Hello, Internet. Seth Skorkowsky,
and today we're going to be doing something a little bit different.
This month marks the 10-year anniversary of my monster-hunter urban fantasy novel Dämoren.
April 2014 my debut novel released. Which led to three sequel novels and a handful of
short stories in my Valducan Series. It was the culmination of years of hard work
and something that changed my life. Even this channel is a direct result of that occasion.
So to commemorate that, I just want to talk
about Dämoren and its sequels, where that came
from, the highs, the lows ,and how all of that played out - much as I did from my Black
Raven Retrospective I posted back in 2018. I started writing shortly after college as a way
to pass the time. And I became very active in the Online Writing Workshop for Sci-Fi, Fantasy, &
Horror. And I started working on what I'd hoped would be the next great fantasy novel. Now during
that time I wrote and sold a few short stories, including some of my Blac
k Raven adventures. And
after finishing my first novel "Dreams of Lost Souls," the first in my Empire of Deceit series,
I started on a sequel novel as I started querying to find an agent for the first book. And that did
not go too well. Rejection after rejection after rejection. And finally I got pretty discouraged.
Eventually, for the lack of better word, I got guilted into attending FenCon 2011,
which some friends were helping organized that. And they pushed me into joining their
Writer's
Workshop - and I could not imagine at the time the effect that this would have on me.
Now the workshop was led by a gentleman named Lou Anders who had just won the Hugo Award for editing
just a month before, and the workshop focused on the first 10 pages of our manuscript. So each of
us in there, we sent each other the first 10 pages of our manuscript several weeks in advance, that
way we could all peer review those and know what everybody had, and then we spent pretty much three
days locke
d in a room with Lou Anders as he walked us through his analysis of everyone's submissions.
And it was just an eye-opening experience. And the end result of all that was Lou pretty
much telling me that my novel was unpublishable crap - though he did say it a lot nicer than that
- but that was pretty much the effect that it had. But the process of writing it had taught me how to
write. So I knew how to write now, and he told me I should go out and write a publishable book.
Now this might soun
d like it would be just crushing to hear - I was almost 200,000 words
and several years into this series and you don't want to hear that it's terrible after
all that. But I wasn't crushed at all. I was surprised by that. I was relieved. Lou merely
voiced something that I knew. So it was kind of like he was giving me permission to put it
away and work on something else instead. So it was really liberating for him to tell me that.
In fact, in the previous few years as I was writing that novel,
I'd been toying with the idea
of a modern-day monster hunter novel. So once I was done with Empire of Deceit I was going to work
on that. Now none of my ideas were really solid things, but just really interesting concepts.
So fired up from a great weekend workshop, I dusted off all those rough ideas and
started writing Dämoren the following week. The novel originated as two separate ideas.
The first idea is I wanted to figure out how to make a magical gun for Dungeons and Dragons. A
magica
l sword or a magical axe - those make sense, right? The blade is enchanted, you hit the bad guy
with the blade, and then the magic of the blade hurts the bad guy. But with a magic gun, the gun
itself never actually touches the bad guy. Only the bullet does that. So the solution that I came
up with is that inside the barrel was inscribed a spell or a prayer, and then the bullet, as it's
traveling through the barrel it gets charged with this enchantment, but the last word or the
last symbol o
f this spell or prayer - something like "Amen" was molded into the bullet, and that
enchantment, as the bullet hit that certain point, it would then charge up with the magic and imbue
the bullet with all the power, and then carry that magic off to the target and hurt the target.
So this meant that everything about the gun - the bullet itself would have to be specially made.
Which led to the idea that the brass shells, and the bullet mold, and the powder, all
of this would have to be part of
this as the gunslinger would load their special shells.
So this gave way to the idea that the gun was going to be previously been a magic sword
that broke. And then the owner took those broken pieces and had them turned into what
the time would have been the most cutting edge weapon - a single-action revolver.
And then all of the parts of the sword, such as the bronze cross guards and all that would
have been melted down and used as the the shells for this gun, and some of the blade became t
he
bullet mold. And through this, this broken magic sword would be reborn into this revolver.
The second unrelated idea was the notion that supernatural creatures, like werewolves and
vampires and the like, were not diseases - I never really liked the idea, that modern take that those
were just diseases instead of some Supernatural curse - but instead, it's It's actually
an evil spirit, like a demonic possession, is actually what the vampire or the werewolf is.
So if you were to shoot a wer
ewolf with a silver bullet you're just going to kill the host body.
