Glynn Stewart's Blog, page 34

Children of Prophecy Paperback Release!

Children of Prophecy is now available as a physical paperback via CreateSpace.

This is something entirely new for me, and Children of Prophecy is my experimental guinea pig on this one. I have proof copies and the book looks gorgeous.

Happy reading folks!

-Glynn Stewart

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New Novel Release – Children of Prophecy!

New release!

 

My first fantasy novel, Children of Prophecy, is now available on Amazon.

For the next 90 days, Children of Prophecy will be an Amazon exclusive and available through the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owner’s Lending Library. After that, it will be released into the greater digital wilds!

A paperback version will be available from Amazon and CreateSpace before the end of the month.

Children of Prophecy

An age in the past, the world’s two greatest Mages fought a bloody war to a draw that slew them both.

In the time since, the Kingdom of Vishni has known quiet, and the Swarm beyond the mountains has grown in strength and numbers. Now, with the Time of Prophecy at hand, dark forces move to fulfil ancient visions.

Two men, born to poverty but bearing the blood of those ancient Mages, will rise to decide the fate of both Swarm and Kingdom as the fires of this ancient conflict rise anew.

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Watch this space…

An age in the past, the world’s two greatest Mages fought a bloody war to a draw that slew them both.

In the time since, the Kingdom of Vishni has known quiet, and the Swarm beyond the mountains has grown in strength and numbers. Now, with the Time of Prophecy at hand, dark forces move to fulfil ancient visions.

Two men, born to poverty but bearing the blood of those ancient Mages, will rise to decide the fate of both Swarm and Kingdom as the fires of this ancient conflict rise anew.

 

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Good news and bad news: reviews and piracy

The day after I launched Starship’s Mage Episode 4, I got on a plane to England and became roughly eighty percent out of communication for ten days.   The United Kingdom was gorgeous, much greener than Calgary is left by this time of year, and we had a fantastic trip.  Even got to spend a good while at Stonehenge – you apparently have a specific half-hour timeslot you’re allowed to be at the circle during busy times, but its quiet enough in September that they’re okay with you walking through the barrows up to the circle and spending a good long while hanging out there.

 

When we got back, I checked how Starship’s Mage had been doing while I was gone. The answer was “stunningly well”!  Checking Amazon for reviews, the novella was up to six five star reviews and had careened its way to #8 on the Kindle Science Fiction Short Reads list.

The reviews have continued to fly in for Episode 4, and the earlier episodes as well!  Right now, Episode 4 has ten reviews, and is still (almost twenty days after launch) holding down spot #20 in that SF Short Reads list.   September was my best month for sales yet, by about forty percent XD

The serial as a whole now has 44 reviews on Amazon, 29 of them five stars.  (The remainder are 4 stars, except for the one two star reviewer who was apparently looking for Harry Potter in Space, not Mages in Space.)

Episode 5 is under way and I fully expect to meet the target release date of December 15.

Alongside the release of Episode 5, I will be releasing an omnibus edition of all five novellas as a single e-book.  If everything goes well, the Omnibus will also be available as a physical trade paperback through CreateSpace on the same day.

I have a couple of other projects on the go that I want to keep at least a little under my hat for the moment, but the plan is that the Starship’s Mage Omnibus will be the second full length novel I release through Amazon and Createspace.

 

Now, the not-so-fun discovery of the last few weeks.

A short while ago, I finally got a fully functional Google Alert set up for ‘Starship’s Mage’ to send me any sites or posts about the series.  Every alert I have received so far has been some kind of pirate site.

I understand the appeal of piracy, to be perfectly honest.  Sometimes, you can’t afford something, or you think the price demanded is too high, or you just can’t get something in a reasonable way. But for a series of 99 cent e-books, it seems a little petty to go out of the way to pirate them.

Today, my google alert was a link to a forum post where someone had posted the covers, the blurb text, and a zip file of all four epubs.  I’ve been ignoring the weird random ugly looking ‘warez-style’ pages, and the strange videos on dailymotion… but this was a very well done, cleanly assembled, package of all of my work.  I was, and remain, somewhat boggled.

