The Indie Showcase presents; Gilbert Stack
Please welcome this week’s guest. Gilbert describes himself as a Historian and Author (Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, SF and Paranormal Adventures).
How I Learned to Stop Doubting and
Love Self Publishing
Books have long been one of the
centers of my life. It started with my mother reading Dr. Seuss and quickly
moved on to the Hardy Boys, The Land of Oz, and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three
Investigators. These were books that ignited my imagination and made me crave more.
By sixth grade I had discovered J.R.R. Tolkein, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Neil
Hancock. The bookstore was a six-mile bike ride and by eighth grade my best
friend and I were making the trip every week where I spent my paper route money
on new novels and new adventures. In high school I joined the Science Fiction
Book Club and my reading horizons broadened even further—Roger Zelazny, Robert
A. Heinlein, C.J. Cherryh, David Eddings, and Terry Brooks to name a few.
In high school I also started getting
serious about my own plots and my own books and tried to develop interactive
stories through role playing games. These weren’t my first ventures into
fiction—those stretched back to my imaginary friend when I was still in
preschool—but it’s when I first started thinking about becoming a novelist. In
college I completed my first full-length novel and I started studying history
to enrich my fantasy writing, eventually going to graduate school and earning a
PhD. During these years I wrote a lot of stories and started to collect
rejection notices, but it was only after I completed my doctorate that my
fiction really started to take off.
My first sale, Pandora’s Luck,
was to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery
Magazine and focused on a bare-knuckle boxer and a lady gambler traveling
together in the Wild West. It was an
action-packed crime story and was followed by fifteen others, mostly in the
same series.
While the AHMM mysteries began to
sell I continued to explore other markets. I sold a superhero story to Cyber Age Adventures, but it went out
of business before my tale could be published. That was a common problem with
online ebook companies, many of which published my growing library of stories
but couldn’t stay in business in the long run. So my urban fantasies—historical
and modern—made their debut but didn’t stay around long enough to let me build
a following. These collapses were terribly disappointing but it eventually
became apparent to me that the publishing world was moving in the direction of
the independent author and if I wanted to reach readers I had to learn a new
business model.
Now I’m pursuing my dreams
self-publishing my work on Amazon and through the Smashwords distribution
network. I’m writing fantasy novels like my Legionnaire series which has really taken off. It’s a fantasy
series built on an analogue of the Roman Empire (called Aquila) in a world in
which magic and the supernatural are very real. The first short novel, The
Fire Islands, introduces Lesser Tribune Marcus Venandus and his Black Vigil
Severus Lupus as they struggle to maintain the discipline of their unit in
extremely adverse conditions.
Maps are very important to
fantasy literature, and I was very fortunate to discover Chris Adams—an
amazingly talented painter who took my poor pen and paper scratches and turned
them into works of remarkable beauty as you can see first in this map of the
Jeweled Hills in the Legionnaire series:
And then in his even more
incredible map of my other fantasy series, Winterhaven:
And now I’m very excited to
announce that the first three books of my Legionnaire series are available in
audio format at Audible thanks to the amazing vocal talents of Will Hahn.
I hope you’ll stop by my website
at: https://www.gilbertstack.com/
And Chris’ website at: https://www.chrisladamsbizarretales.com/
And Will’s website at: https://www.williamlhahn.com/posts/category/lands-of-hope/
To learn more about my work. I’ll
leave you with the blurbs and covers for the first books in both series and a
sincere thank you to Richard for hosting me.
Lesser
Tribune Marcus Venandus, Legion officer exemplar, was exiled to the
disease-ridden hell hole known as the Fire Islands as punishment for the failed
political machinations of his father. While the days of the powerful
witchdoctor kings throwing skeletal armies against the shields of the legion
have faded into history, all is not right at the edge of the world. Unrest is
boiling once again as long dead darkness seeps back into the islands. With the
legion more concerned with its personal rivalries than with its duty, it will
fall to Marcus and his small, highly disciplined, command to put the horrors of
the past back in their graves and literally save Aquila from a fate worse than
death.
In the far off Duchy of Winterhaven at the edge of human civilization, a young knight investigates a most unusual murder while the Great Lords of the land scheme to expand their borders and take control of the duchy. A decade of relative peace is about to collapse and only young Dhrugal of Edgefield and his brothers and sister stand between Winterhaven and dark-spun chaos.
My thanks to this weeks guest for a great post. I hope you all enjoyed it.
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Have a good week,
Richard.
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