Another decade of Scalzi
If you're a fan of John Scalzi's books, some good news dropped last week: he has signed a new major deal with Tor Books, one that will see him publishing 10 more books with the publisher, for which they'll be paying him a seven-figure advance. If that sounds a little familiar, it's because back in 2015, he and Tor signed a $3.4 million, 13-book deal that has seen him release The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, The Last Emperox, Head On, The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Starter Villain, with When the Moon Hits Your Eye and another installment of his Old Man's War series arriving in 2025.
By my count, he's still got six additional books to fill out that contract, and this new deal builds on that. Over on his blog, Scalzi explains that he and his team and Tor began looking over the sales record of his recent novels and that "of the five books Tor had put out since the 2015 contract started, four of them had been New York Times bestsellers, all had been optioned for film/TV, and there had been rather a few award nominations and wins. Equally significantly, through sales and directly-related income, I had earned a multiple of the up-front financial figure attached to the 2015 contract."
That's not a bad place to be in, and around the release of Starter Villain, "we both felt like now was the right time to figure out the details of that, so that there would be no “end of contract” anxiety on either side of the table."
I'm a bit hit or miss on Scalzi's books: I think he's done some excellent work over the years, particularly with his Old Man's War series. He's touted his ability to write books quickly, and I think that's shown with books like The Consuming Fire and Starter Villain, both of which he wrote pretty quickly. They weren't bad, but I felt like they were works that could have stood to have had their release dates pushed back a bit and given a bit more time (something I think is always worth it with any creative endeavor) to write and rewrite.
Mind, my criticisms with the books don't seem to have affected the books in any way: as he pointed out in the announcement and his follow up notes, the books have done exceptionally well, sales-wise: hitting various bestseller lists and getting optioned for TV and film. I think much of his success comes from his desire to write voicy, easily-accessible novels, and those sorts of books have broken out beyond the confines of SF Fandom and into more mainstream, genre-curious readerships. When I interviewed Scalzi back in 2017, he described himself as Tor's "easily accessible, gateway science fiction author."
Which is totally fine: it helps bring people into the fold who might not have otherwise picked up a book. I thought Kaiju Preservation Society hit the right note for that wide audience, and judging from the announcement, it's done pretty well for Tor, which should broadly help the other authors it publishes.
So, I generally see this as good news: A rising tide lifts all boats. Scalzi followed up this announcement with some number crunching, noting that a bulk of his income isn't from books like Kaiju and Starter Villains, but from his backlist performing steadily year after year. I have to assume that Scalzi's readers don't just stick with him: they'll also pick up other genre books as well along the way. For the folks that don't particularly like his books? Well, there are plenty of others out there to choose from.
In a fun bit of serendipity, there's another indication from Tor that they're planning ahead for the 20th anniversary of Scalzi's debut novel, Old Man's War. As I noted above, he's noted that the book's his best seller by far, and there's a new installment coming down the pipeline in 2025. While putting this post together, I found that it looks as though Tor is re-releasing the books with new covers (I'll point to the piece I wrote last week about minimalist covers), presumably to celebrate that milestone and get readers excited for the next book.
The first two, Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades will hit stores in November, while The Last Colony and Zoe's Tale will hit stores in February 2025. I don't see updated covers or listings on the various retailer sites for the other two books in the series, The Human Division or The End of All Things, but it might just be too early for those to have appeared just yet.
Like any minimalist cover, your milage might vary. These are kind of neat, and they provide a fairly unified look for the series, but I do hope that Tor will bring back John Harris to do up the cover. It's hard to top his artwork.