Announcing the release of Without A Front: The Producer’s Challenge

It has been a long time coming, but I’m delighted to announce that the sequel to The Caphenon has just been released! Or perhaps I should say pre-released, because for the next two weeks, Without A Front: The Producer’s Challenge is solely available at Ylva Publishing.

Buying from Ylva is great for readers who want digital files, because you get all three formats (epub, Kindle, PDF) for the same price, and it’s great for authors, because we aren’t paying a huge overhead to Amazon and so we get a larger share. If you are holding out for a paperback copy, that should be available on Amazon next week. (Since those come from the printer, we don’t have exact control over the scheduling.)

On 23 October, the book will be available on all platforms and several retailers, including in Kindle format on Amazon. But you don’t have to wait that long.

Now then, I’m going to let you feast your eyes on this lovely cover, and then tell you a bit about the book…

Readers who have been following my work since the fanfic days know that I wrote the original version of this book back in 2006. This version is far superior for several reasons. First, I’m a better writer than I was nine years ago. Second, I had to rewrite this book to fit into the world I created for The Caphenon, which meant increasing the scope of its world-building and expanding the cast of characters. The epic romance that anchored the story is still there and better than ever, but the sci-fi wrapping, the consequences of the events of The Caphenon, the overall scope — those are new and bigger and more complex.

Readers who have never seen this book before will find themselves sucked right back in where The Caphenon left off. The events of that story had to have consequences, and they will continue to ripple through the series. Without A Front: The Producer’s Challenge focuses on Lancer Tal as she works to heal her war-torn world and simultaneously bring it into the future. Not everyone is happy about the new technologies, particularly the producer caste — and one producer becomes a bigger problem than all the others. Tal comes up with a novel solution to that problem, which leads her to both a sanctuary and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. But her choices in The Caphenon have left her politically vulnerable, and sanctuary and dreams are distractions.

As a responsible author, I must issue a warning here. This is volume one of Without A Front, and that means…yes, it ends on a cliffhanger. The story is entirely resolved in Without A Front: The Warrior’s Challenge, which will be published in November. We deliberately scheduled the two books to come out within a few weeks of each other for just this reason. If you buy the first one now, you haven’t long to wait before finding out what happened…and you won’t be left hanging at the end of volume two. I am not that cruel, unlike some famous authors we will not name.

The Ylva store works with both PayPal accounts and bank cards. I would caution readers against using PayPal’s eCheque, because PayPal does not tell you that eCheques can take a week to clear the bank, and the store cannot send the goods until the check clears. Nobody wants to wait that long.

And finally, because everyone loves a sneak peek…have a look at the first 29 pages of Without A Front: The Producer’s Challenge in either PDF or epub.