Please note there are two editions listed on the Waterstones site. If you want the black-edged version, you’ll find it here.

3. Yes, Goldsboro book are also going to be releasing a signed and numbered special edition of DARKDAWN like they did with NEVERNIGHT and GODSGRAVE. I can confirm it will be different to the Waterstones edition, but can’t give you more details than that yet, other than that it’s going to be FUCKING AWESOME.

I don’t know if it’s Goldsboro’s intent to contact the previous purchasers of the NN and GG editions to give them option of first purchase – I presume so, but again, this isn’t confirmed yet.

Please be patient, as soon as the deets are confirmed, I’ll will let you know. Trust me, I know how much you want this edition, I get it, I do.

4. In regards to other special editions, I can definitely say Australia will not have any. Such is life, my fellow Aussie droogs, I feel your pain 😦

I cannot yet confirm there will be a US special edition of DARKDAWN – I wouldn’t count on it, but it’s a little up in the air. However, I can confirm all US First editions will be signed by yours truly, same as NN and GG.

5. Yes, I and the folks at Harper Voyager UK are aware people are really desperate to get their hands on the UK hardback version of NEVERNIGHT, and that a secondary market has sprung up selling hardbacks at pants-on-head stupid prices:

what in the goddamn fuck

Now, it’s great that people are still discovering the series and its popularity is still growing and that the hardback is becoming a coveted commodity – this is the kind of thing authors dream about, to be honest. So thank you thank you thank you to all you stabbykids out there pimping the series!

But it’s one thing for a collector who wants a first edition to pay a steep price for it, and it’s another thing entirely for someone who just wants the books on their shelves to match having to fork out upwards of a grand for the privilege.

NN has moved out of hardback format and into paperback – this is the life cycle of all books. But, me and the Voyager team are aware of the issue and looking for a way to solve it. Please stay tuned, we hear you, we’re working on it.

And that’s it!

For everyone who’s pre-ordered already, for everyone spreading the cover love or just spreading the word about this series, thank you thank you thank you! ❤

Hello droogs!

Today’s the big day for the AURORA RISING cover reveal! We won’t waste much of your time, since we’re sure you want to get to the loot and AMAZING cover itself, but, we must say a special thanks to the incredible team at Allen and Unwin, our brilliant cover designer Debra Billson and our incrediballs illustrator, the one and only Charlie Bowater (squeeeeeee)!

So! We’ll do this in three stages.

1. Pre-orders

Pre-orders are the lifeblood of any book’s launch, and there’s no better way to support your fave authors than pre-ordering their next book. So, if you’re inclined, links are below.

If you do pre-order, thank you! And if you’re an ILLUMINAE fan, save your receipts, because we’ll be announcing a pre-order offer early next year that you will not want to miss out on. Trust us.

AUSTRALIA

Booktopia

Dymocks

Angus and Robertson

UNITED KINGDOM

Amazon uk

Waterstones

Foyles

UNITED STATES

Amazon

Barnes&Noble

Indiebound

Powells

Book Depository

2. ARC giveaway

We have FIVE AURORA RISING ARCs to give away. Behold the awesome:

If you’d like the chance to win one just in time for the holidays, read on. And we seriously mean read. YES, THE WHOLE THING.

THIS CONTEST IS OPEN INTERNATIONALLY. BRITONS. AUSTRALIANS. AMERICANS. MARTIANS. WE GIVE NO TOSSES ABOUT WHERE YOU ARE FROM.

Each of you will be given two chances to enter. Yes, this means you can enter twice, and we encourage you to do so:

1. Tweet about the cover reveal. Your tweet must include a link to this site and the hashtag #squad312. Other than that, do what you like. If your tweet is cool or creative, you might get extra entries. If you’re slack (and that’s ok, so are we), here’s a sample tweet:The AURORA RISING cover is live, and my eyes are bleeding from the awesome. Make with the clickies:
   jaykristoff.com
   #squad312
   
2. Post the cover artwork onto your instagram feed.You must include the hashtag #squad312 (otherwise we won’t see it)

That’s it. Two ways to enter. Enter both ways, double your chances of winning. Simple, yes?

This contest closes on Sunday, December 23.

 3. The cover!

From the internationally bestselling authors of THE ILLUMINAE FILES comes an epic new science fiction adventure.

The year is 2380, and the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy are being assigned their first missions. Star pupil Tyler Jones is ready to recruit the squad of his dreams, but his own boneheaded heroism sees him stuck with the dregs nobody else in the Academy would touch…

A cocky diplomat with a black belt in sarcasm
A sociopath scientist with a fondness for shooting her bunkmates
A smart-ass techwiz with the galaxy’s biggest chip on his shoulder
An alien warrior with anger management issues
A tomboy pilot who’s totally not into him, in case you were wondering

And Ty’s squad isn’t even his biggest problem—that’d be Aurora Jie-Lin O’Malley, the girl he’s just rescued from interdimensional space. Trapped in cryo-sleep for two centuries, Auri is a girl out of time and out of her depth. But she could be the catalyst that starts a war millions of years in the making, and Tyler’s squad of losers, discipline-cases and misfits might just be the last hope for the entire galaxy.

