Chaos reigns this week
Hey and welcome back! I have lots of the best news of all, book news, so let’s get to it.
I think we have the final covers or pretty close to them. Before you scroll down and look at them, please keep one thing in mind:
***If you purchased the retail ebook copy of Chaos Rises from us, either through:
our shop or
the kickstarter that launched it last year or
you got a copy as part of your paid membership through Patreon or Substack, then:
We’ll update the cover on Bookfunnel and you can just download a new copy to your ereader with the new cover that will match the other three books in the story arc.***
That’s the end of my public service announcement. I’ll let you know when we update it. It’ll be closer to the launch date of the kickstarter because you never know. We could make further changes. My scribe would like us to leave the cover alone, but it’s our best marketing tool, so it needs to grab attention.
This is Ran, Sarn’s son from the Curse Breaker series, and I might be driving the cover revisions. I want Jousts to grab a lot of attention. Fourteen years’ worth of attention would be great!
So with that out of the way, it’s time to see those covers!
And after much arguing, that is the official reading order. Although, my aunt claims you could read Chaos Reigns before Curse Breaker Jousts, but that would spoil the epic story arc in Jousts. So don’t do that, okay?
We’ll have close-ups of the covers as we get closer to the big launch event.
When will that be?
We hope for Sept 28, 2026, and I’m sure that’s no surprise if you’ve been with us a while. We always aim to have a new book out around the end of September.
But we can’t promise that because we don’t hit the launch button until all 4 books are 100% written, edited, formatted, and we have proof copies in hand.
As of right now, Chaos Rises and Curse Breaker Jousts are written and we have one bespoke art piece created by an upcoming artist for Jousts. My scribe, Melinda, is writing Chaos Reigns, and she’s working hard to channel that chaos into an epic tale.
At the rate, Melinda is writing it, we think she will finish Chaos Reigns in less time than it took to write Curse Breaker Jousts. But that still leaves the final book in that story arc. So we’ll just keep you updated as the books progress.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking about what happens after the Riders of the Apocalypse story arc, and what new and exciting trouble my father might get into. I will absolutely help him with that magical mayhem.
You can read Chaos Reigns and Curse Breaker Jousts on Patreon or Substack right now if you can’t wait. They are not edited or polished and some chapters have moved in the final versions.
The first chapter of both books is free to read right now on both platforms.
But there’s a 50% chance that another chapter may end up as chapter 1 in the final version of Chaos Reigns. The characters don’t agree on the final order, and there are some really good arguments for switching the order and putting chapter 2 first. So I’ll just let you know what happens with that.
Patrons received a finished copy of Curse Breaker Jousts yesterday as a thank you for being part of the writing process. It really motivates our scribe to write more when there are readers waiting to read the next chapter.
Since we characters only exist when you read our stories, this helps us to exist. So we’re exploring some new functionality Patreon added recently to see if we can offer more value for Patrons and more books!
Books are life, so we must have more of them.
Chaos Rises is available in our shop as well since Melinda wrote and released it last year. We have not updated the cover on our shop yet. If you buy it through us, then you’ll get the updated cover later this year too.
I just got everyone to agree on the covers this morning so that’s why it’s not updated anywhere yet. I needed everyone to agree before I could share the covers. That’s kind of important.
That also brings me to my next piece of news.
Book Availability
Our books have temporarily disappeared from library systems and some online stores. Don’t panic! They should return soon.
Why did they disappear?
Indie authors like ours have to go through third parties to reach library systems and bookstores. We’ve been using one third party since 2018 (we’ll call then Distributor A) but they recently announced they were changing their policies and assessing fees if an author did not earn a certain amount through them.
That’s double dipping on their part since they also take a 15% commission on every book sold.
So I told our scribe, we’re not paying that, and I took all our books down off that distributor.
Why are they adding new fees?
The reasons given don’t make sense because the new fee structure for published authors earning under a certain amount won’t stop bad actors. It will likely incentivize them to put out more poor quality books in the hopes that more bad books will result in more sales to meet that new threshold.
But that’s not the only reason our books are leaving that platform. I might be rash but my scribe, Melinda isn’t. She wouldn’t let me unpublish all our books over a new fee even if she doesn’t agree with it and said fee penalizes new authors and authors who are not good at marketing or advertising.
(Our scribe is terrible at that too, so no judgment here! That’s why I took over the newsletter. Someone has to try and get the word out about our books.)
I digressed. Melinda wouldn’t let me remove our books just because of a fee unless the fee was really high. It’s not high at least not for us. But this opens the door to the fee rising if the distributor needs to deliver more value to shareholders.
And they will raise it. Maybe not next year. But they will raise it. Unfortunately, prices just keep going up.
But I digressed again. Melinda let me remove our books from that distributor because she has been looking into another distributor for a couple of years now. Distributor A (the one we left) sends our print books to Distributor B and takes their cut.
Melinda didn’t like that since it made getting proof copies so much more expensive and it added an extra 15% onto what you pay if you buy our books from online bookstores.
But moving 35+ books is a lot of work, so she was on the fence about doing it for the last two years. So this all just pushed her to test out using Distributor B and cutting out the 15% the middle man was taking from our books.
So far, she’s just republished Curse Breaker Enchanted through Distributor B, and the process took about a week. So it only just republished. We don’t see Enchanted available in stores yet, but we’ll keep searching. It might take a few more days.
We’ll let you know how things go. If moving to Distributor B doesn’t work out, we’ll go back to Distributor A.
In the meantime, we’re looking at other options so you can continue to read our books. But we’re still in the research phase, so I’ll let you know when we have some information to share.
That’s it for this week. Cross your fingers that new-to-us distributor works out and our books get back into stores. Have a great week and I hope you read some great books!
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