Benedict Jacka

Hope everyone’s New Year went well!  I had a good break and now I’m back to work.  Here’s what’s going to be happening with the Inheritance of Magic series in 2026.

Inheritance of Magic #4 is still with my publishers.  I haven’t heard anything from them for a while, but as of the last time we talked, the plan is still to release around 3rd November 2026.  Of course, this assumes there aren’t any major delays or issues with rewrites, but the last couple of books didn’t have any massive problems as far as that went, so I’m hopeful that the same will be the case this time.

One slight issue is that I still haven’t had the first-round edits back for book #4.  (For an explanation of what ‘first-round-edits’ are, look here.)  The amount of time my editors take to get back to me with their edits varies – sometimes I get them back in only a month, sometimes it’s longer, and in this case, it’s been longer.  In the past I’ve often been a bit annoyed by this, since it’s left me in the position of wanting to start the next book, but feeling like I can’t do so until the last book is finalised.  This time, I’ve decided to take a different approach and just start book #5 anyway.  Which has actually been going very well – I got a lot of notes written over the December period, and started writing on the 3rd of January.  So far I’m about 8 pages in, which isn’t very much in the grand scheme of things, but is actually quite a big deal for me.  I often find that two of the bigger hurdles in a new book are writing the first words, and finishing the first page – getting past both of those often takes me a long time, so I’m very happy to have them both done.  If I can keep up this pace I’ll actually have the first 3-chapter section finished by the end of January, which would make me very happy.

Of course, this all assumes that I’m not changing anything major in book #4.  But at this stage of my career I’m a lot more confident in my writing than I was in the early stages of the Alex Verus series, which makes me more willing to look at a newly-finished manuscript and decide ‘this is basically good’.  So I’m not expecting to be doing a big rewrite of Inheritance of Magic #4 in the way I did with Alex Verus #1 and #5.  I will have to make some changes, which will probably take a fair amount of time, but with a bit of luck I might be able to do those alongside writing IoM #5.  I’ve generally found it very doable to do the copy-edits for a previous book while working on the first draft of the new one;  I’ve never tried doing the same for first-round edits, but it can’t hurt to try!  At worst I’ll have to pause Book #5 for a bit while I take care of Book #4, in which case I’ll at least have made a bit of progress.  At best I might be able to do them in parallel, which might be a long-term solution to the slowdown problem that I wrote about back in November.  If I can overlap ‘first-round-edits on book X’ with ‘first draft of book X+1’, then that’ll speed up my per-book writing time by a good few months, which could actually get me back up to 1 book a year again.

. . . Hopefully.  This is all still very speculative.  But it’s worth a go!

So for now, I’m going to keep working away at Book #5 while waiting to hear back from my editors about Book #4.  I’ll let you know once I do!

Hope your New Year’s went well, and that 2026 is starting off on a good note for you all!

I had a quiet holiday season;  not too much news to report for now.  We’re getting into the lead-up period to me starting work on Book 5, but I’ll write a more detailed overview of how things are looking for the Inheritance of Magic series next week (when hopefully I’ll have heard something from my publishers).

Hope that you had a good Christmas yesterday, and that the rest of your holiday season is a good one!

Got a nasty bug the past week which has pretty much zeroed out any work I was planning to do.  Could have been worse, I could have gotten it in that last week that I was rushing to finish the book.

I’m working on ideas for Inheritance of Magic #5, but don’t have anything firmly decided yet.

Okay, I’ve had a brief holiday and recharged the batteries a bit.  Here’s some news on how things are going and the outlook for the Inheritance of Magic series in general.

Inheritance of Magic #4 is now with my publishers.  It’s now at the “Waiting for Edits” stage that I wrote about in my “The Process” series (that was written back when I was still writing the Alex Verus series, but the basic pattern hasn’t changed).  I’ll probably hear back from my editors somewhere around the beginning of the New Year, at which point I’ll find out what changes they’re asking for and how much work they’ll be.

According to my UK editor, they have Inheritance of Magic #4 pencilled in to be released on 3rd November 2026.  So assuming there aren’t any massive delays or issues with the edits (which there weren’t for book #2 or book #3) it’s pretty likely that you can expect book #4 to come out around then.  So we’re still keeping to a 1-per-year schedule . . .

. . . at the moment.  Unfortunately, this is where the problems start to come in.

In the case of book #3 (A Judgement of Powers), I started it around the beginning of 2024, and sent the finished manuscript in to my editors around the beginning of September (so, about 8 months from beginning to end).  I got the edits back mid-late October (so about 1.5 months later) and sent off what would be the final edited version around beginning of December (so about another 1.5 months).  Then it took me another month-and-a-half to do the preliminary planning for book 4, which I started about halfway through January 2025.