But then the werewolf spirit would simply move on to another victim that had marked somewhere else.
So that way, if a vampire, let's say infects four people, you don't suddenly have five vampires
now. But you just have a single vampire that can move around between five possible hosts, but
it's still just one single vampire. And the only way that you could possibly kill this monster -
actually truly kill the evil spirit itse
lf - is with an enchanted weapon. Which, of course
enchanted weapons are going to be incredibly rare. So I imagine this team of modern-day
monster hunters decked out in full tactical kit, but among all the Kevlar and automatic weapons,
each of them also had this ancient weapon at their hip - like a mace or Egyptian khopesh.
It was actually quite a while before I remembered that magic gun idea that I had had earlier.
And it just dovetailed perfectly into that, so those two ideas became one.
I
originally envisioned Dämoren as being crafted by Beretta - a very old Italian
gun manufacturer. But Beretta really didn't work much with revolvers back then, so I changed it
to being a Holland & Holland out of England. But then I discovered cutlass revolvers - namely
the beautiful cutlass revolvers from Dumonthier, a French gunsmith from the 19th
century. And I love the idea that part of the sword's original blade was now
incorporated into the design of this pistol. Now later on, after it
published, some
reviewers accused me of getting the idea from anime or Final Fantasy. But,
nope, Dumonthier was a very real guy, and I put a lot of time into researching what
little information I could find to put in the book. So take that, to all you haters that
said I ripped off anime - Dumonthier was real. Starting it out, I only knew what the first
two chapters - really, the first chapter and a half - of what the book would be. There's a scene
where Matt is first introduced to Dämoren
and his mentor Clay at the very beginning, followed by
fast-forwarding to him as an adult and trying to get an antique gun through customs, and then
going off to a hotel and then melting down some antique silverware to mold some bullets with
kind of saying that, "Now the job is on." Those were actually going to be two separate
ideas for an opening chapter of the book, but I just decided to go ahead and use them
both, and thought it worked pretty well. After that, I had a few cinematic mome
nts in
my head of what I would want in this book, but no real idea of who these characters were
how they got there. But I simply just started off writing the book, assuming that I would
figure all that out by the time that I got there. Now I was a couple chapters in before my wife
and I we traveled to Italy for 2 weeks. We'd gone to Italy a couple times before, but
we wanted to dedicate some real time to Florence and Venice. Now in Florence, I
decided the book would also lead the hero ther
e. I even got to throw in a little nod to
Cellini's 'Perseus with the Head of Medusa,' one of my very favorite sculptures in the world.
When visiting Monteriggioni - which I'm probably horribly mispronouncing that - it's a tiny
medieval walled city in Tuscany, and I knew that is where I wanted my book's climax to take place.
Though I ended up making my own little town for the book, that was very much inspired by this one.
It took me 15 months to finish writing Dämoren, and it came to 98,000 w
ords. Once it was all said
and done. Then I started out the whole process of querying this for an agent. Now for those of you
who don't know what querying a novel entails, you essentially have to pitch your
entire book in just 3-5 sentences, and in a way that tells an agent or editor what
the book is about, who the main characters are, then the hooks of the moods of the the novel
in a way that it hooks them and they want to know more about it, they ask you for some sample
pages or chapters
, or maybe the full manuscript. It is hell.
Pitching a novel is absolute hell. I attended the 2013 DFW Writers Conference,
hoping to find an agent there. And after attending a panel on crafting a query letter
- which also just so happened to have Lou Anders there in attendance - I reworked my query
letter. So by the end of the whole conference, I then submitted this to their big Query Letter
Contest that they do that ends the entire thing, where they read your query letter out before
the wh
ole conference, and all the agents there will get to ding you if that's the point that
they would stop reading or there's any problem with it. And I was the only person to make it
through without a single person docking it. Now for those wondering what
it said, my query letter read, "14 years ago a pack of wendigos killed
Spencer Mallory's family and damned his soul. Now he is a Demon Hunter armed
with a holy revolver named Dämoren. After a violent series of murders leaves only
50 holy wea
pons in the world, Spencer is is recruited by the Valducans, an Ancient Order of
demon hunters. Many of the hunters do not trust him because he is possessed. When sabotage and
assassinations begin, the Valducans know there's a spy in their ranks, and Spencer becomes the core
of their suspicions. Desperate to prove himself, and to protect Dämoren, Spencer fights
to gain their trust and discover the nature of the entity residing within him.
