Jim C. Hines is auctioning off an advance reading copy of his forthcoming The Stepsister Scheme. The book will be published in January, but the winner of this charity auction will get a chance to read it much sooner.
Hines is running the auction as a fund-raiser for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Hines wrote, announcing the auction, “if the bidding breaks $100, I’ll start to throw in some extra prizes to the winner. How many prizes depends on just how high that closing price goes.” The ten-day auction, on eBay, ends 23 October, and the bid was already north of $100 within 18 hours of its opening.
The book is described, by publisher DAW, as “What would happen if an author went back to the darker themes of the original fairy tales for his plots, and then crossed the Disney princesses with Charlie’s Angels? What’s delivered is The Stepsister Scheme—a whole new take on what happened to Cinderella and her prince after the wedding. And with Jim C. Hines penning the tale readers can bet it won’t be ‘and they lived happily ever after.'”
Hines is also the author of the Goblin Quest trilogy.