For this book (book #4) I sent the finished version off to my editors two weeks ago, roughly halfway through November.  If we’re using book #3 as a model, I can expect the edits back in 1.5 months (New Year), the finished version to go back to my publishers midway through February 2026, and for me to start book #5 around 1.5 months later (beginning of April).

Now, these numbers might not match exactly.  It’s possible that it might go a little quicker.  If my editors take only 1 month to get back to me then I might be able to get the edits done over Christmas break, in which case starting the new book around February-March is possible.  Also, Inheritance of Magic #4 turned out to be unusually long – I usually aim for around 90,000 words per book, but this time my final draft came in at a bit under 110,000.  So it’s possible that future ones might be a bit shorter/quicker.

But no matter how optimistic my projections for how many months each part of the book will take, and no matter how I add them up, it seems clear that the final sum is going to be greater than 12.  In other words, at the speed I’m currently going with the Inheritance of Magic series, it doesn’t look as though I can keep up the rate of one book a year.

I’m not happy about this, for a variety of reasons.  The first is purely mercenary;  I only get paid for books I sell, and I can only sell books once I’ve written them.  So each extra month that it takes me to write a book means a hit to my income.  There’s also the concern with retaining readers;  a year is already a long time, and after waiting 12 months for a sequel, there’s a good chance a reader will have forgotten a lot of what’s happened in the book before.  The more that gap stretches out, the harder it becomes for readers to keep track of the story.

The final reason I don’t like this is more personal.  Fantasy authors these days have kind of a bad reputation for not finishing their series.  It’s a bit unfair since the majority of fantasy writers do finish their series, but there are a small handful who don’t, and they’ve done a lot to reduce goodwill towards the others.  So partly as a result of this, I’ve tried to be consistent/reliable with my own writing, so that if someone finishes book #X in one of my series, they can be pretty confident that there’ll be an #X+1.  Dropping below the 1-per-year rate feels like it’s going to harm that.

Unfortunately there’s not that much I can do about it.  While I’m not 100% sure why I take longer to finish a book than I used to, I think it’s probably a couple of reasons.  First, my books are just more complicated these days, with more moving parts and a more involved ongoing storyline (this started back in the second half of Alex Verus and hasn’t gotten any simpler with Inheritance of Magic).  This isn’t something I can change easily and I’m not sure I would even if I wanted to, since I quite like big long involved stories.  The second reason is that my personal life is a lot fuller these days:  in the early days of the Alex Verus series I was single, whereas nowadays I’m married with several small children (which unsurprisingly is also not something that I’m looking to change).  So I simply don’t have as much time as I used to!

So if current trends persist, while Inheritance of Magic #4 will be coming out in November 2026, it feels very unlikely that Inheritance of Magic #5 will be coming out in November 2027.  Or in 2027 at all, for that matter.  Spring 2028 is probably more realistic.

On the positive, side, I can pretty much promise you that it will still be coming out, just a few months later than I’d like.  I’ve got no plans to stop writing the Inheritance of Magic series any time soon and fortunately it seems to be selling well enough that there’s nothing forcing me to do so.  So the way things are going, I should be able to write it all the way to its conclusion.

Maybe I’ll just make the series a little bit shorter.  If I make the series 1o or 11 books instead of the Alex Verus series’s 12, that would be kind of like giving myself an extra few months per volume, right?  (Well, maybe not.)

Anyway, this has gone on for a while at this point, so I’ll bring it to a close here.  Just to reiterate, none of this is going to affect the release date for book #4;  it should be coming out in around a year, in November 2026.  This is more a matter for far-future plans.  But, if you’re writing a series that’s projected to last 10+ years, that’s kind of what you have to plan for!

In any case, I hope everyone enjoyed book #3, and as always I’ll let you know of any new developments.  Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving to my US readers!

Reddit AMA is finished and so is Inheritance of Magic #4.  I’ve sent it off to my publishers and now I get a brief break while I wait for the edits.

Next week I’ll write a bit about the projected timeline for Book #4, when to expect its release, and the future of the series.  For now though, I’m taking a break.  Last month has been pretty exhausting!

My AMA is just finishing up now.  I’ll probably try to answer any late questions if you guys have any, but the bulk of the thread should now be finished.  Thanks to everyone for coming, it was fun!

Link is here!  I’ll be answering questions for the next 24 hours or so.