Books

In my last post (Prospectus 2023, Part 1), I talked about how I’ve spent the last year getting over most of the “learning curve” for my new writing and publishing career. In this post, I’m going to talk a little about some of my plans for what to do with that new knowledge.

I’ll start with an update on my major task last week, which was to do a deep dive on the extensive documentation for Scrivener 3’s new features. Scrivener’s a fantastic writing tool for serious authors, and I’ve used it for most of the last decade. It has many powerful capabilities, and it takes a lot of time and study to learn how to use them fully. That’s especially true of some of the new ones added since the version 3 upgrade.

I learned enough of Scrivener’s new compile system last month to create the upload file for the new Dawn of Chaos paperback. I spent much of last week learning the rest, along with its new “style” system. As a result, I’ve now been able to create fully functional template for the upcoming books in the Sanctum saga. That’ll start with the next volume, Crucible of Heroes. All I have to do now is write them. 😁

I’ve also made a “release strategy” decision on something that I’ve been debating for a while. I had decided to break Dawn of Chaos into an e-book trilogy consisting of a full-length novel (Hell Gate) sandwiched between prologue and epilogue novellas (Prologue to Chaos and Aftermath). I then released Dawn of Chaos as a “compilation volume” of all three, in e-book, print, and (coming soon), audiobook formats. That’s the pattern I’m planning to continue for the remainder of the nine planned volumes in the series. Each will come out first as a trilogy of e-books (consisting, typically, of two novels and a novella), which will then be published as a collection in e-book, print, and audio. So Sanctum of the Archmage will, essentially, be a ten volume series of trilogies.

I’m also planning to end an experiment I tried with further breaking the novels into a rapid-release series of “episodes,” as I did with Hell Gate. To put it simply, that just did not work out. So the next book, Wrath of the Peregrine King, will not be coming out in two parts, as I’d suggested in some of my newsletters last year. It will be a full length novel, and likely won’t be available until summer 2023. I am still thinking about whether I could develop an “interim release” strategy for parts of the series, so that interested readers might have a way to get some of it in installments. But if I do, it’ll likely be through a subscription service like Patreon or Locals, and wait until I actually have enough interested readers to make it worthwhile. 😉

In the meantime, I’m going to get busy on my two major book publishing projects: writing Wrath of the Peregrine King (WPK), and publishing Dawn of Chaos as an audiobook. Writing WPK will be especially interesting for me, because it’s the one book in the series that I didn’t already have an outline for. Readers may know that I’ve been working on this story “in my head” for decades, and that much of Volumes Three and Four (The Sight and The Miracle Worker) are already familiar to players of my Sanctum RP Adventure games. WPK represented a gap in the tale that needed to be filled, though, and I’m looking forward to finally filling it.

That’s all for now. In Part 3 of my “Prospectus 2023” series, I’ll go into some of my other upcoming project plans for the months and years ahead. I’m excited to talk about that because I feel very much as though this last year has been all about “getting things ready” for those future plans, and that 2023 will be the year when I can actually start moving forward on them. So stay tuned!