The Guadel Chronicles #3 has been started!

Honestly I can’t believe another two plus weeks have already passed!  I’ve got a few updates; the first of which is that Torn is now available as an audio book!  You can get it from Amazon, Audible or iTunes.

Torn is narrated by Clifton Satterfield and I have to say that not only is he extremely talented, he was also a real pleasure to work with.  I’m very happy with the way that Torn turned out and am looking forward to seeing the Broken audio book go live in the near future.

I’ll probably be pausing the commission of additional audio books for a little while.  I’m anxious to eventually see all of my work available as an audio book; but despite the fact that the narrators are doing all of the heavy lifting, it still ends up being a pretty hefty time commitment for me to review and approve the audio files.  If Broken, Torn, and Frozen Prospects all sell well as audio books, I’ll push getting additional audio books out higher up the priority list.

Anyone that has happened to click on the Frozen Prospects product link here on the blog will have noticed that it’s now available at some new retailers (XinXii, Vook & DriveThruFiction).  Somehow I thought I’d pretty much exhausted the places that I could easily get to as an Indie author, but it turns out I was incredibly wrong and I couldn’t be happier.  I’ve got a list of eight more retailers to go out and investigate, which is incredibly exciting to me because each book at each retailer represents another hook out there by which I can hopefully bring in more readers.  Unfortunately I’m seeing that getting all 15 of my titles up at each retailer is going to require a sizable chunk of time.

In other news, it looks like Broken has now dropped out of the top 200 free books at iTunes.  It’s been a great ride, literally for weeks and weeks; and while I would have loved to see it continue to stay up there for months to come, I’m really gratefully to all of you who helped keep it there for so long.  As I’m writing this Broken is still number 36 in the top free Children’s Fiction, and Torn and Splintered have bounced in and out of the top 200 paid Children’s Fiction.  Splintered is currently #128.  Again, thank you to everyone that has helped spread the word about Va’del & Jain or Alec & Adri.  My being able to ‘write’ full time is mostly due to you all telling friends and family and I’m overwhelmed at having this chance.

It’s now become clear that if I’m not careful, I could spend all or nearly all of my time doing stuff that needs done but which isn’t the creative writing that my current fans are after and which they rightly deserve.  Because of that realization, I’ve pressed forward with book 3 of the Guadel Chronicles and have decided that all the rest of the stuff on my to-do list each day will simply have to wait until I’ve managed to get my daily quota of writing in.  I’ll leave an hour or so each evening to progress the non-writing side of things (like capitalizing on new retail channels, progressing the print copies of Frozen Prospects and Thawed Fortunes, and edits of the next two Reflections books (neither of which are Alec and Adri stories specifically-sorry, I really am hurrying every chance I get)), but please be patient it if takes me a bit longer than normal to get back to your e-mails.

Katie might kick me for saying this, and there is more than a little risk that we aren’t going to be able to hit this, but she and I have a goal of getting out True Believer, both of the Reflections novels, Guadel Chronicles #3 and the next Alec and Adri book in time for Christmas.  It’s going to be tight, especially if I let myself get very distracted with some of these other projects, but we’re going to try very hard to meet that goal as we know there are thousands of you out there already waiting with hundreds more coming onboard each month, and we’d like to be able to progress both of our major series such that you can relax with some of your favorite characters over the holidays.

As always thank you for all you do to help spread the word and for joining us on this adventure!

-Dean