Okay, I’ve had a brief holiday and recharged the batteries a bit.  Here’s some news on how things are going and the outlook for the Inheritance of Magic series in general.

Inheritance of Magic #4 is now with my publishers.  It’s now at the “Waiting for Edits” stage that I wrote about in my “The Process” series (that was written back when I was still writing the Alex Verus series, but the basic pattern hasn’t changed).  I’ll probably hear back from my editors somewhere around the beginning of the New Year, at which point I’ll find out what changes they’re asking for and how much work they’ll be.

According to my UK editor, they have Inheritance of Magic #4 pencilled in to be released on 3rd November 2026.  So assuming there aren’t any massive delays or issues with the edits (which there weren’t for book #2 or book #3) it’s pretty likely that you can expect book #4 to come out around then.  So we’re still keeping to a 1-per-year schedule . . .

. . . at the moment.  Unfortunately, this is where the problems start to come in.

In the case of book #3 (A Judgement of Powers), I started it around the beginning of 2024, and sent the finished manuscript in to my editors around the beginning of September (so, about 8 months from beginning to end).  I got the edits back mid-late October (so about 1.5 months later) and sent off what would be the final edited version around beginning of December (so about another 1.5 months).  Then it took me another month-and-a-half to do the preliminary planning for book 4, which I started about halfway through January 2025.

For this book (book #4) I sent the finished version off to my editors two weeks ago, roughly halfway through November.  If we’re using book #3 as a model, I can expect the edits back in 1.5 months (New Year), the finished version to go back to my publishers midway through February 2026, and for me to start book #5 around 1.5 months later (beginning of April).

Now, these numbers might not match exactly.  It’s possible that it might go a little quicker.  If my editors take only 1 month to get back to me then I might be able to get the edits done over Christmas break, in which case starting the new book around February-March is possible.  Also, Inheritance of Magic #4 turned out to be unusually long – I usually aim for around 90,000 words per book, but this time my final draft came in at a bit under 110,000.  So it’s possible that future ones might be a bit shorter/quicker.

But no matter how optimistic my projections for how many months each part of the book will take, and no matter how I add them up, it seems clear that the final sum is going to be greater than 12.  In other words, at the speed I’m currently going with the Inheritance of Magic series, it doesn’t look as though I can keep up the rate of one book a year.

I’m not happy about this, for a variety of reasons.  The first is purely mercenary;  I only get paid for books I sell, and I can only sell books once I’ve written them.  So each extra month that it takes me to write a book means a hit to my income.  There’s also the concern with retaining readers;  a year is already a long time, and after waiting 12 months for a sequel, there’s a good chance a reader will have forgotten a lot of what’s happened in the book before.  The more that gap stretches out, the harder it becomes for readers to keep track of the story.

The final reason I don’t like this is more personal.  Fantasy authors these days have kind of a bad reputation for not finishing their series.  It’s a bit unfair since the majority of fantasy writers do finish their series, but there are a small handful who don’t, and they’ve done a lot to reduce goodwill towards the others.  So partly as a result of this, I’ve tried to be consistent/reliable with my own writing, so that if someone finishes book #X in one of my series, they can be pretty confident that there’ll be an #X+1.  Dropping below the 1-per-year rate feels like it’s going to harm that.

Unfortunately there’s not that much I can do about it.  While I’m not 100% sure why I take longer to finish a book than I used to, I think it’s probably a couple of reasons.  First, my books are just more complicated these days, with more moving parts and a more involved ongoing storyline (this started back in the second half of Alex Verus and hasn’t gotten any simpler with Inheritance of Magic).  This isn’t something I can change easily and I’m not sure I would even if I wanted to, since I quite like big long involved stories.  The second reason is that my personal life is a lot fuller these days:  in the early days of the Alex Verus series I was single, whereas nowadays I’m married with several small children (which unsurprisingly is also not something that I’m looking to change).  So I simply don’t have as much time as I used to!

So if current trends persist, while Inheritance of Magic #4 will be coming out in November 2026, it feels very unlikely that Inheritance of Magic #5 will be coming out in November 2027.  Or in 2027 at all, for that matter.  Spring 2028 is probably more realistic.

On the positive, side, I can pretty much promise you that it will still be coming out, just a few months later than I’d like.  I’ve got no plans to stop writing the Inheritance of Magic series any time soon and fortunately it seems to be selling well enough that there’s nothing forcing me to do so.  So the way things are going, I should be able to write it all the way to its conclusion.

Maybe I’ll just make the series a little bit shorter.  If I make the series 1o or 11 books instead of the Alex Verus series’s 12, that would be kind of like giving myself an extra few months per volume, right?  (Well, maybe not.)

Anyway, this has gone on for a while at this point, so I’ll bring it to a close here.  Just to reiterate, none of this is going to affect the release date for book #4;  it should be coming out in around a year, in November 2026.  This is more a matter for far-future plans.  But, if you’re writing a series that’s projected to last 10+ years, that’s kind of what you have to plan for!

In any case, I hope everyone enjoyed book #3, and as always I’ll let you know of any new developments.  Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving to my US readers!