Photo by JR Blackwell

We are more than excited to announce a new novel by Mur Lafferty to the Orbit list! Her announcement is here. We plan to publish THE SHAMBLING GUIDE TO NEW YORK CITY worldwide in Spring/Summer 2013.

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We interrupt our usual service for an announcement from Giguhl, the demon/feline sidekick of Sabina Kane, star of the urban fantasy novels by Jaye Wells.

Hello, mortals.

Giguhl, the fifth-level Mischief demon, here. You’ve probably heard of my many accomplishments as the champion of Demon Fight Club and as the coach of the seriously bad-assed Manhattan Marauder roller derby team. But did you know that in my spare time, I am also the official sidekick of an urban fantasy heroine?

Her name is Sabina Kane. She’s half-mage and half-vampire and all sorts of trouble. And without me getting her back and providing color commentary, she’d be totally lost. I get lots of letters from beings who want to follow my hoofsteps into the sidekicking business. They think it’s all glamour and making sweet love to nymphs. Little do they know that it’s actual work. Today I’m going to break down the attributes required of every awesome sidekick . . .

 1. A sense of humor. Look, I don’t mean to be judgey, but a lot of urban fantasy protagonists tend to veer between anger and morose nihilism. Things can get dark pretty quickly without a sidekick around to make a well-timed dick joke. It helps if you have no internal censor or qualms about offending delicate sensibilities. In other words, if you can’t look at a corpse and improvise a joke about blue balls, you’re not on your game.

2. Speaking of balls, you need some. Hush, lovely ladies, I’m not being literal. Trust me, I’ve met plenty of UF heroines who make dudes look like fluffy bunnies. Male parts are not required for bravery. Regardless, since you’re going to spend a good portion of your time backing up your hero/ine while they battle Avenger demons and other nasties in dark alleys, you can’t be the sort to tinkle in your panties at the first sign of violence.

3. Flexible morals. Thank the gods I’m a demon and was born without any sort of annoying moral compass. Some of you might not have been so lucky and are burdened with a pesky “conscience.” My advice is to get over that ASAP. Saving the world isn’t pretty. Neither is hiding the bodies of your boss’s enemies. Or 4 a.m. blood and whisky runs. Guilt is for saints, but you, my friend, need to revel in being a sinner. Trust me, misbehaving is way more fun than piety, anyway.  

4. No sense of shame. Imagine you’re normally a seven-foot-tall sexy badass of a demon until your heroine decides to experiment with magic. Suddenly you’re spending half your time trapped in the body of a hairless cat. Are you going to let soul-crushing embarrassment get in the way of doing the job? No you are not. Granted, it’s no picnic to have to wear cat sweaters and knit caps, but at least you get to flash your dangly bald bits at unsuspecting bystanders.

5. Sexy dance moves. Okay, this isn’t exactly required for the job, but you never know when you’ll get a chance to partake in the forbidden dance with a hot nymph. Plus, you never know when someone’s going to challenge you and your hero/ine to a dance fight a la Westside Story. You gotta have your jazz hands o’ fury ready!

That’s pretty much it. Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on your handler. Like, say, if your heroine is a werewolf, she might be a real bitch who demands you wax her back around the full moon. If that’s the case, run like hell because next thing you know she’s gonna be demanding you pour hot wax on her undercarriage and no sidekick is paid enough to give a werewolf a Brazilian wax. Trust me on this.

If you have any other questions or, you know, just want to tell me how awesome I am, feel free to drop me a line on the Twitter.

 Giguhl out!

Giguhl can be found on twitter @Giguhl, and Jaye Wells can be found at her website or on twitter @jayewells.

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We released Jaye Wells’ new urban fantasy novel SILVER-TONGUED DEVIL (UK/ANZ/US) this month, and to celebrate this and the fact that there’s a lot of love on the Orbit team for all the urban fantasy heroines out there, we created a quiz to give you the chance to test your knowledge against us!

Can you guess which urban fantasy heroines uttered the quotes below? If you recognise one, comment with the number of the quote and the name of the leading lady who uttered it. Try to be the first to get them right! No googling, because that’s just cheating!

We had a lot of fun coming up with these quotes, and we hope you have fun guessing too . . .

1. “I took one more thing to bed with me, a stuffed toy penguin named Sigmund. I don’t sleep with him often, just every once in a while after someone tries to kill me.”
2. (“What up, peeps?”) I looked at the hairless cat for a moment. “‘What up, peeps?’ You’ve been watching MTV again, haven’t you?” (“Word.”)
3. “If the Apocalypse comes, beep me.”
4. “This feels a little bit like what a vampire bar would look like if it were a ride at Disney World.”
5. “Another werewolf thing. Like most animals, we spent a large part of our lives engaged in the three Fs of basic survival. Feeding, fighting and… reproduction.”
6. “She’s a thousand-year-old vampire who’s joined the cheerleading squad. There’s a whole different set of rules in play here.”
7. “So here’s the plan. I’ll get us tickets to New Orleans, we’ll go save the world from abstract evil, and afterward we’ll hang out in the French Quarter for a couple of weeks and blow off steam.”
8. “I was dragged through Hell, betrayed by my god, left in Jersey, and finished up nearly being drowned by a demon with a bad haircut.”
9. “Lycans are allergic to silver. We have to get the bullets out quickly, or they end up dying on us during questioning.” (“What happens to them afterward?”) “We put the bullets back in.”
10. “So in the sweltering heat of a July night, I sang a Christmas carol to a room full of fae, who had been driven out of their homelands by Christians and their cold-iron swords.”
11. “But the next noise to echo through the hall was one I was pretty sure I recognized. It was the unmistakable sound of the sh*t hitting the fan.” 

