Sadly, this isn’t the announcement I wanted to be making. A month or so back when I dropped that teaser image, I was expecting to be providing a pre-order link to Dervish: Third Book of the Ascendant shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, that simply wasn’t meant to be.
At some point while preparing the book, I must have made a mistake. I accidentally used the title of the second book Conduit instead of Dervish. Still not sure how that happened, but when I went to correct it, therein ensued a month-long battle with Amazon. Because apparently changing the title of your book after publication is a big NO-NO. They wanted me to delist it and resubmit as a new book.
Which was a problem, because another rule says that if I canceled a pre-order, they wouldn’t let me do another one for a full year.
And I kind of like doing pre-orders. It lets me provide a set date for the books release, lets me have a bit of stability to the whole process. I went back and forth with support, trying to get one issue resolved, then the next. I tried to explain it wasn’t an actual title change, just a simple mistake. Over and over again, I kept hitting a wall. It was no fun. Then I kept getting conflicting information, with one person telling me I wouldn’t be penalized with no pre-orders for a year, the next saying whoops, that wasn’t actually true.
FWIW, I don’t blame Amazon for any of this trouble. I brought it about myself in the first place by not checking everything over before submitting. And for an organization as massive as Amazon to try and process as many new books as they do on a daily basis, there has to be a certain level of automation, which means that sometimes an author will fall afoul of the system, whether accidental or intentional. That’s just the nature of the beast.
Anyway, to make a long story short, this weekend I decided to throw in the towel. I had been planning to release my book on the 15th of December, but now I’d have to tell readers that it might be out slightly before, slightly after, since there’s a 72-hour window once I hit the publishing button and you never know exactly when your book will appear on the marketplace.
But then, I thought to myself, why should my readers suffer for my own bad mistakes? Why sit on this book that I’ve had done for months now when I could just release it right away? Why not get it out there to the few hands that might be interested?
So that’s what I did. Shortly before publishing this post, I hit the submit button and sent Dervish on its way (triple-checked this time!). You should be seeing it hit the Amazon store sometime in the next few days, and of course I’ll be posting a follow-up link as soon as its out.
But that’s only the first piece of news I have! There is also a new series announcement, one that I am (hopefully, pending approval and any other potential issues) launching on Royal Road in early January. I’ve been wanting to post a story to RR for a while, and I’ve almost got a sufficient number of chapters built up that I feel comfortable now doing so.
The story will be much in the same vein of Fatedancer, but far more stat-focused, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. Have no fear, however, it won’t just be a bunch of number crunching, there will also be plenty of story, and cool characters, and an awesome new world I’m looking forward to sharing with all of you. In particular, I wanted to develop an MC that was different from my other works. Someone who doesn’t have Temperance’s maudlin attitude, or Luf’s rigid morality. I think this will be one of my more interesting creations, once it’s all said and done, but if not, I’m sure readers on RR will let me know quick enough.
The story’s name is still pending, but check out the cover image below!
(Before anyone asks, no, that is not AI generated. I actually commissioned this back shortly before AI art became a thing.)
Finally, I know there are at least a couple people waiting to hear about the next Bulletproof Witch book. I am not unaware that this one has been too long in coming. For reasons both related and unrelated to book six I’ve been delaying a long as I can. However! The time for waiting is almost at an end! I have recently begun my re-read of the last five books to refamiliarize myself with the story prior to writing the next one.
Book six, which will be title The Forgotten City, will probably be somewhere around 80k in length (so between the size of book 2 and 3) based on my initial plot outline, so I’m hoping to have it done sometime early in 2023. Obviously, I’ve been getting more and more off in my estimates lately, but I feel reasonably confident I can meet this goal. So, stay tuned, and hopefully I have more information to share soon.