Dämoren is a 98,000 word Supernatural Fantasy set in
North America and Europe. My short stories
have appeared in Black Static and Flashing Swords magazines, as well as yada-yada-yada.
Thank you for your consideration. Please represent me."
Now for anyone familiar with Dämoren, and you're kinda wondering "Why are you talking about Spencer
Mallory instead of Matt?" the reason is the first chapter of the book he's named Spencer. And then
by Chapter 2 has changed his name to Matt. But an agent that asked for the first 10 pages, or if
you submitted
it along with the manuscript and they're reading along, they're going to be
seeing the name Spencer and just wondering, "When this Matt guy in your query letter was going
to show up?" So I went ahead and just used the name Spencer for the query letter, that way the
agent would know that this was the person in the query letter. And then if they keep reading, by
page 12 or so they can see that he's changed his name and they'll figure that out for themselves.
Anyway, armed with this now proven
query letter, Dämoren was rejected 82 times.
It was crushing. Only 44 of the query letters that I sent out even
bothered to send me a response to it. The rest of them... just silence. And even after a few of
them asked for full manuscript requests, some of them still ghosted me. They asked for the full
manuscript and then never heard anything back. But after 9 months, I sent a query letter off to a
brand new publisher called Ragnarok Publications. They'd just hit the scene with a Kickstarte
r for a
Kaiju Anthology that had some pretty good names on it. And through friends-of-friends connections,
I had one of the owners as one of my Facebook connections, and we liked each other's memes
and whatnot. So I reached out to him and I asked when Ragnarok was planning on opening up to novel
submissions. And he said. "No we're not going to be opening for a while, but go ahead and send that
in. Send it our way and we'll get a look at it." Well a few weeks later, I got a message from thei
r
editor Tim Marquitz. He liked what he read, but he wanted to know if I'd be willing to make a few
pretty big changes to it. And I agreed. At that point I've been querying it for nine months. I'd
have agreed to just about anything at that point. So by December 2013 I had
signed and sold my first novel. Well, the next few months after that were just
a whirlwind of editing and promotion. But one notable thing that happened during that time, is
my wife and I were visiting some friends that w
ere much older than we were, and he had made a pretty
successful career in marketing. So we were talking about my novel coming out and everything,
and he said that I needed to make a YouTube channel. He said it's the second largest search
engine in the world, and I should really get on that in order to get my name out there.
I said, I had no idea what I wanted to make a channel about.
Originally he said, "Well, make it about writing." I'm like, "Well, I've only written like
one novel. Brando
n Sanderson's got a YouTube channel out there and he's has a
ton more stuff than me. So it's not like I can compete with Brandon Sanderson."
He said, "Look, it doesn't matter what the YouTube channel is about. Just
get a YouTube channel out there." And I said, "Okay, I'll think about it,"
which I really wasn't planning on doing. But that bug was dropped in my ear.
And spoiler - I eventually figured out what I wanted to make a Channel about.
So release day rolled around, and reception was actu
ally pretty good, and it picked up
pretty quickly. I had pushed for an audiobook release because I'm a big fan of audio books.
So by August, Dämoren has released on Audible, and narrated by the wonderful R.C. Bray. I
was so excited that I got to have him. He had just done The Martian. He was a really,
really up-and-coming name at the time. Also, you really don't know how many words
in a book that you have made up until your narrator is asking you how to pronounce those
words. Which you the
n have to figure out how to even pronounce the words. I liked the way
they looked. I didn't actually know how a lot of those words sound. So a lot of the ways that
I had pronounced them before in my head was not how they should actually be pronounced.
Now audio editions, when they came out, did very well. And Dämoren was an Audie Award
Finalist for Best Paranormal Audio Book. I traveled to New York for the
event, and I finally got to meet R.C. Bray in person - terribly nice guy.
Meanwhile, I
was already working on a sequel for Dämoren. While Dämoren was written as a
standalone novel - I didn't want to have it be where I was committed to write so many
books in order to finish a single story, so I just wrote as a standalone but with
plenty of room for sequels to be added on to. I decided that instead of following Matt and
Dämoren for the next book, I wanted to change things up and focus on a different hunter and
their weapon so I planned for the second book would be Ibenus, foll
owing Allen and his magic
khopesh that allowed him to teleport. And I knew that I wanted this one to have this love story
angle. But I hadn't really figured out the... I'd done the human plot for it, I still hadn't figured
out all the kinks of the main actual plot - what it is that the hunters are facing for this one.