They’re not the heroes we deserve. They’re just the ones we could find. Nobody panic.

Very chuffed to reveal the cover for the US editions of DEV1AT3! It is pink and it is glorious.

The synopsis is below but it has some huuuuuge spoilers for LIFEL1K3 so, you know, don’t spoil yourself. 🙂🤖💔

 
Seriously

 
Don’t

From bestselling author Jay Kristoff comes the second installment in the LIFEL1K3 trilogy–hailed by Marie Lu as “a breathless, action-packed exploration of what humanity really means.”

In the wake of a climactic battle in the ruined city of Babel, two former best friends suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of the same war. Eve is torn between the memories of the girl she was, and the synthetic she’s discovered herself to be. Together with her lifelike “siblings,” Eve sets out to find the real Ana Monrova, whose DNA is the key to building an army of lifelikes.

Meanwhile, Eve’s best friend, Lemon Fresh, is coming to terms with a power that she has long denied–and that others want to harness as a weapon. When she meets a strange boy named Grimm, he offers to lead her out of the horror-ridden wastelands and to an enclave of other abnorms like herself. There, Lemon quickly finds a sense of belonging–and perhaps even love–among the other genetic deviates.

But all is not what it seems, and with enemies and friends, heroes and villains wearing interchangeable faces, Lemon, too, will join the race to locate Ana Monrova before her former best friend can get to her.

It’s got a title, droogs! Cover reveal sooooooooon.

Some jacket is below, please not, this contains some huge spoilers for the first book, so don’t read it it if you haven’t read LL yet (and if not, why not)

From bestselling author Jay Kristoff comes the second installment in the LIFEL1K3 trilogy–hailed by Marie Lu as “a breathless, action-packed exploration of what humanity really means.” 

In the wake of a climactic battle in the ruined city of Babel, two former best friends find themselves on opposite sides of the same war.

Eve is torn between the memories of the girl she was, and the synthetic she’s discovered herself to be. Together with her lifelike “siblings,” Eve sets out to find the real Ana Monrova, whose DNA is the key to building an army of lifelikes. Meanwhile, Eve’s best friend, Lemon, is coming to terms with a power that she has long denied–and that others want to harness as a weapon. When she meets a strange boy named Grimm, he offers to lead her out of the horror-ridden landscape and to an enclave of other abnorms like herself. There, Lemon quickly finds a sense of belonging–and perhaps even love–among the other genetic deviates.

But all is not what it seems, and with enemies and friends, heroes and villains wearing interchangeable faces, Lemon, too, will join the race to locate Ana Monrova before her former best friend can get to her.

The victor will decide the future of humanity itself.

Droogs!

My partner in crime Amie and I can finally reveal the title of our new sci-fi collaboration! We’ve been working on this one for two years, and to say we’re excited about it is like saying I’m excited about my morning cup of coffee.

We have loads of exciting news coming up on this one – cover reveals and pre-order news and some other top secret stuff! But for now I leave you with:

My goodreads gif review and FAQ

Some pre-order links (we ❤ pre-orders!):

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

And the synopsis!

From the New York Times and internationally bestselling authors of The Illuminae Files comes a new science fiction epic . . .

The year is 2380, and the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy are being assigned their first missions. Star pupil Tyler Jones is ready to recruit the squad of his dreams, but his own boneheaded heroism sees him stuck with the dregs nobody else in the Academy would touch . . .

A cocky diplomat with a black belt in sarcasm
A sociopath scientist with a fondness for shooting her bunkmates
A smart-ass techwiz with the galaxy’s biggest chip on his shoulder
An alien warrior with anger management issues
A tomboy pilot who’s totally not into him, in case you were wondering

And Ty’s squad isn’t even his biggest problem–that’d be Aurora Jie-Lin O’Malley, the girl he’s just rescued from interdimensional space. Trapped in cryo-sleep for two centuries, Auri is a girl out of time and out of her depth. But she could be the catalyst that starts a war millions of years in the making, and Tyler’s squad of losers, discipline-cases and misfits might just be the last hope for the entire galaxy.

NOBODY PANIC.

Hello droogs,

Some of you have noticed some confusion about the release date for DARKDAWN in the last couple of weeks – Amazon says one thing, Goodreads says another, and so on.

Folks have asked me about this on twitter. I did notice, I promise. And apologies I haven’t made an announcement sooner, but I was tied up on the LIFEL1K3 release schedule and tour. Now that my post-apocalyptic baby is out in the world, I can turn attentions back to my more murderous child.

So, the bad news: The release date for DARKDAWN has been pushed to September 2019. Which, I know, is more than a year away. And I know a lot of you were really fucking looking forward to getting it this year and yes, this sucks. So, allow me to explain.

