"What the heck happened to Hybrids: Arrival?!"

or...

"Dude, I was reading that!"

The short answer is that Arrival has been pulled indefinitely.

The long answer is, well, long.

As I have mentioned a few dozen times in different places, Arrival was not the easiest book to write. I rewrote the beginning at least four times. And I mean a total "from scratch" rewrite. The character names changed, their ages changed, their personalities changed.

Then I thought it was done. I put it on the shelf to cool while I did other things and worked on the sequel. The plan was to have the sequel finished before the first one went out.

After some thought, though, I realized that Arrival needed some changes. Thus began Rewriting Hell that dragged on and on and on. By the time it was finished, I really had to get another book out and so, even though Hybrids: Conversion was still more of a concept than a book, I decided to publish Arrival.

I went full-out with Arrival, hiring a professional artist to do original art for the cover, shelling out a ton of money for advertising, making the promo vid and handing it out to every review site that I knew of.

I was hoping for a strong debut, leading to ever-increasing interest. My "worst case" scenario was that it would debut to the usual numbers and have about the same success as my other books -- which would certainly have been fine, just not something to throw a parade over.

So, after years of effort, tons of money spent and every effort I could possibly make to get people into this new series, Arrival hit the shelves.

And bombed. I mean, it really bombed. The first book I ever put out, the one that debuted when no one knew me at all, debuted to stronger numbers.

So, that happened.

I gave it time to find an audience. It did not. I think I knew I was in trouble when I couldn't even get people to read it for free in trade for a review. And the reviews seemed to come back with, "I didn't think I'd like this, but I did."

Obviously, I didn't promote the book correctly, or something.  That's on me, totally. Absolutely no one but me is to blame for Arrival's failure. But it sort of bankrupted me, so a sequel didn't seem like a very good idea.

After a lot of soul searching, some alcohol and a few curses hurled at the Fates, I decided to shelve Hybrids for the foreseeable future. I have a lot of other things to focus my energy on and I just cannot justify working on something that was this big a failure.

I pulled Arrival because while it sort of maybe could stand on its own, it's clearly a part of a series and I didn't want another half dozen people to read it and then feel betrayed by the author that there was no sequel.

And so that's the story of the failure of Arrival. Apologies to all those I left hanging, and many thanks to Arrival's few stalwart supporters.