Winter Witch Preview

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Illustration by Jesper Ejsing

As you may have already noticed if you're a regular follower of the free weekly Pathfinder Tales web fiction—and if you're not, you should be—this week's offering is a little bit different. Normally, each Wednesday brings you a serialized chapter in a brand-new Pathfinder Tales short story by a promising new author or established fan favorite.

This week, however, we're trying something new. We realized recently that while the web fiction stories have hopefully been rousing some enthusiasm for Pathfinder fiction as a whole, we've ironically shown off very little of our flagship novels. To that end, from now on, each time a new novel releases, we'll choose one of the book's chapters and reprint it here in its entirety as a free sample (usually with additional art—we didn't come up with the idea quite in time to order new art for this round). After that, we'll make the sample chapter available in perpetuity both here and as a free downloadable PDF from the product page.

First up in this new plan is the just-released Winter Witch, for which we've selected the prologue as a perfect example of the kind of barbaric fun this book has to offer. Back when Elaine was first pitching the story to us, this chapter was the first thing she wrote and sent to us as an example of where she was headed. Once you've read it for yourself, I think you'll understand why we immediately knew we had to publish this book.

Normal web fiction will return next week with Ed Greenwood's explorations into the corrupt and combustible politics of Alkenstar, but for now, head over to the web fiction and get a first glimpse at Winter Witch! And as always, don't be afraid to comment on this blog or head over to the Pathfinder Tales messageboards to tell us exactly what you think.

James Sutter
Fiction Editor