best month and two anecdotes

The Lord has been good to me, and I’d like to thank you all, because May 2016 was my best month so far for book sales.

This was because FROSTBORN, my self-published “traditional fantasy” series about knights and orcs and elves and battle, is still going strong.

In commemoration of that, I’d like to share two anecdotes from the days when I still dealt with traditional publishers.

Anecdote one:

A really long time ago, when DEMONSOULED was originally published, a reviewer let me know that in no uncertain terms that traditional fantasy was dead. No one, he said, wanted to read books about knights and elves and orcs and battles any longer. No, the publishers wanted subtle fantasy about surly, morally compromised antiheroes.  Ambiguous fantasy, with no clear lines between good and evil, that was what the publishers wanted, and traditional fantasy was hopelessly unfashionable and out-of-date.

Anecdote two:

A long, long time ago, I submitted the book that would become THE BLACK PALADIN and THE TOMB OF BALIGANT to a publisher. Sixteen months later, I heard back with a standard form rejection letter, with a single personalized note:

“Sometimes I wish Dungeons & Dragons had never been invented.”

I don’t think they liked it.