The Big News

The time has finally come… From the Grave of the Gods, the first full-length novel in The Augment Saga and follow-up to companion novella, The Re-Emergence, is finally being released to the world on 1st November 2021! What’s more, you can use the links above to pre-order the novel right now. The ebook will be available exclusively from Amazon as part of Kindle Unlimited, so if you’re signed up for that service, you’ll be able to read for FREE.

At the moment, the Amazon paperback pre-order is only live for the UK store. I’ve spoke to IngramSpark about this, and they say it could take a while for all of the pre-orders to go live. Also, it’s listed as $23 or something, which is ridiculous: it’s going to be $13.99 when it finally goes live. The UK price of £9.99 is correct.

Also, Book Depository has it listed at 10% off. I had no hand in that, but it’s pretty cool. Don’t know when that offer is going to end. As far as I can tell that doesn’t affect my royalties, so go get it while you can :)

Funny story, I wasn’t originally planning on having it up for pre-order just yet. I looked around the internet at articles about how to do pre-orders for indie authors and lots of places suggested around 1-2 months. I also looked up how to use IngramSpark for paperback pre-orders and I set the dates to do what I thought was preventing them generating, intending to come back to it later once I had made a decision.

Sounds good; doesn’t work.

It turns out that the moment you put any dates into Ingram’s system at all, their database starts to generate pre-order listings for retailers. On the one had it’s quite good that it’s an automated process so authors don’t have to worry about setting it all up, but it wasn’t what I was expecting to happen. I tell you, it was quite the surprise when a family member contacted me to say they saw the book was up for pre-order! After a short panic, I decided to roll with it rather than try and muck about changing things for the sake of sticking to my half-baked schedule.

So I’m good with it. I only wish that there was a list somewhere of retailers that pull from Ingram’s database so I could go find all the pre-order links. As I’m based in the UK, I’m not familiar with most of the US retailers that Ingram supply, and it seems like they’re a much bigger force across the pond than here. So if you find From the Grave of the Gods available from a retailer I haven’t listed above, please do let me know (especially if it’s outside the US).

What else have I been up to?

If you’ve been following my blog, you may have noticed I haven’t posted in a while - my last post was a review for the absolutely brilliant The Crimson Script by SJ Hull about three weeks ago. So what have I been up to in the meantime?

Well, to be perfectly transparent, all of my mental energy for the last month or so has gone on things like the book launch and marketing for The Re-Emergence, and I feel like I’ve been obsessively chasing down reviews and checking my KDP sales page every five minutes! I’ve also sent a copy of The Re-Emergence to the British Library (because apparently that’s a legal requirement in the UK) and spoken to my town’s local library about stocking the novella by donating a copy. Plus on top of that, getting things ready for the lead up period for From the Grave of the Gods: adding it to Nielsen’s Title Editor, finding the pre-order retailers, creating promotional materials and mock-ups etc… It’s a rabbit-hole, and I definitely need to learn to balance it better. The result is that I haven’t felt much like actually writing!

On a more positive note, I’ve been really enjoying playing through the Mass Effect series for the first time via the Legendary Edition. I can’t believe I slept on this series for so long. The story and lore of this universe is amazing, and I noticed that - completely by accident - there’s more than a few similarities in the background lore to my Augment Saga. So I guess I can say, “If you enjoyed Mass Effect, you’ll enjoy my work” maybe? That’s pretty cool :)

Continuing my rampant media consumption, I’ve also been reading the fantastic Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell - expect a review to go up for that in the next few weeks - and rewatching the extended versions of The Lord of the Rings in glorious 4K with the newly released blu-ray trilogy. Those films are incredible and the polished visuals are beautiful.

I’ve not been totally ignoring my writing, however. Just recently, I managed to finish my detailed outline for The Flight of the Aurora, my next novella. Broadly, it takes place a while after the events of From the Grave of the Gods and gives us a bit of a check-in with the characters, with a much greater focus on the wonder of exploration. In essence it acts as a prequel/companion novella to The Shadow of Arcadia, the second Augment Saga novel.

Finally, some new Augment Saga artwork

I like making artwork for my writing. Not only does it help with keep descriptions consistent, but it also keeps things fresh by engaging my other hobbies. If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you’ll likely already know this, just look at my Illustration page. Well, here’s another piece of artwork I haven’t shared before: the En-Kadr class Heavy Cruiser from The Re-Emergence.

The keen-eyed among you may notice that it is also featured on the front cover of From the Grave of the Gods (albeit in a pretty bad state), and if you’ve read the companion novella, you’ll know why. But here it is in its full glory. I’m very happy with how this came out, and I do intend to do a similar “glamour shot” of the Qesh’kal, the hero ship of The Re-Emergence, at some point in the future.