Slanted Jack is available for online purchase!

WARNING: Some Baen- and self-pimpage ahead.

Baen Books operates a cool ebook program, Webscriptions. With Webscriptions, you can buy online copies of books--and those copies have no digital rights management crap that restricts what you do with them. None. Nada. Baen Books trusts you, and so do I. So, come summer, you'll be able to buy Slanted Jack as part of a Webscriptions package.

If you can't wait, however, you can actually buy Slanted Jack now--or, more precisely, you can buy an eARC of the book. An eARC, or electronic Advance Reading Copy, is the book exactly as the author submitted it to Baen. A typical final hardback book includes the results of an editing pass, a copyediting job, the author checking the copyedited manuscript, typesetting, and the author checking the nearly final typeset book. You basically never see the book the author submitted.

With Baen's eARC program, however, you can. If you want to see the original Slanted Jack version exactly as I wrote it, you can buy it here--and read it months ahead of your friends.

Did I mention this book is almost 20% longer than One Jump Ahead? We're talking a lot more value for the money, because I didn't pad--I never pad; the story needed the space.

Of course, then you might want to see the final, polished result, so you can order the hardback when it appears. The folks at Baen--and I--certainly hope you'll buy both.

Hey, I never said the program wasn't out to make a buck.

Now, about this no-DRM business: doesn't it mean you could pass the book around to all your friends and thus deprive Baen and me of revenue? Yup. You could. It's easy; just email the file to them. You can rip us off. We just don't think you will. We're back to that trust thing: we trust you to behave responsibly.

All other considerations aside, I'm psyched that the book is now available for purchase. I've lived with Slanted Jack in my head for a very long time, so it's nice that others will get to join me (in the book, not in my head; that would be messy for all of us). If you choose to buy it, I hope you enjoy it.

Now, back to the third Jon & Lobo book, Overthrowing Heaven. The more I work on the outline, the cooler the story gets. I can't wait to start writing it. Excellent.