Brent Weeks

A while ago, I told you that I had been nominated to the longlist for the David Gemmell Legend Award for fantasy. That list of 78 authors was nominated by publishers and put to a popular vote to decide on a shortlist of five authors.

Along with incredible, established talents like Juliet Marillier, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, and Polish best seller Andrzej Sapkowski, one debut author made the list. (Go on, guess.) Orbit publishing director Tim Holman issued THIS very nice press release. So, thank you very much, because it was people like you–who visited this web page and voted for me–who got me in. It’s an honor just to be listed with these great authors.

BUT! Although I fully expect to get creamed in the finals, I feel pretty optimistic, like THIS.

The winner of the David Gemmell Legend Award is chosen by the public. That means you don’t have to go to a convention, you don’t have to be part of a secret cabal, you don’t have to dress up as a Wookiee, it just takes 3 clicks. Start HERE. Seriously, it’s simple enough that I figured it out. (Though my wife explained the big words.) Voting is open now and ends May 31.

A note: because you aren’t required to login, in order to make sure you only vote once, they monitor votes per ip address. So even if both you and your brother or wife or whatever liked the book, be aware that double votes per household will get both tossed out. (And yes, I imagine some of you are techno-savvy enough to circumvent the system, but please don’t. Cheating to help me would devalue the award, and I don’t want that.)

Thank you again for voting for me, for telling your friends about my books, and just being awesome fans.

This week, I scrambled up two more spots on the New York Times Extended Best Seller List. I am now perched at #29. Whoo hoo! I also figured out that “best seller” is two words. I’m told it behooves a writer to know how to spell. Compound adjectives confound.

And I got this very cool picture (thanks, Heather H.!) this week, taken at a Borders. Nice folks to rub shoulders with, huh?

(Click to enlarge.)

Confession: I tweet. (Twit? Twitter?) At first, it started as a whim, an experiment with the social experiment known as Twitter. At first thought, the whole thing reeks of narcissism. Why should anyone care about my latest trip to the dentist? Or what wine Joe Bob had with dinner? Then, a great college friend (whose own TWEETS are highly entertaining), sent me THIS thoughtful article.  So I tried Twitter, quietly. I’m not an addict. I can stop any time I want to. And no, it isn’t taking away from my writing: tweeting is a good medium for brief wry observations on life or circumstances. There are no dentists in Midcyru. (A flaw in my worldbuilding? Perhaps. Or perhaps in fiction it’s nice to escape the mudanity of the Muggle world.)

So if you’re into this sort of web 2.0 wonkery, you can follow me HERE. Or if you want to weigh in on proper verb form, you can leave a comment below.

it just feels like one.

I have just made the New York Times extended Bestseller List at #31. (Apparently the Gray Lady didn’t resent that “pencil-necked rube” jibe a few posts back.) There are lists and then there are lists. It’s a little byzantine, so I’ll explain what I’ve learned:  The New York Times has bestseller lists for each book format: hardcover, mass market paperback (like mine), and trade paperback (the bigger, more expensive format). They also cover non-fiction and children’s books. Why so many lists? Because there are 172,000 books published every year in the US. And the main list of 15 spots is owned by nice folks named Patterson, Grisham, King, Steele, Picoult, Cussler, Coben, Meyer, and whomever Oprah likes. So in order to add some spice, the NY Times has the extra lists.

This is A Big Deal. Orbit says that according to their official guidelines, I am now “New York Times Bestselling Author Brent Weeks.”

When I graduated from college, I made a bucket list. On it, I believe the first three items were, “Write a novel. Get published. Make the NY Times Bestseller List.” As I got a little older and more mature, I finished the first item and realized how ridiculously improbable the second was, much less the third. My dream became slightly more modest: to just make enough to support my family while doing what I love. So this is surreal. I thought this was the kind of thing you work for a whole career to earn, and I certainly didn’t think I’d hit it with my first book.

I want to thank all of you who forced your friends to read my book. Hitting the bestseller list six months after publication tells me that this isn’t the result of a huge publicity push–not that marketing didn’t have a integral part in this!–but a late peak tells you that people are telling their friends. So you’re responsible for me being able to survive to write more books and live my dream. Thank you. And I want to thank agent Don Maass for taking a chance on me and Devi and everyone at Orbit for working so hard on these books. I also want to thank Borders. They’ve been awesome, and just last week they put up one of those little cardboard stands for me and fellow Orbit author Karen Miller/K.E. Mills. I wouldn’ t have hit the list if they hadn’t. There are supposed to be those stands at every Borders in the country, so I’ll post pictures as soon as I can drive out to my nearest Borders.