That’s right! It’s time for news about Jungle! LOTS of it!

There’s not even any point to holding back or writing a preamble, so I’m just going to dive right in. Partially because I’m pretty tired, but also because this news is just exciting. So are you ready? Here goes.

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Release Details

Jungle is currently on track to release in November of 2019. That’s right, next month. Likely before Thanksgiving. I do not have an exact date for you yet, but in the weeks ahead, there will be one, and Jungle will go up for pre-order.

Now, with this news out in the open, Alpha Readers and Beta Readers both! Feel free to talk about Jungle now. I would ask that you not spoil it for folks (please don’t be that person in Sitka, Alaska who got the first copy of The Half-Blood Prince and spoiled it for everyone) but other than that, feel free to talk about it! You’ve gotten the early look! Let people know what you thought!

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Cover

Now, with the news that Jungle will be releasing in November, I’m sure some of you are wondering “Yes, but what will it look like?” Well, while the final cover isn’t done yet, I have a test work in progress to give you all a pretty close approximation. You ready? Here goes …

How’s that looking, folks? I know, it’s incomplete. And there are definitely some changes to be made. Obviously the title needs to be properly shaded and made to match Colony‘s neat little 3D effect. The blurb at the top is going to change too. Unusual Events won’t be named here. But something like “The long-awaited sequel to Colony” will likely appear somewhere.

I’m gonna change up the stacked appearance of my name as well. Flatten it out. One line.

Cover quotes, maybe. They’d kinda mess with the nice clean look, though. I think I’ll pass, save those for the back of a print copy.

Anyway, yeah this is a test WIP, but what do you guys think?

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Stats

All right, so speaking of a print hard-copy, will there be one?

Ah … no. Not yet. Why? Well, for the same reasons as Colony, just … even on a grander scale? Why? Well, let’s compare some stats. Colony weighed in at 334,164 words in the final product. Add that to some formatting, and you’re looking at title that Amazon currently estimates to be 1,303 pages.

Jungle, meanwhile, is currently without formatting, without an author page, just the raw text, sitting at 457,267 words.

Yeah. If I follow the Amazon conversion (again, without any formatting and the title pages, etc) that’s still around 1,800 pages.

For comparison, that means Jungle is larger than all three Lord of the Rings books put together.

This Epic is big. Why so much larger? Well, it’ll make sense when you read it. At multiple points, I expect.

Let’s see though. Here are some other numbers to dwell on. 42 chapters, divided into four parts (and that number feels … significant somehow). Two million characters, not counting spaces (that bumps it up another half a million). If you read at a rate of two-hundred words per minute, it would take you thirty-eight hours and some change to get through the whole book.

The average audio-book is read at a rate of 9,300 words per hour. So in the event that Jungle got an audiobook, it would take forty-nine hours and fifteen minutes to listen to.

This sucker is titanic. And yet, somehow I fully expect that most of you will blast through it in a couple of days, a week at most (I know it happened to a few Alpha Readers). You might make use of a few “sick days” but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do, right?

After all, these words aren’t wasted. There’s a lot of ground to cover in Jungle. Jake, Anna, and Sweets—the trio from Colony—are back and heading home to Earth as we saw at the end of Colony but … I mean, did anyone really think they’d be able to go back to the lives they knew? With heads full of UNSEC secrets?

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Price

Now, with all this talk of size and mass, what’s it going to cost?

$7.99. The standard.

Yeah, I’m not changing that anytime soon. As I explained in The Price We Pay, that post about ebook pricing VS paperback, I think $7.99 is a pretty solid price point. Sure, I could do the Lord of the Rings thing and make it three books at $6.99 each but … why? There’s no size limit to ebooks. And it’s one, complete story. So it’s going up for my standard price-point of $7.99.

Yeah, $7.99 for a titan of a story. Deal!

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Previews and One Last Beta Round

So, naturally in the weeks ahead, look forward to previews and excerpts. Plus the official cover reveal. We’re getting so close folks. I’m poring over it right now, making editing changes and cleaning things up for the big day. Later this week I’ll make an announcement for a second round of Beta Readers for that final bit of spit and polish …

It’s almost here. Almost folks. So very close. Look for more news in the days to come, but for now?

Just get ready. If you think the ride from Colony is only just starting, you have NO idea.

So block off Thanksgiving, folks.

Jungle is almost here.