Author
I’ve just entered The Woeling Lass in this year’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off, a competition for indie-published fantasy. Looking forward to seeing how it does.
The competition filled tremendously quickly this year. There are 300 spots, and 109 of them filled in nine minutes! It slowed a bit after that, reaching 161 in 39 minutes. I got in there about 55 minutes after it opened, but my guess is it will fill even faster than the 24 hours it took last year.
Daros ended up coming in 15th out of 377 entries in the first ever Self-Published Science Fiction Competition run by Hugh Howey, missing the finals by a bit. That’s disappointing, but it was a really great ride, and I very much enjoyed getting to know the authors and bloggers as the competition progressed. There were four published reviews from blogger judges, and there may be more coming, because a lot more judges read the book as part of the process. Here are those reviews:
Two other favorite moments were:
(1) when a fellow author Ben Roberts made pixel art of Guzma after reading the book
And (2) when one of the finalist judges invoked Captain Torlo:
I won’t have another sci-fi book ready in time for the 2nd competition, but I am working on a new one and would love to enter again.
I’m doing pretty well on NaNoWriMo so far this year, with over 10K words in four days on my way to the 50K target. I’m trying a completely different kind of project this time, set in the modern world with a whisper of magic and/or sci fi, and with more of a sarcastic tone than I usually do.
I’m totally seat-of-the-pants on this one. I started a little after midnight early Monday morning with the barest hint of a concept, i.e. ‘an X, but it can sort of do Y,’ where Y is the magic/sci-fi part. No idea what I’m doing, but I’m keeping the pace up at least.
I’m also editing my epic fantasy multi-perspective Inquisitors’ Guild story at the same time, which is creating a little cognitive whiplash, but I’ll make it work. Probably.
It’s looking like August will be a good month for my very small literary endeavor. It’s looking like I’ll set a new record for Kindle Unlimited page reads, mostly on the strength of Daros. I’m not sure how much of that comes from the very successful free promotion I ran in early August, where I gave away about 3,100 copies of the book, and how much might come from other sources, like discovery on Amazon, participation in SPSFC, a giveaway I’m running on Goodreads, or just word-of-mouth.
Here’s how it looks. Most of it is blue, which is Daros, while the gold and red are Flames Over Frosthelm and The Outcast Crown, respectively. Daros came out in May, but it didn’t really catch fire until August here (where “fire” is relative to my previous success, nothing compared to the big leagues).
Note that it says “All 4 books,” but Traitors Unseen isn’t available on Kindle Unlimited, so it’s not included here.
Amazon rates my books at 550-580 pages for KU purposes, so this represents about 82 full reads, or 47,710 people reading one page each. Impossible to tell, except that some of the bars (particularly red and gold) are about 570 pages, which suggests that people are reading the whole book in a day.
I’ve broken 30,000 pages this month alone, and my previous high month was about 15,000 back in 2019, so that’s another way to put it in perspective. It might all crash in September, but I hope it keeps going.
I’m very pleased to announce that Flames Over Frosthelm is now available as an audiobook narrated by the wonderful Simon de Deney. You can hear a free sample and purchase on Audible.com, and the audiobook is also available via Apple Books/iTunes and on Amazon.
If you want to hear the free sample directly, I have it available below. This section is from the middle of the first chapter.
I am releasing The Outcast Crown, the sequel to my first novel, Flames Over Frosthelm. It relates the further adventures of the young investigators of the Inquisitors’ Guild in Frosthelm. This one is told from the perspective of Boog, the partner of Marten, the narrator of the first book.
Here’s the over-dramatic back-cover blurb: “Boog is back, helping to train a new apprentice inspector, Zekra Kalem. Together, they investigate a mysterious phenomenon afflicting the city – a troubling manifestation, always accompanied by a buzzing sound, sometimes taking almost human form. As they search for clues, they come across a murder of someone who should probably already have been dead and find hints of treachery and intrigue from a far distant land. The city they love may be under a threat as dire as it has ever known, and they are thrust into the twisting machinations of an ancient, deadly mistake and a curse that afflicts an entire nation.”
I hope you’ll enjoy the book. If you’d like a free copy of this book, or of the first one in the series, I have some promotional Amazon ebook codes I am happy to send your way. Just let me know in comments below.
My sincere thanks go to my friends and college classmates who have been so supportive as I’ve embarked on a mid-life writing adventure.
The Amazon book link is here:
The Outcast Crown
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