The Song Rising has been moved from a November 2016 to a March 2017 release date, but for a good reason

Samantha Shannon, the author of The Bone Season series, made an announcement that probably disappointed many of her fans.  The third book of the series, The Song Rising, was scheduled to be published in November of this year.  However, it has been pushed back four months to a March 2017 release.

As disappointing as that sounds, she gives a fairly reasonable explanation, and after reading it, I definitely understand why.  Here’s what she wrote on her blog:

Various things that are out of an author’s control can delay the publication of a book. Originally, I thought Bloomsbury had chosen to delay the release for some of those reasons. However, I have concluded that this delay is, in part, because The Song Rising‘s first draft was not as strong as it should have been. I didn’t realise that at the time, but when I looked back on recently, I could see that it was lacking a strong core. There was a lot of great material, but something was just . . . not there. I felt the same reading it as I did when I read a very early version of The Mime Order, which I scrapped and never sent to Bloomsbury. It was like all the flesh and muscle and bone was there, but something was missing to bind them together. In hindsight, I think the root cause of this was simply that I rushed to send it to my publisher as soon as I’d finished a first draft – and it was literally a first draft, with minimal self-editing. It was hot off the keyboard when it landed in my editor’s inbox. I raced to send it off because I didn’t want my readers to have to wait a year and a half for the next book in the series. I assumed my editor would get back to me at top speed, as she did with The Mime Order. I desperately wanted Book 3 to come out in early or mid-2016. As a result, I sent Bloomsbury a draft that could have been better, which meant that my editor took longer to get through it and get back to me, which negated any time I’d saved by rushing to send it to her. Cue the long wait for notes and multiple rounds of edits that I’ve had to do over the past few months. I now recognise that if I’d taken a month or two to do a few self-edits beforehand, things may have moved faster.

In short, by trying to get the book to my readers quickly, I slowed things down. Lesson learned.

After having read her explanation, it should be understandable and I certainly wouldn’t want to get a book that wasn’t as thoroughly developed as it should be.  This is something probably many less experienced authors should consider instead of just pushing out books to meet deadlines.  Of course, I guess that would only work if the publisher would allow it.  And in this case, it looks like they did.

With that, she does recognize the importance of her books and her ability to write it out in the best way:

On a personal level, I’ve come to understand that I need to accept my boundaries as an author. I pour my whole heart and soul and life into my books. When my publisher first told me that it would have to come out in March 2017, I was distraught. I had been working so hard to get the book finished, and I have always wanted to be the sort of author who could get them out on a yearly basis – but sometimes, certain stories take a while to tell. And The Song Rising has been one of those stories. Blood, sweat and tears have gone into getting this book right. It’s more ambitious than The Bone Season and The Mime Order in terms of its scope, set in three different cities and dealing with many different characters and factions, so it was always going to take slightly longer to tease out and refine. It’s the book that lifts the series onto the global stage, where the stakes are much higher. It’s taken me a long time to accept that a larger story might take longer to get right; I equated being a bit slower with failure, and I shouldn’t have. Something I’ve finally learned from this experience, which I’d like to pass on to any aspiring writers reading this blog post, is that it’s okay, and usually the best approach, to take your time when you’re creating.

When March 2017 comes around, I hope that we’re all able to enjoy it as much as Ms. Shannon wants us to.

Source: Samantha Shannon blog