So I was still bouncing a few ideas around. But at the same time, it was a few weeks after I'd
finished Dämoren, my wife and I then went for a kind of extended weekend off in
New Orleans. And
I was inspired by so much of what I encountered there. It's no wonder so many stories are based
around that city. So I would get back to my hotel room and just jot down everything that I had seen
- and smells, the sounds, the emotions that I felt - and I just wrote all of this down in this little
journal while it was still fresh in my mind. I ventured up through an alley that was
outside the French Quarter - kinda snuck into an alley - and I peered in this little
courtyard
behind one of the houses. And it had the high walls that were capped with broken glass
- like bottles that were stuck into the concrete and smashed so nobody could climb over them.
And I imagined what it would be like to wake up in a courtyard like that - naked, covered
in blood, the house locked and filled with bodies - and I tried to figure out how it is this
person would have gotten there in the courtyard, what happened to their clothes, and what it was
they were going to do now that th
ey're awake. So I returned home from that trip and
I tried to keep working on Ibenus, trying to figure out some ideas for it. But every
time I started trying to think about it, my mind went back to New Orleans and that courtyard, and
trying to build more and more on top of that. So eventually I just had to concede that
this was the story that I wanted to tell, and I began writing Hounacier as Book 2. And
I like to tell people that Hounacier was the book that pretty much willed itself into
existence because it wouldn't let me write anything else until that was out of my system.
Hounacier was a pretty big deviation from Book 1. Dämoren had a large cast with
machine gun fights, and big explosions, and globe-hopping, and a 'save the world' plot -
very action/adventure. Hounacier, however, was a murder mystery horror novel that was only set in
a single city. And we only follow one character. And the stakes are very personal. Instead of
being world-changing stakes, it's really just
fighting for the life and soul of one person.
Then to top that off, the hero of the novel, Malcolm Romero, really isn't a likable character
in the first book. He wasn't a bad guy - he wasn't a villain or anything like that. But
he was somebody that Matt clashed with a lot in Dämoren - kind of like an Iceman to Maverick,
right? A good conflict character. So I needed to write Malcolm in a way that he would be somebody
that the readers would be coming into this novel disliking him because he w
as such a jerk to the
protagonist in the first book, and turn him into somebody that the readers would enjoy very quickly
because I knew I wouldn't have much time for that. And Hounacier ended up being a pretty
dark novel - the darkest one that I've ever written - but it's also my personal
favorite of the entire Valducan series. Once it was completed, I sent it off to Ragnarok,
and Hounacier was published in 2015. R.C. Bray returned for the audio edition. And that won the
Audio File Earpho
nes Award and was also an Audie Award finalist for Best Paranormal Audio Book.
Meanwhile during all of this, I started writing a few standalone short stories in the Valducan
Universe. I called them my Archive Adventures, as if they had come out of the the Valducan
archives that appear in the novels. And they were all set in the period before Dämoren was.
Now the first one of these that I wrote, 'The Vampire of Somerset,' was a 1930s vampire
hunt set in England. And I love the heroine that I m
ade for that - Lady Helen Meadows - she's
one of my very favorite Valducan knights that that I've ever written. And it was planned to
be in the Grimoire of Eldritch Inquest. And they they accepted it, and then they moved
it to a sudden planned Volume 2 anthology. And then... nothing after that. Eventually, the
publisher folded, and the story returned to me, and the Vampire of Somerset still hasn't seen the
light of the day. Maybe one day it'll see print. But this was the story that actually
started all
of the the different Archive Adventures that I wrote. This is the idea that I had that kind
of made me start wanting to write more of them. Now the next one, 'The Serpent's Army,' that
did appear in the Not Your Average Monster Anthology. And it's sort of a 1980s buddy
cop story following Clay and Schmidt when they were young and they're tangling with
an enthralled biker gang outside of Dallas. Cohesion Press released 2 Valducan shorts.
The first, 'Hungry Eyes,' appeared in SNA
FU: Hunters, and it followed a younger Malcolm
Romero as this kind of new Junior Knight with a team that's searching for monsters
that are lurking in the Paris Catacombs. It served as sort of a prequel to Ibenus.
