Matthew Hughes's Blog: barbarians of the beyond - Posts Tagged "angry-robot"

I'm in Italy

I'm starting a new housesit that will run at least until December in a little hillside village in the Apennines, about midway between Rome and Naples. A very old-fashioned Italian house, more or less dug into the hill, overlooking an intermontane plateau of olive trees and farm fields. It's the birthplace of Thomas Aquinas.

It took us three days to drive down from Brittany, in heat that touched 40 degrees C at times, and with no air-conditioning in the car. And people think authors have a soft life. Well, of course we do, but we can still pretend to hardship.

Back on the internet, I've found blogged reviews of the first two volumes of my urban fantasy series, To Hell and Back from Angry Robot Books. The blogger is Rocky Sunico, who describes himself as a gay Filipino geek who picked up the trilogy months ago and got around to it only lately. Which is fine; I'd sooner be read later than never.

The reviews are positive and comprehensive. If you've been looking at the series on Amazon and wondering if you'd like it, I think Rocky's take on it will tell you whether or not it will delight you. If you ask me, of course, I'll swear that you'll love it, and you ought to get extra copies for your friends and colleagues. I'm told they make excellent Christmas and birthday gifts. Besides, it would be nice to see the trilogy earn out its advance.

Links to the reviews: http://www.geeky-guide.com/2015/06/bo...

http://www.geeky-guide.com/2015/07/bo...
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Published on July 07, 2015 05:18 Tags: angry-robot, costume-not-included, matthew-hughes, the-damned-busters, to-hell-and-back

Say what?

Okay, this one's got me puzzled. A few years ago, I wrote an "urban fantasy" trilogy for Angry Robot Books. I didn't know that urban fantasy meant vampires and werewolves, so I wrote about a high-functioning autistic actuary who accidentally summons a demon. Hijinks ensue and he comes out of it as what he's always wanted to be: a costumed crimefighter whose superpowers come from a wisecracking demon assigned to help him.

The series was called To Hell and Back and although I thought it was pretty skookum, it didn't resonate well with people who expected vampires and werewolves. But those who like their cosmology mixed with a hefty dose of ironic humor said nice things about the books.

They still sell a few copies a week but I figured that was the end of that. Now I see that Penguin Random House, who distribute AR books in the US and Canada, have apparently prepared a teachers guide to the middle book, Costume Not Included.

This has only happened to me once before, when Maxwell Macmillan published a teachers guide to my first novel, Fools Errant. It contained questions about the text that even I couldn't answer.

I'm assuming the PRH teachers guide listing is a mistake by someone in the cataloguing department. I tried following a link to order a copy of the guide and ended up at the Amazon listing for CNI itself.

 
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Published on August 07, 2015 04:24 Tags: angry-robot, costume-not-included, matthew-hughes, to-hell-and-back