Writing the Nevernight Chronicles has been a slightly different experience to writing my other series, in the sense that I’ve been writing the next book after the previous book has hit shelves. I usually do my homework wayyyyy ahead of time – I handed in the second LIFEL1K3 book months ago, for example. We handed in GEMINA well before ILLUMINAE was published, same with OBSIDIO and GEMINA. But I was still writing GODSGRAVE when NEVERNIGHT came out. DARKDAWN was only about 17,000 words long when GODSGRAVE hit shelves (the final book will be about 180k). This has been cool, in the sense that some reactions from readers have influenced certain parts of the story, and made the book and Mia better. The tricky part of this kind of schedule is that after a book is written, there’s still a whole bunch of work that gets done behind the scenes before it’s published – editing, proofing, designing, marketing, shipping and so on.

So, my plan was to deliver the first draft of DARKDAWN to my publishers in April 2018. Those of you who follow me on instagram know I went to Venice for a month in February and smashed about 90,000 words. It was an amazing experience. Wandering those streets and walking alongside those canals and breathing that air, I discovered the book DARKDAWN would become. I’ll owe the people and city Venice a debt forever.

Thing is, DD is gonna be a 180-190k book. So at the end of Feb when I got back from Italy, I still had around 70-80k words to write. And I had a three week OBSIDIO tour in March (thanks to everyone who came out to see us, you were amazing!).

But yeah, April delivery? Not happening.

I wrote my editors and told them DD wouldn’t be ready til May. And even then, I’d be rushing it. And this is the real thing, the most important thing in all this – truth is, I didn’t want to rush this book.

I’ve never got reactions on any other series like the reactions I get to NEVERNIGHT. People like the ILLUMINAE books. They sold a lot of copies. That weird little bookthing paid for a shitload of bourbon. But the people who like NEVERNIGHT don’t just like it. They love it.

LOOOOOOOVE IT.

They get tattoos of it. They make amazing, brilliant art for it. They write me letters telling me that Mia has got them through divorces, devastating emotional trauma, assault, financial collapse, infidelity, deaths in the family, fucking CANCER. I get letters from teens telling me that Mia helped them recognize their own sexuality, that they’d never seen themselves in a book before they saw her. These books are IMPORTANT to a lot of people, in ways that even now I’m still coming to grips with. And it’s amazing and it’s humbling. And I’ll be eternally grateful for the way you folks have loved my stabby bitch of a daughter.

But here’s the thing – no matter how much you love NEVERNIGHT and GODSGRAVE, DARKDAWN is the book you’ll remember most. The note this series goes out on is the one that’s going to stick with you. And given what this series means to people, what this character means to people, I didn’t want to rush this final book and fuck it up.

As I write this, I still have about 20,000 words to write on DARKDAWN. Realistically, it’ll be mid June before I’m done. It’ll be the book you deserve by then. And handing over the book in mid June for a November release is just too hard for my publishers. There’s still months of work to do after you hand in your first draft. Realistically, it’d be December before we could publish it, even if we ruuuuuushed. And nobody publishes in December unless you’re publishing a christmas book.

Mia is a lot of things, gentlefriends. But she sure as fuck ain’t christmassy.

So, no problem Jay, you say. Just publish DARKDAWN in January. It’s only 3 months later than you promised.

Problem there is, I have another book coming out in March – the first in my new series with Amie, the book formerly known as THE ANDROMEDA CYCLE (the name has changed, more about that next month). And then I have the second LIFEL1K3 book coming out in May. Point is, dropping three books in five months is fucking insanity. The sales of one will cannibalize another, the schedule would be fruitloops. I’d literally get no writing done for the first half of 2019, and writing is my drug. My therapy. It’s what I do to stay sane. Five months of constant touring and promo would drive me batshit crazy.

So, Fall release it is. Spring in Oz. September, to be precise. This is an absolute deadline. I swear it on the Black Mother – Darkdawn will be in your hands in September 2019. This is not a Winds of Winter scenario, I’ll be finished writing it in June. And please note I am not knocking Lord GRRM in any way – mad props to George, I love that guy. I’m just pointing out this isn’t writing/content delay. It’s schedules for other books that are spannering the works, not the writing part. The writing part is great.

I know this sucks. I know how disappointed some of you will be. But the book will be better for it. If I’d rushed it, if I’d pushed before it was ready, it wouldn’t be the book it’s going to be. The ending came to me a few days ago. It’s the ending I’ve been looking for the last six months. The other endings I’d thought of were good. But this one is RIGHT. I know it in my bones, the way you know you’re in love. The book is writing itself now. It’s like fucking magic. Everything is falling into place and I’m loving every moment of these final chapters. I’m sitting here typing this blog post and cannot wait to dive back into what I’m writing (Chapter 35, you’ll know what I mean when you get there). God, I can’t wait for you to read this thing, seriously.

But you’re going to have to wait a little bit longer than you hoped.

So, I’m sorry. It’s a bummer. We’ll figure out something cool to make up for the delay. In the meantime, if you must MUST read more of my stuff, you have LIFEL1K3 on shelves this week if you’re in America (July in the UK). And you have have my new series with Amie (new title reveal very soon) coming out in March 2019, and LIFEL1K3 2 in May to tide you over.

And then, in September, daylight dies.

It’ll be worth the wait, I promise.

Cheers droogies. And thanks for understanding 🙂