The story was later then re-released in SNAFU: Medivac, a Charity Anthology
raising funds to help James Moore. Sadly, Jim passed away a week before this
recording. He was a very nice and talented man. The final Valducan Short to be printed was 'Raid
on Wewelsburg' in SNAFU: Black O
ps. It's a 1940s adventure set during the Second World War as the
Valducans are trying to recover some of the magic weapons that have been plundered by the Nazis. It
also included the Chiemsee Cauldron, which is a very real and creepy gold cauldron the Nazis made
that was discovered in a lake back in 2001. And the story also got to feature Lady Helen Meadows
in it in her official debut, even though this was her second story to appear in, but this one was
the first one she actually got to se
e print in. Now by the time Ibenus was released in 2016,
Ragnarok Publications had grown significantly. They'd worked out a distribution deal, and
my books were now in wide release in books stores. And I finally get to drop by random
bookstores and see my books on the shelf, which is awesome to have. The cover artist
Shawn King was brought in for it. And to keep consistency Dämoren and Hounacier received
updated covers as well, and they look fantastic. Book 3 returns to Europe, and primaril
y follows
Alan Havlock and his khopesh Ibenus . We're back to an ensemble cast. Both Matt from Dämoren
and Malcolm from Hounacier returned for it. And while the first book was thematically
a fish-out-of-water action/adventure, then Book 2 was this New Orleans Noir/Horror,
Book 3's primary themes were Love and Tragedy. I do some pretty terrible
things to my heroes in this one. This is the first Valducan novel to
be multi-point-of-view from different characters' points of view, as we get to
explore
more of the Valducan Order itself, and the bond that the hunters have with their weapons.
I'd always described this being as deeply emotional connection that all the hunters have
with the specific weapon that chooses them - this incredible love with the entity that's inside
the weapon - and I had a few reviewers early on that kinda confused that for being like a 'sexual
thing,' making some odd claims about my character as a result to that... which I think it says
more about those re
viewers than it does about me. In Ibenus, the Valducan knights venture
into the labyrinths beneath Paris to root out a particularly nasty nest of monsters.
It also explores how secret societies can operate in the age of surveillance
and internet conspiracy theorists. And I particularly enjoyed getting to flesh
out some more of the characters from Book 1. There there were so many that I introduced
in that one - it I had a huge cast - I really didn't have much time to delve too deeply
into a
lot of them. And Ibenus really allowed me to explore and expand on that and really
round those characters out a whole lot more. Book 4, Redemptor, was another change of
pace again. We follow an ensemble cast, but this time across South America.
It also introduces the monster hunters from the Vatican - a rival and threatening group I'd
mentioned to and alluded to in previous novels, but never actually shown them actively.
Instead of trying to stop some plot by demonic monsters, the villain of
Book 4 - for
the lack of a better term - is an Anti-Paladin who's armed with his own sentient weapon. The
tagline that, 'Evil isn't born. It's forged,' was an idea that my buddy Clay Sanger had
suggested to me back when he was originally doing beta reading for Dämoren, so this had been
rattling around in my head for a few years. I was kinda happy to finally get to have a story
just to go with that logline that he gave me. Now the book's underlying theme is Worthiness.
Many of the characte
rs wrestle with with trying to prove themselves, and living up to what's
often very self-imposed expectations. One of them is the Valducan's newest knight -
a teenager who was trying to escape the shadow of her fallen predecessor. Another
one of was a Catholic hunters who has her own issues that she's dealing with. And
even the villain of the novel believes himself to be this righteous savior - but he's
really just this truly insane and pure evil, but he's trying to achieve some sort of wor
thiness
for this kind of quest that he believes he's on. Now Redemptor is also the first Valducan novel
that expects the readers to have at least read one of the previous books. In the first three
books, I wrote those in a way to introduce all the concepts of the world and catch the reader
up on what's going on if they hadn't read any of it. But by the fourth time you're doing this
in a novel, it's just exhausting to explain again how everything works in a different way than you
described
it before cuz you don't just repeat the same conversation. So I figure that anyone's
going to be picking up Book 4 of a series, they kind of have it coming to them and
they shouldn't be surprised if they're a little lost to trying to figure out who
these people are and what's going on. Redemptor was scheduled to be released in 2017.
Shawn King had made the cover, and everything was turned in on time. And to top that off, Ragnarok
was already in talks with companies that were wanting to tran
slate and distribute the series in
Italy and in Spain, and on the surface everything at the time was looking great.
