Transmission One
Static is out. Fully out, as of yesterday, in every format I can put it in.
I have been sitting on this book for a long time. It is a strange thing to hand over. For years it existed only in the version I could see, and now it exists in however many versions there are readers, which is the deal you sign up for and still does not feel real the first time.
So: thank you. You are on this list because you asked for the first chapter, or because you read an early copy, or because you have been asking me for a while now how the book was coming. This is me finally having an answer.
What this list is
Not much, on purpose.
I am not going to email you every week. I don’t have something to say every week, and I would rather you keep opening these than start deleting them on sight. What you will get: release news, the occasional look at what I am working on, some of the research that went into the period, and the odd transmission from the world of the trilogy. When there is nothing worth sending, I will not send anything.
You can reply to any of these. Reader notes get read. All of them.
Where Resonance stands
Book Two is in final edits.
I’m aiming to have early copies in readers' hands in mid to late September. Release follows close behind. I am not putting a hard date on it in print yet, because the last thing I want is to promise a Tuesday and deliver a Thursday, but we are talking weeks, not seasons.
Resonance picks up with Sam on the road, and it goes north. Dial-up bulletin boards, dead drops, the rain-soaked British Columbia interior. She spends most of Static believing she is the only person alive who can hear what is on that satellite. That belief does not survive Book Two.
The trilogy runs to midnight on December 31, 1999. Silence ends it where the century ends.
If you want an early copy
Advance copies of Resonance go out through BookSirens, the same way Static did. I will send out the link to all subscribers the moment copies are ready, which should be within the next couple of weeks. One thing worth saying, since some of you did this for Static and are deciding whether to do it again. Post the honest review. A three-star review from a reader who meant it is worth more to a book like this than a five-star review from someone doing me a favor, and it is worth considerably more to the next reader trying to decide.
The unglamorous ask
If Static kept you up past a reasonable hour and you have not left a review, that is the single most useful thing you can do for it right now.
Static is a debut novel from an independent author. There is no marketing department behind it. What there is, is you, and whatever you decide to say next. Two honest sentences on Amazon or Goodreads is plenty. Reviews are how the algorithm decides a book exists, and they are how the next reader finds this story in all that noise.
That is the whole pitch. I will not do it to you in every letter.
One thing about 1996
People have asked why the book is set when it is set, and the short answer is that 1996 is the last moment the machines still talked to us out loud.
Modems sang when they connected. Satellites had voices you tuned in by hand. A phone was a place you drove to, with a slot for quarters and a cord some previous caller had wrapped twice around the housing. I wanted to write about listening, and about a person whose whole talent is listening, and that only works in a decade where listening was still a physical act that a human being performed.
The other reason is quieter. In 1996 you could not check. There was no phone in your pocket to settle an argument, no search box to tell you whether the thing you just heard was real. Sam has to go find out. Every mystery I love runs on that, and the window where it was still true was closing fast.
The monitoring stations in the New Mexico desert are real. ECHO-7 is not. As far as I know.
More soon.
Robert Tibbs
