But Mark Lawrence read and boosted him, and he got a surge of popularity as word of just how awesome *Senlin Ascends* was spread around /r/Fantasy, and now he’s writing for Orbit. It had been rejected by pretty much everybody, and he was (I understand) discouraged and pretty much ready to give up on being a writer. Josiah is sort of /r/Fantasy’s “local boy made good.” He was in self-published obscurity for years after first publishing *Senlin Ascends*.
The Books of Babel series is fast becoming a modern classic of literary fantasy.I have a lot of feelings about finishing the Books of Babel. Multiple printings of the physical books revealed that there was plenty of market left. Orbit bought the series and proved them wrong. When I started pitching Senlin Ascends to publishers, some editors worried that he'd already found his audience. “He'd tackled self-publishing with considerable professionalism: he'd paid to have the script properly edited and also found a first-class artist to design the jacket.
He fairly fizzed with ideas for the series and by that time he'd garnered more than 500 five-star reviews on Goodreads.” I was so impressed with Senlin Ascends that I arranged to meet him while on a sales trip to New York. Orbit first signed a four-book deal with Bancroft in 2017 for the self-published debut fantasy series, The Books of Babel, which began with Senlin Ascends.ĭrury said: “Bancroft had already self-published the first novel of his planned series when I signed him as a client. “But when they are approached by the royal secretary and told the king pleads to be baked into a cake – going so far as to wedge himself into the unlit oven – the Wilbies find themselves embroiled in a mystery that could turn the nation on its head.” “Aided by hexes and charmed relics, they help desperate clients with the bugbears of city life, whether it’s children abducted by chimney-wraiths, infestations of barb-nosed incubi or the occasional troubled ghost,” reads the synopsis. The first novel in the new series, published in late 2022, is an alternate universe urban fantasy mystery introducing Hexologists Iz and Warren Wilby. Josiah Bancroft's new series The Hexologists has gone to Orbit in a six-figure deal.īradley Englert, senior editor, acquired world English rights to the books from Ian Drury of Sheil Land Associates.
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