Clue: There are some TV heroines, some film, and some from novels, both Orbit books and non Orbit books.

EDIT: It’s 26th January 2012 and we’re providing the answers to this quiz, here they are now . . .

1. Anita Blake, of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels. 2. Sabina Kane (and Giguhl), the vampire (and demon/cat sidekick) of Jaye Wells’ Sabina Kane series. 3. Buffy Summers, from Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 4. Sookie Stackhouse, from the TV series True Blood, based on novels by Charlaine Harris. 5. Elena Michaels, the werewolf from Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld novels. 6. Elena Gilbert, from the TV series The Vampire Diaries, based on novels by L. J. Smith. 7. Jayné Heller, from M. L. N. Hanover’s sequence of novels: The Black Sun’s Daughter. 8. Dante Valentine, from Lilith Saintcorw’s series of the same name. 9. Selene, the vampire star of the Underworld movies. 10. Mercedes Thompson, a werewolf from Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series. 11. Jane True, the selkie starring in Nicole Peeler’s Jane True series.

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SILVER-TONGUED DEVIL is the fourth novel in the Sabina Kane series by Jaye Wells, and it’s OUT NOW to buy as a paperback or ebook.

The series that Sookie Stackhouse author Charlaine Harris called ‘fast-paced and fun’, these novels follow the assassin Sabina Kane as she tries to end the war between the vampire and mage races. In SILVER-TONGUED DEVIL, a series of sadistic murders threaten to stop peace talks between the vampires and the mages, but Sabina’s investigation soon has her questioning everyone she thought she could trust…

We really enjoy this series at Orbit, and we think that you’ll also love its mixture of humour, action and truly captivating characters. (My personal favourite? The demon ‘Giguhl’, trapped in the form of a hairless cat!) If you haven’t yet managed to read RED-HEADED STEPCHILD, THE MAGE IN BLACK, and GREEN-EYED DEMON, here are several more people who think you should…

A fast-paced trip through a dark and dangerous landscape featuring an unusual take on vampires, mages, faeries, and demons. It hooks you on page one and takes you for a great ride!” – Kat Richardson, author of the Greywalker series

The series is truly fab… a great urban fantasy I would definitely recommend.” – Book Chick City

Wells burns up the pages as if they were soaked in gasoline. Jaye Wells is the next coming of LKH and Kim Harrison.” – Paul Goat Allen, Barnes & Noble Explorations

A seriously wild ride.” (Top Pick!) – RT Book Reviews

Plenty of humour alongside the action and suspense’ – Deathray

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A great series deserves great covers, so I hope you’ll agree we’ve done them justice. Little, Brown inhouse designer Hannah Clark’s creative interpretation of my loose brief (which boiled down to “it needs to look like urban fantasy but I want it to be new and different”) has led to this wonderfully fresh and original cover style – thanks Hannah!

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Here’s all the wallpaper download links…if anyone needs a specific dimension made, let us know!

1024 x 768 | 1280 x 800 | 1440 x 900 | 1680 x 1050 |1920 x 1200 | iPhone | iPad

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Here’s a bittersweet cover launch for you – sweet, because it’s another great cover by Calvin Chu, showing one of my favorite Lilith Saintcrow heroines, Jill Kismet. Bitter because it’s the finale of the Jill Kismet series! I love the graphic feel of these covers, it’s been a really fresh take on the urban fantasy style, and both Jill Kismet & Dante Valentine were well-characterized by the illustrations. In this book we really wanted to refer back to the first cover (Night Shift) and bring the series full-circle with a close-up shot. After the jump, see the whole series together, and a teaser…

Jill Kismet is back from the grave in this explosive conclusion to Lilith Saintcrow’s urban fantasy series. 

She wakes up in her own grave. She doesn’t know who put her there, she doesn’t know where she is, and she has no friends or family.

She only knows two things: She has a job to do: cleansing the night of evil. And she knows her name.

Jill Kismet.

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Having a long series of books (aka more than a trilogy) is a lot of fun, because over time, just as the reader does, you get a better feel for the character, and it definitely comes out in the cover art. Craig White has been really hitting his stride with Sabina Kane, I feel like each cover has more and more personality. The great photo shoots by Shirley Green with Toni Busker as our model certainly help. Toni is a veteran of many geek projects, and she is super fun to work with as she is always game for climbing about and playing with all kinds of weapons…Actually you may recognize her as a mermaid in the recent Pirates of the Caribbean #4. If that’s not geek cred for a cover model, I don’t know what is.