I’ve asked the site to take down the post, which is as far as I currently plan on going (it is NOT worth my time to chase pirates, as the impact on my sales is pretty clearly negligible) but I am a little stunned that someone would put that much effort into pirating MY work.

Guess its as much a sign of popularity as all the Amazon reviews, huh?

 

Glynn Stewart

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Starship’s Mage Episode 4 Launched!

Starship’s Mage Episode 4 has now launched! All pre-orders should clear through by the end of the day.

All Amazon stores (Kindle)

Kobo (Kobo)

Smashwords (Any device)

Google Play Books (Android devices)

Barnes & Noble Nook (Nook)

iTunes (iPhone, iPod and other Apple devices)

A world that defies all law and authority should be a safe port from the forces of the Mage-King of Mars. But other powers have learned about the Blue Jay, whose Ship’s Mage has transformed her into a deadly weapon. Bounty hunters trail Damien Montgomery and the crew at every turn, forcing them to seek new allies.

With both the criminal underworld and the soldiers of Mars pursuing them, they make a deal for a risky delivery in the shadow of a dead system. On the run, the Blue Jay and her crew set a course for the Fringe worlds, trailed by powerful forces who will stop at nothing to bring them to heel.

 

 

The post Starship’s Mage Episode 4 Launched! appeared first on Faolan's Pen.

Starship’s Mage Episode 4 has now launched! All pre-order...

Starship’s Mage Episode 4 has now launched! All pre-orders should clear through by the end of the day.

All Amazon stores (Kindle)

Kobo (Kobo)

Smashwords (Any device)

Google Play Books (Android devices)

Barnes & Noble Nook (Nook)

iTunes (iPhone, iPod and other Apple devices)

A world that defies all law and authority should be a safe port from the forces of the Mage-King of Mars. But other powers have learned about the Blue Jay, whose Ship’s Mage has transformed her into a deadly weapon. Bounty hunters trail Damien Montgomery and the crew at every turn, forcing them to seek new allies.

With both the criminal underworld and the soldiers of Mars pursuing them, they make a deal for a risky delivery in the shadow of a dead system. On the run, the Blue Jay and her crew set a course for the Fringe worlds, trailed by powerful forces who will stop at nothing to bring them to heel.

 

 

The post appeared first on Faolan's Pen.

Starship’s Mage Episode 4 – Preorders open!

Starship’s Mage Episode 4 is now available for pre-order at the following places:

Amazon (link will go to your local store)

Kobo

Smashwords

Google Play Books

A world that defies all law and authority should be a safe port from the forces of the Mage-King of Mars. But other powers have learned about the Blue Jay, whose Ship’s Mage has transformed her into a deadly weapon. Bounty hunters trail Damien Montgomery and the crew at every turn, forcing them to seek new allies. 

With both the criminal underworld and the soldiersof Mars pursuing them, they make a deal for a riskydelivery in the shadow of a dead system. On the run, the Blue Jay and her crew set a course for the Fringe worlds, trailed by powerful forces who will stop at nothing to bring them to heel.

Starship’s Mage is space opera set in a future we would never have predicted: where humanity’s far flung interstellar colonies are tied together by the Protectorate of the Mage King of Mars and the magic of the Jump Mages.

Starship’s Mage: Episode 4 is a 23,775 word novella,the fourth of five in a serial.

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Starship’s Mage Episode 4 complete.

So, sometime this morning my muse got her whips out.

I wrote 5,660 words today, which is definitely in my top three writing days ever.  (I don’t think it’s my absolute best day, but I only really have a record of word counts per day for this year).

So, at 23,531 words, Starship’s Mage Episode 4 is complete!

I’ll be editing it for about a week, and then it needs to go out to my beta readers, and I’m still waiting on a cover and…

Long story short:

Starship’s Mage: Episode 4 will be released September 15, 2014.

Mark your calendars!

