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July 13- July 20, 2006 Edition

Goodkind’s Phantom

Due for Big Summer

Release on July 18

NEW YORK, NY/7/12/06—Terry Goodkind’s newest book, Phantom, will be released by Tor July 18 with an initial press run of 500,000 copies. It is one of the biggest runs in publishing, ranking near James Patterson and Andrew Gross.

Phantom is the latest installment in Goodkind’s fantasy Sword of Truth series. He will pre-sign 10,000 copies as part of his “virtual book tour.”

Goodkind’s first novel, Wizard’s First Rule (Tor Books, 1994) immediately established him as one of the world’s bestselling authors. Each subsequent book in the Sword of Truth series sold better than the one before and some twenty million copies of books in the series have now been sold.

The saga of the Sword of Truth started growing in Goodkind’s mind during the early 1990s while he was building his house in the forests of the northeastern U.S.

“It started with the character of Kahlan, and grew from that seed,” he says on his web site. “It really became a haunting experience. As soon as I started writing Wizard’s First Rule, I knew writing was my calling. I’d found something to which I truly want to dedicate my life.”

Goodkind was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, where he also attended art school, one of his many interests on the way to becoming a writer. Besides a career in wildlife art, he has been a cabinet maker and violin maker, and he has done restoration work on rare and exotic artifacts from around the world ­ each with its own story to tell, he says.

While continuing to maintain the northeastern home he built with his own hands, in recent years he and his wife, Jeri, have created a second home in the desert Southwest, where he now spends the majority of his time.