July Public Update

I’ve been busy writing this month, which means this should be a simple monthly update, but I still have a couple of important-ish announcements to make. Nothing troubling, though. This update mostly just sums up past Patreon news stuff, for those wondering.

The news:

• Neural Wraith 3’s audiobook is available for preorder on Audible and releases on the 1st August. Check it out here: https://www.audible.com/pd/Neural-Wraith-3-Audiobook/B0C9FN6G2X
• The first book in my new urban fantasy series is complete on my Patreon, and I’ll be posting the second book there until Spellblade chapters are ready later in July.
• Speaking of my new series, it will be coming to Amazon around 4 weeks before I publish the next Spellblade books. I’ll release it at the same time I put up the pre-order for Spellblade 6. This is probably in August.
• Heretic Spellblade 6 Soon (TM). I won’t put it up for pre-order until both it and Book 7 are at least in a decent state, to avoid the issues I ran into with Neural Wraith 3.

Anyway, onto the important-ish stuff.

First, there was some hubbub about Amazon changing how authors submit books with explicit content. This situation is pretty uncertain at the moment, but I haven’t seen much to justify the proclamations of doom bandied around. Unless there’s some actual sign that Amazon is going to do horrible things to authors for ignoring this rather ambiguous change they’ve made, my books will remain unchanged. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you don’t need to worry. I just know there are some people out there who might worry that I’m making drastic changes or something. If my stance changes, I’ll update about it.

As a Patreon bonus, I'll mention that there is still no update on this situation. Amazon has remained silent over the past month and a lot of authors are choosing to just take the risk and not press the adult content button (as there's no punishment for not doing so right now). Maybe a bunch of folks will still try the fade-to-black route, and I've heard at least one author supposedly retiring a very successful penname. It's been a weird situation all around in a year with a lot of annoying stuff in self-publishing (such as the increasing amount of botted AI spam books that Amazon is struggling to deal with).

Second, I’ve gotten an increasing number of messages and comments about when X book is coming out. This is my own fault, because I have a bunch of series going at once that progress rather slowly. I also tried and failed to stick to a schedule this year before a lot of stuff went wrong.

So, here’s a very rough schedule update, with almost no dates, only relative releases:

• Book 1 of my new series, mid-August (hopefully)
• Heretic Spellblade 6, 4 weeks later
• Heretic Spellblade 7, 4 weeks later
• Demon’s Throne 4
• Neural Wraith 4

From there, I’ll work out some sort of rotation. Book 2 of my new series may slide in somewhere, as I intend to use it to fill in gaps between my bigger series. I don’t know when I’ll come back to Empire Reforged, as it’s difficult to find time to work on an old, unsuccessful series when I’m already in a rather difficult year. Finishing my bigger series seems like a sounder idea, and I now have a more straightforward series to publish during my longer breaks between books.

Anyway, I’ll keep plugging away. My plan remains to save up some books before I start publishing again, in order to rebuild some momentum. I’m posting plenty of chapters on Patreon if you don’t want to wait another month or two for a new book. Otherwise, I’ll see you in August when the Neural Wraith 3 audio comes out.