I’m delighted, yet horrified, to announce that The Blade Itself was published on the 4th May 2006, twenty years ago today. Since then I’ve published 12 more novels, plus a novella and a collection of short stories, and written another yet to be published, around 2.5 million words of fiction, if you can believe it…

One observation that blows my mind – The Blade Itself is now twice as old as A Game of Thrones was when The Blade Itself came out. GRRM felt like a long established pillar of the genre to me at that point. Truly I must be part of the fantasy furniture at this one…

There have been a LOT of different cover approaches down the years, for international editions, for special and limited editions of one kind or another, even for a comic book adaptation which lasted only 4 issues, a few of which I’m attaching to this post. Some I’ve loved. Some I’ve been on the fence about but can’t deny the commercial effectiveness of. Some have been… hard to understand. But the original bundle-of-knackered-parchment style designs briefed by Simon Spanton and carried out by Laura Brett seem to have been as persistent as the book has. For a new hardcover release in the US, Orbit are going back to something very close to the well-loved original you can see at the top of the post.

The Blade Itself, and many of its sequels, has been translated into over thirty languages now, in many cases with a change of title. The Voice of the Sword, Power of the Sword, War Blades, Edge. In some of those (German, Polish and Spanish, for example) it sold well from the start and has been ticking over ever since. In others it had a bumpier ride (France and Italy, say). In still others it kinda failed and has since gone out of print (Holland and Sweden). Sometimes that’s because so many people read in English in those countries the translation market is naturally tough. Sometimes some bump in the publishing is enough to derail a book – a weird cover, the loss of the editor who believed in the project, the collapse of the imprint. Sometimes it might just be the different taste of a market. But the book continues to sell into new languages now and again – I believe Thai rights in the trilogy were sold the other day.

It’s always fascinating (sometimes baffling) to see the different approaches to covers and design different publishers take. Sometimes a copy arrives in not just a different language, but an alphabet I don’t recognise. It remains amazing to think that people of such different cultures are still reading this nonsense I made up in the middle of the night for my own amusement. Maybe even enjoying it…

The first book event I did was, I think, a signing at Forbidden Planet in London the month the book published. I remember there being about a dozen people there, and I knew maybe nine of them. A couple of years later I gave a triumphant lecture at the Neolithic village in Alphen a den Rijn in Holland to an audience of 2. Since then I’ve been to Eastercons, Worldcons, Comic Cons and events all over Europe and the US. I’ve become a regular at Celsius Festival in Spain and seen that event grow every year – last summer there I signed for a queue of nearly 1000 (took six and a half hours, since you ask). Here I am with Brent Weeks and Peter V. Brett in 2012 in Detroit:

Here’s to the sunny slopes of long ago… And here I am with Brent (sadly no Pete on this occasion), last week in Portland:

On that publication day in 2006 I was 31. I’m now (as you can probably calculate) 51. Back then I had no kids, was living in London, and still working as a freelance TV editor (mostly documentary and live music). In those intervening twenty years I not only got married to my wonderful wife Lou, moved to Bath and had three kids but have seen the oldest of them move out. I might have to start describing myself as an adult. When The Blade Itself was published there was far from an immediate transformation in my life. Certainly it troubled no bestseller lists. The book got a few reviews and I now know did great by most standards but to me it seemed to drop into a black hole. As Before They Are Hanged then particularly Last Argument of Kings came out in 2008 there was more anticipation, more reaction, but it wasn’t until Best Served Cold had been out a while, maybe five years since I was first published, that I could consider becoming a full time writer.

Without doubt a big part of the book’s success is down to my editor, Gillian Redfearn. She more or less pulled the Blade Itself out of the slush pile (where it had been rejected by half a dozen agents already), got it published (alongside Scott Lynch and Tom Lloyd who’ll also be celebrating two decades in the business this year), and we’ve been working together ever since – she’s a brilliant creative editor but also (perhaps even more importantly) a great champion for her authors and co-ordinator of all the different processes that go into publishing a book. No detail is too small to escape her basilisk gaze. I also need to give a shout out to my agent Robert Kirby, who has calmly and patiently piloted the ship, always with an eye on building a career rather than reaping a short term payoff.

The publishing industry, or at least my perception of it, has changed a hell of a lot in those twenty years – likely more than in any period since the printing press came along. When I started I can remember the big concern being that Waterstones had just taken over Ottaker’s (two uk book chains), and we had to support plucky little newcomer Amazon in the hope of challenging this high street behemoth. We all know how that turned out. Then there was the rise of e-books and a period when it seemed that physical books would soon disappear. I didn’t get an audiobook until Best Served Cold was released in 2009, when it appeared as a 20 CD boxed set, but with the rise of smartphones audio has become a more and more important part of the market. With The Devils, in large part due to the prodigious talents of Steven Pacey doing the readings (shown below last year in London), more than 50% of my sales have been on audio.

In the last few years brick and mortar booksellers seem to have rallied, publishers have improved the hardcover offering and the feel and design of physical books, and ebooks have somewhat gone into retreat. Subscription services (Fairyloot, Goldsboro Books and Broken Binding being some of those I work with) have gone from strength to strength providing all kinds of special editions with alternate art and sprayed edges, while at the top end of the market boutique outfits like Subterranean Press and Curious King are delivering ultra high-end limited and letterpress editions that push the boundaries of materials, bindings and design at costs to make your eyes water.

At the same time the internet – first through blogs and chat rooms, then twitter, reddit, instagram, youtube, tiktok – has transformed the way we learn and talk about books, how readers can connect with writers and fandoms can find each other and organise. Self publishing has become a far more viable route to market, and crowdsourcing offers a way to get all kinds of projects off the ground. I’ve even dipped my toe into those waters myself, with some help from artist Joel Daniel Philips and the guys at Lit Escalates, with the latest special edition of The Blade Itself in the warehouse and shipping in the next few weeks.

Most books appear with some fanfare, have a burst of sales in hardcover, then tail off in paperback and ebook and eventually disappear from view. The Blade Itself, and The First Law trilogy in general, by some alchemy I find hard to explain, is selling more copies than ever 20 years on. I was certainly lucky with my timing – it anticipated a boom in ‘grittier’ fantasy (I hesitate to use the fateful term grimdark) which helped establish a whole group of writers, and SFF as a whole is one of few genres which have grown consistently over recent years compared to a lot that have shrivelled.

Reading The Blade Itself now I wince at the odd thing, and roll my eyes at a few others, but overall I’m surprised by how good I think it is. There’s undoubtedly a lot I’d do differently, but I’m not sure I’d change anything given the chance. I’ve learned a huge amount about writing with every book I’ve done, and think without doubt my craft has improved, but there’s a degree to which you’re always trying to regain that sense of exuberance and passion you had in your first book without really thinking about it, when you were writing purely for the joy of it, without a thought for contracts, or schedules, or audiences. Warts and all, I remain fiercely proud of The Blade Itself, and I’m delighted that readers are still discovering it two decades after it was first published.

I hope I can say the same in another 20 years time…

The post 20 Years appeared first on Joe Abercrombie.