Category: Tales of Vatan

Progress Dropship Down (Cover soon!)

A view of Earth from 80,000 feet of altitude.
Credit: UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Work is progressing on getting Dropship Down (Clausewitz #1) ready for publication. Daria is working on the cover. The attached image is a view of Earth from 80,000 feet captured by the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering in 2014. The opening scene of Dropship Down takes place at roughly the same altitude, but then over a different planet, named Celestia. The cover art will be a view from a similar altitude over that planet.

For the rest, editing is always hell, but slow progress is being made. Hoping to have it all ready soon ™.

After that, work begins on getting The Value of Nobility (Alagariel #2) ready for publishing. There’s going to be a bit more work involved there as I’ve decided to add some stuff in the first half of the book. I felt the characters were rushing through a large portion of Iurrak that really deserved a little more colour and depth, especially since that area will be visited a few more times in book #3 or #4.

The Half Elven Orphan in Stock

I have enough copies of The Half Elven Orphan in stock if anyone wants to order from me directly. It doesn’t seem worthwhile to put together a whole webshop for just one product, so if you want one, just send me an e-mail (books@jceberdt.eu) or use the contact form (below). Please let me know in the mail roughly where I’ll need so send the book.

I’ll send a Paypal payment request and send you a copy. Currently pricing is 20 euro’s, including shipping (unless shipping costs are crazy for your region but I’ll let you know before you pay anything if that’s the case).

The cover of The Half Elven Orphan, with the protagonist, a femal half-elf, crossing a river at night mounted on a black horse.
Name

Publishing Mystery

The Half Elven Orphan is the first book I’ve published and I’ve done it independently, so everything is a new experience. First off, it looks like I’ve actually sold some books. Not enough to buy more than a junk food lunch, but it’s not zero. My primary channel is Ingram Spark and they have a dashboard where you can see where sales have been made. To my great surprise, the first four print books that have showed up there have been sold in Germany. I mean, I do know people in Germany, but them buying more than one or two books when I’ve already told them I will give them copies for free doesn’t make sense. It stands to reason, then, that these must be other Germans. Which is very odd. My website has almost no traffic from Germany that I can’t match to people I know.

Beyond that, I know that there must be some e-book sales too, as the book has a sales rank on some e-book only sites, but they haven’t showed up yet. So, thanks (or Dankeschön) everyone who has bought one. For e-book buyers, there will be another sale over on itch.io starting the 17th of December. I still highly recommend itch if you want the e-book. No DRM, it comes with a pdf with a a Table of Contents and Glossary and files for the artwork and map. Oh, and they give the author a far large proportion of the proceeds.

A Parcel Has Been Delivered

Despite the best efforts of his superiors, a parcel with some books from Milton Keynes has arrived.

I have yet to understand why I was charged for the privilege of receiving 0% tariff book while I have VAT and EORI numbers, but they’re here and that’s certainly something.

I’ve decided to fulfill direct orders. Obviously, I don’t have to pay the retailer 55% like I do on in-store prices, but I do have to ship it. The book is 349g, which means that with packaging it’s quite expensive to ship individual copies. So, it’s the same price as in stores which is €20, but shipping is free everywhere in the EU.

Paperback Version Available!

The paperback version of The Half Elven Orphan is available now. At the moment, it only seems to be orderable from Amazon.com. Hopefully other local Amazons will make it available soon, though I assume number of sales will have something to do with that. In any case, it should also be possible to order it at any regular bookshop. To do so, you need the ISBN number which is 9789083478302.

I haven’t put together a hardback edition, but it wouldn’t be a huge amount of work to do so. If anyone can’t live without a hardback, drop me a line and I’ll make the effort. I did check what it would cost and a proper hardback edition with a substantially larger font size would end up costing something like thirty-five euro’s though amazon and equivalent. I may be able to keep the price more reasonable if I only do direct sales. For now, I’ll wait to see if there’s any demand for one.

Newsletter Changes

I’ve posted the entirety of the draft version of The Half Elven Orphan and sent all the accompanying weekly newsletters. So, I’m changing the frequency of the newsletter. The draft version will remain accessible until the end of the year, but I feel it will only cause confusion if I leave it in place now that the actual book is released.

For the foreseeable future, I will send one newsletter a month (if there’s anything worth mentioning). There will be occasional excerpts, news and of course I’ll continue the world-building posts too. It’s time to get to work on The Value of Nobility, Tales of Vatan, Alagariel Book Two and Dropship Down, Total War, Clausewitz Book One. Dropship Down is rather closer to being done that I thought, so that shouldn’t be long now.

Oh and of course, here’s the Where to Buy page. If you want an ebook, I recommend the itch.io version as it just has more goodies, better updateability and supports authors better.

Ebook Released Today!

The Half Elven Orphan became available today on all the big sites. I’m attempting to list the places where it’s available on the Where to buy page. It’s also on Goodreads now. Obviously, I’m in dire need of reviews, so if you’re a reviewer and would like a review copy, please let me know.

Where to from here?
Next up, I’ll be polishing Dropship Down book one of the Clausewitz Series. I’ve been going through it a bit the last few days and honestly it doesn’t need all that much work. It’s about 160k words and I doubt much will be changed. The time for another long stretch of editing. Never say never, but I might manage to get this out in a few months.

After that, I’ll be focussing on The Value of Nobility, book two of the Alagariel Series. How fast I try to get that out honestly depends a little on whether The Half Elven Orphan generates any interest at all. It is going to have some major work done to it before it’s up to the same standard as Alagariel I.

It’s hard to see the future beyond that, but of the 10-15 books I have in a state that look a little like completeness, I’d like to publish one every six months or so. Time will tell if that can be achieved.

“It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.”

P.G. Wodehouse, Cocktail Time

Available November 15th (Amazon)

The amazon page is now up. The print-on-demand version will be a few more days I expect as there was a problem with the cover and they’re very busy at Ingram Spark.

Anyway, it’s beginning to look like I may have published a book…

It’s a little poetic that this coincides with the release of Episode 59 of the version of The Half Elven Orphan that’s on the site here (20k words shorter than what’s on Amazon).

A interesting tidbit: Episode 59 actually became Episode 1 of The Value of Nobility (Tales of Vatan: Alagariel Book Two). It’s not in the longer book that’ll become available at all the e-book stores over the next few days.