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When Words Collide 2014

This past weekend my wife and I attended the When Words Collide writer’s festival here in Calgary, Alberta.  (Website is already starting to show the details for next year!)

I’ll admit to not having a lot of experience with conventions.  I’ve attended exactly two in my entire life – ShevaCon 2005 and World Fantasy Con 2008 when it was here in Calgary.  That said, I found that the WWC Festival was extremely well put together – there was none of the confusion over space, badges, panels or anything else that I’ve heard of from other conventions.

 

We didn’t attend as many panels and presentations as we were hoping, but we did make it into a few interesting and educational ones.  I was impressed with Sandra Fitzpatrick‘s presentation on business plans for writers as she managed to point out a few things I hadn’t thought of – and if you can teach ME something in terms of financial planning and writing as a business, you’re doing something right!

My friend Kate Larking (author of Novel Marketing) also had a presentation on the same topic as her book that went over extremely well (I, being an awful friend, missed it due to arriving at the Festival after she started – but I heard good things from unbiased third party sources!)

I did make it to Jodi McIsaac‘s panel on marketing your self-published book, which I came away from brimming with thoughts and ideas.  Not many of those are immediately actionable, but they are feeding into the website revamp that my PR team (also known as my wonderful wife) is planning for me.

Also attended a presentation on loglines (one sentence summaries of your book, using this formula on my Goodreads ads!) and a few on the general state of publishing and the impact ebooks, which were interesting and provided some food for thought.

A couple of the presentations I attended were a little too focused on genres other than mine (which is my own fault for mis-judging the panel) and there was one real stinker of a presentation (it turned out to be basically a fifty minute spiel of ‘buy our services’), but all in all it was a good weekend.

To my amusement, at one panel (on blending SF/Fantasy) the mention of one of the search hits I’ve seen lead people to this site – “science fiction about mages in space” – got the interest of a few people.  Including the presenter!  (We also discovered that searching just “mages in space” doesn’t seem to work.  We’ll be working on that ;))

I plan on making it out to When Words Collide next year.  If I’m paying attention, I may even try and sneak onto a panel or two (if they’re crazy enough to have me – we’ll see!)  If you’re in the area, or just looking for a convention focused on the art and business of writing, I suggest you check it out!

-Glynn Stewart

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Starship’s Mage Milestones and Updates

It’s been a busy month with work and school (I’ve started a new certificate program to keep up my education requirements for my designation), so things have been a little quite around here.

The Starship’s Mage sequence passed a couple of milestones in July though, and I thought I would point them out.

The sequence in total has now sold over 2,000 copies of the various episodes, with over six hundred people buying all three episodes.   Thank you everyone!  I am ecstatic, and a little humbled, by all the attention my little project is gathering.

July 2014 is also now my strongest month for sales ever.  Sales dropped off a bit after Episode 3 fell off of Amazon’s ‘new in the last 30 days’  list, but new readers keep finding their way to the Mage-King’s Protectorate.

Last, but by no means least, Starship’s Mage Episode 1 now has 11 reviews on Amazon (having passed 10 on me sometime in the last week when I wasn’t looking!), 8 of them five star reviews saying wonderful things.  All three Episodes are hovering around 4.5 stars on Amazon, which brings me back to ‘ecstatic and a little humbled’

 

Starship’s Mage Episode 4 is trucking along.  I’m a little behind schedule on this due to my brain insisting on getting more of the Space Carrier Avalon side-project in electrons before allowing me to resume Starship’s Mage, however my schedule has a lot of slack time in it as my work is known for eating entire weeks’ worth of evenings one way or another.  I fully expect to release Episode 4 on time in September.

Not sure how much I’ve mentioned of Space Carrier Avalon, but that has one full Act of a five Act structure complete.  I expect to be releasing this one (a full-length space opera novel in a more traditional SF universe) in March or April of 2015.

 

I look forward to seeing everyone’s opinions of Episode 4!  Now I need to go write it…

Happy reading everyone!

-Glynn Stewart

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