That time we snuck in

Hi,

Did you notice that we snuck something into last week’s newsletter? What did we sneak into it?

This is Ran, Sarn’s son from the Curse Breaker series and the Rogue Gods Trilogy, and maybe this is just a ploy to make sure you read about how I saved Thanksgiving last week or maybe it’s both because I do want to make sure you read about my big moment.

Did you figure it out yet?

If not, no worries, I’ll spill all the tea in a minute. But first some books news!

Melinda is writing Chaos Rises, book 1 of the Riders of the Apocalypse trilogy/quadrilogy and would you believe it?

The characters already ran off with the plot. Time is breaking down and Fay is the only one who can see it. There’s also an army marching toward Fay’s home, but we don’t know anything about it. And there wasn’t supposed to be an army doing that.

Melinda is already at the hair-tearing out level of frustrated. The characters were supposed to find and trap the Riders of the Apocalypse, not break time and fight an army. So that’s where things are with that book.

Chaos is definitely rising. Will anyone stop it or sort it out? That remains to be seen since we’re still in the run around and cause mayhem part of the plot. That’s actually our specialty.

Melinda is also still writing Catch the Scribe. The story kind of went off the rails and she doesn’t know where we’re going with the plot. Do we know?

Yes, of course we do. She should know where we’re going since the book is actually autobiographical and totally not fiction. Yup, it’s a true account of real events that actually happened. Nothing made up about it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

We also received the latest round of proofs of the Robin of Larkspur books for the upcoming Kickstarter, and the edges are brick red! They are gorgeous inside and out. But we’ll have pictures next week when we’ll have hopefully figured out how to color correct the images so the edges on screen look like the edges on the actual book.

That’s proved weirdly tricky to do. But we want to accurately reflect the color in here and on the prelaunch page. So We’ll figure it out!

Now back to my opening question.

If you guessed we snuck in a video that features a full cast recording of the first 4 chapters of Gateway to Hell, book 1 of the Rogue Gods Trilogy, then you are correct!

Why didn’t we talk about it in the newsletter last week?

Well, that was my fault. I wanted to tell you how I saved Thanksgiving, and then I ran out of room to talk about it. But guess what?

There’s plenty of room in this week’s newsletter to talk about it, and there are two more videos up! So you can listen to the first 12 chapters. It’s almost like we planned that.

Maybe we did. Melinda was sick this week with a bad cold, and she loves audiobooks so much that she bought over 3000 of them over the years. So she really wants audiobooks made of all our books.

We tried for years to make that happen but audiobooks are really expensive to produce when your books are long. Now I could have asked for less page time to help with that, but where would the fun be in that?

You expect not just me but all the characters to to get into as much trouble as we possibly can. So we have to do that. It’s required. But I think I digressed. Back to my story.

Since Blackstone and other audiobook publishing houses didn’t knock on our door, and we don’t blame them. Our books aren’t spicy romantasies or cozy mysteries or pulse-pounding thrillers or Litrpg or Isekai or any of the hot selling tropes or subgenres.

They’re classic epic fantasy, and we’re not selling tons like Brandon Sanderson’s books. So they aren’t interested, and it’s up to us to somehow figure out how to get audiobooks.

When virtual voices became available, we used it to make some of our books into audiobooks. But the voices were kind of robotic, and there weren’t many to choose from. But we did it anyway for the few folks for email regularly to ask if we have audiobooks in case that was the only way they could experience our mayhem.

Fast forward to today and those voices aren’t robotic anymore. There’s also enough different voices so we can all have our own voices!

The dream of a full-cast recording now seems achievable. Don’t get me wrong. We still want a human narrator. But if 2024 and the passing of Melinda’s father has taught us anything, life is too short to wait.

So we decided to stop waiting and use the technology available now to make a full cast recording.

Why start with the Rogue Gods Trilogy?

Because Guerren scares me, and he really wanted to be first. After all, he’s a war god. I’m not angering him. No way.

And the characters in that trilogy were less picky about the voices. That’s a big part of it, but one of the voices is actually perfect for Guerren. The voice model we used for him got really into it and started hallucinating all kinds of dialog for him until we dialed it back. So his spirit might have possessed the poor program for a while. He’s not sorry, by the way.

We hope you enjoy this version. You can purchase a copy to listen to outside YouTube once the book is fully narrated.

We hope you enjoy listening as much as Melinda enjoys creating this version.

And please subscribe to our channel on YouTube. Help us get to 1000 followers so we can earn a few pennies to drop into our piggy bank, so someday, we can hire RC Bray or another popular narrator to do a version because that’s still the goal.

Also, recommend our books to your friends, your enemies, your book club, your gym mates, your work colleagues, and maybe buy some books as Christmas gifts?

If we top some charts on Amazon, then maybe Blackstone or Tantor will want to make our books into audiobooks. They work with the top narrators on Audible, and it would be a dream come true to hear from them.

Until then, we’ll just keep doing our best with the tools within our means. Have a great week!

New Podcast Episodes & Videos

Listen to our podcast in your player of choice. Or Watch it on YouTube.

Watch part 1 first. Watch Part 3.

New Releases and Book Sales

Does Jerlo catch the dragon he’s chasing? Find out in Chasing Dragons!

Follow the campaign to get notified when it launches. The preview page has the latest cover mockups and previews of the illustrated pages.