Charles Stross updates his readers on what’s in the writing and production pipeline, and in the process discovers a niche market that might just be viable:
[…] Because if there’s one thing guaranteed to annoy everyone, it’s embarking on a project that is bound to be at least a year late …
What’s the problem? Well, I only get one slot per 12 months with my main publishers, and they’re nailed down years in advance. And the 2013 slot is currently occupied by Neptune’s Brood, which I finished writing in July this year, about six months later than originally expected. Neptune’s Brood is notionally a space opera, but I prefer to think of it as a parable about the banking liquidity crisis of 2008; the setting is recycled from Saturn’s Children, albeit 5000 years later and without the overt Heinlein homage (and the characters). Unfortunately I’m a slow learner. A chunk of the action takes place on (or rather in) an aquatic super-earth with no land masses: consequently, the early cover art treatments rely on the theory that the book will sell best if, rather than somehow conveying the message that it’s about fractional-reserve banking fraud in a slower than light universe, the cover promises MERMAID BOOBIES!!!1!!
Hmm.
(I wonder if there’s a secondary market for fake dust-jackets for the easily-embarrassed reader, bearing the correct name and title but a different illustration? Signed by the author, even …!)
For example, here is the original cover for Saturn’s Children:
