Okay, so let’s rip the band-aid off and deliver the bad news first. I know two weeks ago I promised to talk about the Black Library’s preorder process and compare it to some innovations other hobby companies have implemented, and then last week given how much content was already in the hopper I punted it to this week. But I’ve been working on that and expanding it, so I’ll probably end up doing a standalone piece with it rather than fold it into Black Library Weekly.
So if you cracked into the column today hoping to see that, I apologize, bear with me just a little longer. But on the upside, as we continue to monitor the “Wednesday Windows” of deluxe edition releases there was one rather intereting possible development that emerged this past week as Peter Fehervari’s Cold Covenant finally arrived. As to whether or not it’s a positive development, well, like the rest of them it rather depends.
Bulk Discount
In this case, it started with an early round of order cancelations.
Now, that’s nothing new on its own. Every preorder cycle for as long as I can remember, folks have occasionally (if somewhat inexplicably) received notification that their order has been canceled.
What made this round interesting is that some of those reporting a cancelation were folks who, for one reason or another, ordered multiple copies of Cold Covenant.
Now, there’s certainly a conversation to be had around the ethics and impact of this practice. On the rare occasion I’ve ordered an additional copy of a deluxe edition (such as, for instance, the book giveaway I ran last week), I’ll admit I feel a little twinge of what you might call ethical unease1.
Proponents will note that every copy they secure keeps one out of the hands of scalpers. Critics will note that it also keeps one out of the hands of legitimate buyers, and even if later sold at retail price still adds a potential layer of cost (shipping, which would normally be free to stores).
I’m going to sidestep that for today and focus on the cancelation of orders itself, because that’s the part that’s relevant to the anti-scalper initiative it seems that Games Workshop has been undertaking. Now of course, I don’t have any special insight here; like most of you, I’m on the outside looking in to see if I can make upstream sense of our downstream experiences. But it does seem to me that throttling multiple orders- in effect a post-facto enforcement of a “limit one per customer” stricture- isn’t an entirely unreasonable position to take. After all, if you’re going to hard-cap the number of products you’re going to offer, it makes sense to want to get them into as many different hands as possible (with the natural corollary being to disappoint as few people as possible).
The problem, as always, lies in communication, which in my experience is the element that companies tend to struggle with the most. In the absence of guidance and clarity, you’re relying on the community to read the tea leaves. You know how astropaths don’t send messages in the form of words and statements, but rather of psychic dreams and visions which require interpretation and discernment? It’s a bit like that.
Which is unfortunate, because clear statements of purpose and intent have the effect of reassuring a customer base that their concerns are being addressed. It’s free goodwill, just sitting there in a pile on the table. We’ve now (more or less) managed to figure out that the move to Wednesday Windows is to allow Games Workshop employees to monitor traffic and take necessary action during normal business hours. While yes, many customers worldwide have found the time inconvenient (and fairly so, it’s a big world), having official confirmation that this is being done to safeguard our interests could go some way towards mitigating the frustration that’s resulted.
By the same token, making a clear statement around quantity ordering would go even further, because if people knew that ordering more than one copy risked order cancellation, they might opt to simply be content with ordering one.
The problem with this- and here’s where we’ll park it for today- is that this can also open up a can of worms all its own. There’s no downside to letting the public know that preordering is moved to Wednesdays in order to more effectively fight bot traffic. But if you declare that orders in excess of two copies will be subject to cancellation, for instance, you’re in effect incentivizing the buying of two (an example of perverse incentive).
Ultimately, with all information being anecdotal it’s difficult to discern the signal from the noise2, but the scenario on the ground seems to be:
Games Workshop is taking more aggressive measures to combat scalper/bot ordering.
These measures are having unintended consequences to the community.
Games Workshop has chosen to remain opaque about what is happening.
So until #3 changes, all we can do is report on #2 and speculate on #1.
Wordforge on Facebook
Before we jump into everything else, just a quick reminder that for those of you on Facebook, the Warhammer Wordforge now has its own page here. Stop by and say hello!
Trick or Treat: October’s Black Library Giveaway
To ring in this year’s Spooky Season and celebrate hitting 500 subscribers on Substack, this month’s Black Library book giveaway offered you the opportunity to nab either the Galaxy in Flames Premium Edition or the Deathwatch Special Edition!
Congratulations to GDAR, selected through the magic of Random.org! GDAR was hoping for Steve Parker’s Deathwatch, so we’ll get that headed their way!
Arrivals & Departures
In this section I look at what’s coming up around the corner (Arrivals) and what’s landing on bookstore shelves (Departures).
Arrivals
Lots of goodies in the pipeline this week, as we not only have a book coming up for preorder this Saturday but also a Warhammer Community preview piece detailing three more!
Age of Sigmar has been playing catch-up nicely, with a first-half drought seeing some wonderful rainfall as we play into the back nine. Available for preordering this Saturday is Shadow of the Silver Wolf, the latest Neave Blacktalon book from Gary Kloster (Skaventide, The Last Volari). This will be available in standard hardcover only.
Next, there’s another Special Edition reprint headed our way with Ben Counter’s Grey Knights. Grey Knights was inducted into the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2004, and as HoF Committee AJ of The Paladin Journal noted:
As much as Ben’s Soul Drinker was a breath of fresh air among Space Marines novels, Grey Knights does the same trick again successfully. This time we are with the most secretive and important chapters amongst all the ascended warriors of the Imperium, and Ben tells a fascinating story about faith and evil.
Then, we have the next installment of the tremendously successful Illustrated and Annotated Edition series with John French’s Cypher: Lord of the Fallen. Originally from 2023, this is an interesting choice (I personally might have preferred Ahriman: Exile myself, but that’s just me). A first-person story with a notoriously unreliable narrator, this will be a fascinating opportunity to get into French’s thoughts in crafting the tale, and I’ll be very excited to crack into this one.
Finally, a question I’ve had for awhile gets a delightfully affirmative answer in Throne Questoris!
Victoria Hayward’s Deathworlder was my 2024 Black Library Book of the Year. Wonderfully gripping characters thrust into deliciously grotesque Tyranid body horror as the planet melts down around them, I couldn’t put the book down. Since then, though, I’d been surprised that we hadn’t seen another longform story from her.
It wasn’t like she’d left the hobby. She often shares her visits to Warhammer World on social media, and she’d appeared on WarhammerTV’s Scribes & Scriveners at the start of last year. But the last time she was published in the Black Library was in 2024’s Advent Subscription, with The Feast of St. Luthera.
Well, look who’s back! Not only that, but with Throne Questoris we’re getting a proper novel follow-up to Feast!
No word yet on a release date or whether a deluxe edition will be on offer, but we should find out relatively soon.
Departures
Nothing! All of our wallets and purses marked themselves safe from new Black Library releases this week.
Right on Track (Redux)
One of the great things about being a part of a creative community is that a creative community likes to, well, create things. From book trackers to eBay agents to RPG character and scenario generators, I’ve enjoyed shining a little spotlight on these whenever they bubble up from love’s labors in the code mines.
The latest comes to us by way of Marton Holmos, who has created the site Ordo Canonicus as a way to track books and lists. “I have been getting deeper and deeper into the Warhammer 40k lore in the last few years and have compiled a pretty exhaustive catalog of relevant publications in order to track my progress through them,” notes Holmos, “including cross-references between anthologies and omnibuses and the works contained within them. It felt weird to just keep this database to myself and not publish it in some way.”
Holmos stresses that he’s “an enthusiast, not a developer,” but the site has all the basics covered: your books (and ways to denote whether you simply own them or have already read them), ratings (both individual and community), and ways to create custom lists. Its database is nicely interconnected too; mark an anthology as Finished, and it will also do the same for all of the individual short stories.
As with all such projects, the more it’s used by readers the greater its value becomes. As it’s still in early soft launch mode, things like community ratings haven’t been fully fleshed out yet but as more readers jump aboard and rate their books, the better the star ratings will be. The site is completely free to use, and Holmos is keen to hear from users what they’d like to see.
The combination of a simple, useful layout and deep catalogue makes Ordo Canonicus worth a look, and it joins other user-generated apps in enriching the options available for getting the most out of our passion and hobby!
No Books, Just Awesome
Okay, a slight detour here to highlight a couple of articles this week that aren’t Black Library related, but just too cool not to share.
First, Gav Thorpe (Luther: First of the Fallen, Kill Team) wrote about a recent interaction he had with a trio of fans. Instead, he accepted an invitation to be Guest of Honor to a small event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Inquisitor game, and what they pulled together has to be seen to be believed. Incredible!
Then there’s this piece by Timothy Linward over at Wargamer, about an American Custodes player who has tracked his units’ every performance for the past four years.
Foster started playing Warhammer 40k, and the Custodes, in spring 2021. “I thought it would be cool if each model had a name, leaning into the ‘Earning of a Name’ aspect of Custodes lore”, he recalls. With the help of a buddy who owned a 3D printer he began making nameplates. Then, he says, “I had the epiphany that if they all had unique names, I could track what each model accomplished in a game”.
This kind of ridiculousness only resonates with a certain kind of person, I suspect, but as it happens I’m one of those people. I remember tacking a baseball-like level of metrics in my games of BattleTech way back in the day, and even now I sometimes give in to the compulsion to track every military unit each city produces in games of Civilization, renaming them in-game to be 5th Berlin or 8th Washington (and then giving then official nicknames after particularly noteworthy battles).
Enjoy!
ICYMI
Here’s what’s been going on this week for Warhammer content!
Warhammer Wordforge
Last week’s Black Library feature was the second installment of The Writer Files, a companion series to WarhammerTV’s Scribes & Scriveners. Under the lens this time was Mike Vincent, who discussed his Night Lords work for The Remnant Blade!
It’s another Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame weekend, which means a new installment of the companion series, The Hall Monitor. This one was a lot of fun, as we broke out the Top Twenty best-performing books (based on public voting data) for each of the four lines (Horus Heresy, 40K, Fantasy, and Age of Sigmar).
Less of an article and more of a resource, I added a page on the site to keep track of the honor roll of Hall of Fame winners. The ‘Banner of Glory’ graphics at the bottom of the main articles were looking a little tired.
In Warhammer RPG Weekly, we looked at the curious case of the vanishing Necromunda RPG which was revealed only three weeks ago as part of the Big Autumn Preview, plus the first book giveaway for the RPG side will see one lucky reader score a stunning Collector’s Edition of Imperium Maledictum’s Inquisition Guides.
Finally, in Trench Crusade Weekly, this week was all about the October Rules Review- but we also checked out the officially-licensed coins from Baron of Dice.
Tabletop Battles
Our Lore Friday review this week was my look at Richard Swan’s Voice of Command- one of this year’s surprise hits. If you enjoyed Gaunt’s Ghosts, make sure to check it out.
Want to see who was inducted for the Class of 2018 for the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame? Here’s the main feature, and make sure to vote for the books of 2019 while you’re over there!
Warhammer Community
No Black Library-related content this week, aside from the new book announcement. I mean, three new books, who could complain?
WarhammerTV (paywalled)
This week sees the next Scribes & Scriveners episode drop, this time featuring Noah Van Nguyen (Elemental Council, Blood of the Godeater). Look for a new installment of The Writer Files soon, which is our Scribes & Scriveners companion series (you can see the most recent one here).
Around the Webway
Hall of Fame Committee Member Aasa Timonen dropped a review of Robert Rath’s The Wicked and the Warped over at The Warhammer Scholar this week.
Want another look at The Wicked and the Warped? Jen and Keri of the WH40K Book Club have got you covered!
Cold Open Stories
No new Warhammer content here this week (though a new non-Warhammer audiobook just dropped!).
Quick Hits
Missing some spooky in your Spooky Season? Make sure to check out Sci-Frights, a pair of sci-fi/horror short novels by Paul Kane (Triggers).
Richard Swan (Voice of Command, Tears of Raphaela) shared that he’d been signed to do another four novels in his Empire of the Wolf saga. Congratulations, Richard, just make sure to squeeze some more Black Library in there too if you can!
Nottingham Library is hosting a Fantasy Festival event next March, and take a gander at some of the folks on the guest list: Dan Abnett, Jude Reid, John French, and Gav Thorpe? If you’re anywhere near Nottingham, it sounds like time very well spent!
Can’t wait that long? Howabout seeing Victoria Hayward, Gav Thorpe, and Jude Reid this Sunday (10/18) at The Dukes in Lancaster for Litfest: Fair Realms: World-building in fantasy?
On the other hand, if you happen instead to be in Honk Kong later this month, make sure to check out the Fireside Chat event with Robert Rath (Assassinorum: Kingmaker, The Infinite and the Divine). Tickets are HKD $200 (about twenty-five bucks in USD) and 100% of that is going to Read the Room’s children’s literacy programs.
Maria Haskins (The Jagged Edge) shared that her story, Highway 1, Past Hope (originally published in The Deadlands) will be included in the upcoming Year's Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 4!
Coming Attractions
Here’s a list of the known upcoming releases from the Black Library based on the available preorder information we have. As always, take all of this with a grain of salt unless it’s Games Workshop-confirmed.
This section will be updated weekly in this column, and anything in bold has been added (or updated) this week.
Upcoming but Undated
Crucible of Fire, by Tom R. Pike
Raptors: War and Shadow, by William Crowe
Blood of the Bastion, by Evan Dicken
Whisperblade, by Hal Wilson
Throne Questoris, by Victoria Hayward
Cypher: Lord of the Fallen, by John French (Illustrated and Annotated Edition)
Grey Knights, by Ben Counter (Special Edition)
Current PODs in Production
Hive, by Dan Abnett (Special Edition, estimated deliver-by date of 11/26)
Upcoming in 2026
Cold Covenant, by Peter Fehervari (hardcover, Special Edition, 10/17)
Auxilia, by Russell Zimmerman (paperback, 10/17)
Dropsite Massacre, by John French (paperback, 10/17)
Apostle, by David Annandale (paperback, 10/17)
Shadow of the Silver Wolf, by Gary Kloster (hardcover, 10/31)
Death Rider, by Rhuairidh James (paperback, 11/19)
Ghost Legion, by Mike Brooks (paperback, 11/19)
Chem Dog, by Callum Davis (paperback, 12/17)
Ghazghkull Thraka: Warlord of Warlords, by Denny Flowers (paperback, 12/17)
Ashes of the Imperium, by Chris Wraight (paperback, 12/17)
Thanks again for joining me for all the going’s on in the Black Library, and see you next week!
An exception here is when I’ve ordered for someone in the community who was having technical difficulties at the time of the preorder window opening, for which I feel no discomfort at all because I know in that moment I am directly helping another person.
One person whose orders were canceled later reported it to be a bank issue, not a GW one.
Hey I made myself clear many times. I love Ben Counter. I couldn't give two shits about people saying his novels are bad or boring.
I simply love his stories. There's something, a switch that activates in my brain whenever I read one of his works.
He might not have the most amazing story or the most interesting characters or even a competent plot. But he always has something interesting in his stories he tries to tell or show.
People love to shit on Battle for the Abyss but you always see people quoting Galaxy in Flames.