So, back to the cover at hand – as you can see, Sabina is back and prowling in NYC, and after the jump you can get a little teaser, along with the covers in order…

Now that the threat of war has passed, Sabina Kane is ready to focus on the future. Her relationship with Adam Lazarus is getting stronger and she’s helping her sister, Maisie, overcome the trauma of her captivity in New Orleans. Even Giguhl is managing to stay out of trouble thanks to the arrival of Pussy Willow and his new roller derby team. But as much as Sabina wants to feel hopeful about the future, part of her doesn’t trust that peace is possible. 

Her suspicions are confirmed when a string of sadistic murders threaten to stall treaty negotiations between the mages and the vampires. Sabina pitches in to find the killer, but her investigation soon leads her down dark paths that have her questioning everyone she thought she could trust. And the closer she gets to the killer, the more Sabina begins to suspect this is one foe she may not be able to kill.

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The real problem isn’t finding good artists, it’s wishing I had enough good projects for all the fabulous artists I know of! And I love getting people who haven’t worked on a lot of book covers to work on a cover for me, I think it keeps the art really fresh. So I am always walking around with a “dream team” list in the back of my head. And David Seidman was on that list for a while…until I heard that we were going to do an omnibus edition of Trent Jamieson’s Deathworks Series, and I knew he would be perfect for it. I’m not sure where I first saw David’s work. It was either on facebook or it was his Coheed and Cambria picture disk. Either way I just had a gut feeling he would have a fabulous take on these books, which is kind of a little Constantine by way of The Office. Or Office Space, actually. We really wanted to capture the bored sick-of-this-damn-cubicle attitude, while showing a bit of the supernatural. If you want to get a good intro you can read the opener here.

As you’ve been reading over the last few cover posts, I love doing omnibus editions. I like them as a fan, there’s nothing better than getting a big honking bible-sized edition of a series, and as an art director, I love getting a chance to reinvent a character. This redesign started with shooting the right photo reference with Shirley Green. (Often an artist shoots his own reference photo, but the editors and I had such a strong sense of what we wanted that I art directed the shoot then sent the images we picked to David). We had a heck of a time finding the right model. We knew we wanted someone out of the vein of beefcake, someone cool, who could look so very fed up and a bit pissed. And look good in a suit, of course! But we settled on Jonathan Taylor and he was a great model, and totally a geek too, which makes it all so much more fun. Anyway then we picked poses we liked in-house, then sent the winner to David. He & I went back a bunch talking about tone and color, and he produced this fabulous illustration. So enjoy BIG after the jump, along with some shots of the various stages. And a teaser, of course…

reference pose of model Jonathan Taylor, by Shirley Green

initial sketch by David Seidman

final art by David Seidman

David weighed in on the cover process too:

“It is always exciting to work with a new client and see what stories and ideas they bring your way.  The concept behind The Business of Death was right up my alley and made this cover a blast to work on.  Plus, anytime I can work a skull onto a cover, it is a good day.”

final cover with type. i love all the skulls...

full mechanical by Wendy Chan...love the desktop & stationery on the back...

Reaping.  It’s a grim job, but someone’s got to do it.

Life is tough at the top when work is a matter of life or death.

It’s one thing to run Mortmax International as head of a team, but it’s quite another to rule alone.  Staff fatalities have left Steven by himself on the Throne of Death, and there’s no time to get comfortable.  The Stirrer god’s arrival is imminent, threatening life as we know it. Plus Steven has managed to mortally offend the only ally strong enough to help out.

And how can he ask someone to marry him when the End of Days seems inevitable? As if they’re going to think he’s committed. The portents don’t look good as a comet burns vast and looming in the sky and Steven can almost hear a dark clock ticking. He will have to play nice if he wants his ally back, and must address the madness of the Hungry Death within himself if he even has a chance at defeating the Stirrer god.

If he fails, Hell and Earth are doomed and wedding bells will be quite out of the question.

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After the jump, get to see the US back cover and the requisite teaser text…..and if you haven’t met Jane True yet, you really must pick up the rest of the series…here’s a fabulous review from B&N to whet your appetite…True Love: Nicole Peeler’s Selkie-Halfling Heroine Jane True is Paranormal Fantasy’s “It Girl”

Nothing says “home” like being attacked by humans with very large guns, as Jane and Anyan discover when they arrive in Rockabill. Seeing Anyan fall awakens a terrible power within Jane, and she nearly destroys herself taking out their attackers.

Jane wakes, weeks later, to discover that she’s not the only thing that’s been stirring. Something underneath Rockabill is coming to life: something ancient, something powerful, and something that just might destroy the world.

Jane and her friends must act, striking out on a quest that only Jane can finish. For whatever lurks beneath the Old Sow must be stopped…and Jane’s just the halfling for the job.

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