Pinch me, someone–I just saw “The Skystone” eBook!

Date: July, 2015

It seems to have taken an unconscionably long time to get this thing going, but it’s finally done and I received confirmation today, from my publishers at penguinrandomhouse.ca, that my original Canadian series, A Dream Of Eagles, which is published in the USA as The Camelot Chronicles and in the UK as Legends of Camelot, is finally available for purchase in eBook form, on all the major e-Reader platforms—Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Google, eBooks and iBooks.
That means all my books are now available in e-Reader format, and I know many of my readers have been awaiting that reality as eagerly, and for as long, as I have.
The reality is (and I’ve talked about this before,) that back when the series was originally published, there was no such thing as an electronic book. The technology was unthought of and even unimaginable, back in 1992, and it did not become a reality until the turn of the Millennium. That was only eight years later, but in terms of electronic technology eight years is several lifetimes nowadays, when new smartphone technology is rendering older versions obsolete within a year. I believe it was not until the year 2000, when I signed a contract to write the last two novels of the nine-novel Camulod cycle, that the rights to electronic versions of the book manuscripts came into play in standard Publishing contracts. From then on, every publishing contract has reserved the eBook rights for the original print Publisher and the purchase of those rights is incorporated into the negotiated contract.
In the old days of the early- to mid-1990s, though, “electronic” rights were unheard of. Who would have believed, back then (a mere 20-odd years ago,) that people would ever read—or buy—books that weren’t printed on paper?
And so none of the books in my original series involved the sale or purchase of Electronic Rights, and it was only years later that the entire area of who had the rights to what came up for settlement. It was then that the eBook rights were acquired by my publishers, and only afterwards did it become apparent that some of those rights (the electronic rights to the last two books in the 9-book cycle) were already in existence and inadvertently duplicated, thereby nullifying all the most recent contracts… It took a LONG time after that to sort those matters out—a time lapse marked time and time and again by plaintive queries from readers who wanted electronic access to the nine original Arthurian novels, irrespective of whether or not they bore the original Canadian or US titles.
Now it’s all done, for which I thank the Deity, and all the books are finally available on-line, wherever you shop as an individual purchaser. I hope you’ll continue to enjoy them in the new format.