Unfortunately, it wasn't. Ragnarok had grown really fast in
those few years since I had been there, and they were putting out a lot of books, and
with the distribution deal costs and everything, that was pretty steep costs that they were dealing
with. And Ragnarok was never really the best about paying on time. And I chocked all that up to being
'growing pains.' But payments d
id come... though a little bit slowly. But then eventually,
the payments stopped coming all together. Now this was causing a few issues with me and with
all the other authors there. And some of the more successful authors that Ragnarok had acquired
- Rob J. Hayes and C.T. Phipps - they pulled their books in entirely around the end of 2016.
Now Ragnarok at that time begged me to stay with them. They promised that they were going to get
me caught up on all the payments, and they were going to
be merging with another company, and
that would give them a big cash infusion as well as you get them some really experienced people
there. So I decided I was going to go ahead, stick around, and I was going to weather
the storm with them, because, once again, it's 'growing pains' of a new company, and
I'd been with them since the very beginning. Now by this point, I had already left
my normal day job in the Summer of 2016. And then by November of 2016, I'd finally
taken my friend Tom's ad
vice and started up a YouTube channel - which at that point
it had only been a single recording of Mist of Lichthafen that I'd made for a podcast. But
after two-and-a-half years since he suggested it, I decided that I can make videos about Tabletop
Role Playing Games and other nerdly things. But at that time, my channel really wasn't making
money at all. I had less than a 1,000 Subscribers and still trying to figure out how this whole
'YouTube thing' worked, and finding my voice. So while A
uthor Royalties weren't my sole means
of income, they were pretty damned important to me because I didn't have a day job anymore.
By Summer 2017, the Ragnarok merger had gone through and I still hadn't been paid yet,
and I was getting pretty impatient with them, right - I was just completely out of patience.
Now the original owners, they were gone, and I got some of the money that I was still owed.
But there was still a lot left that they owed me. And due to some "Terrible Bookkeeping" on th
eir
part, I had no idea how much that I was owed. Now this was also the time that Redemptor was
entering the editing phase now. My original editors were now gone, so my new editor had just
been promoted up from Office Manager and had no - if not entirely no editorial experience at
all if she had any. She was unfamiliar with any of the previous books - which that was fine, except
for this was the book that I wasn't going to explain how the world worked and all that because
we're at the four
th in a series - but she didn't even understand the Fantasy Genre itself. She did
romance. They actually had to explain to her that 'Fantasy' didn't just mean 'Romantic Fantasy.'
So when all those edits came back, it was... it was bad.
I mean, in all my years of publishing short stories my previous
novels, I'd never once doubted my editor's abilities. I'd always had full faith in them.
Even if we disagreed on something, I'd always considered them to be the authority. But the edit
requests th
at I got back were just... terrible. Many of them were just plain wrong. They were just
incorrect. They're actually adding mistakes to it. And some of the comments that were in in
the margins of it were just... baffling, to put it kindly. It's just unbelievable
how bad of an experience that was going through the initial rounds of edits.
Now the Valducan series had always been one of the most successful series
- if not THE most successful series that Ragnarok had published. And now with the o
ther
authors that were gone, it was definitely the biggest property that Ragnarok still had.
So I would have at least expected a capable editor to be assigned to it - especially when
the same author is currently owed several thousand dollars and they're threatening to leave.
So when they missed their latest payment deadline right about the same time, that's when I went
ahead and pulled the plug and I withdrew all my books from Ragnarok, and I left them entirely.
The new owners were not happy.
But the breakup went pretty smoothly... until it didn't.
And then the breakup got pretty damn ugly. Now it took a few months to get all the rights
returned to me as different distribution contracts and to run a certain course, but I did receive
all the money for the the Print and the Ebook and everything for all the previous sales there.
But Audiobook royalties - which audiobooks were always the bigger seller with the Valducan series
- I never saw the full royalties for those, or even the
full sales numbers for the audio books.
So I have no idea how much I was owed for them. Audio rights did eventually return to me.
And now I get full royalties and full sales reports sent directly to me. But those first
couple years of sales - the peak years of those sales - it's still a mystery what all was sold.
Anyway, so at this point I've got three Valducan novels and two Black Raven collections that
have lost their publisher. I have one new novel, but it's the fourth in a series.
Which
makes that a lot harder to sell if it's the fourth book in a series.
And they didn't give me the contact names and the info for the publishers that were wanting to do
the foreign language right. So all of those deals have fallen through that I was looking forward
to. So I'm frustrated, everything has gone badly, and I'm feeling a bit lost, to be honest.
Now around the same time, Steve Felberg with Audible Studios reached out to me. He'd
seen my announcement of what was going going on - and w
ith 2 of the 3 Valducan audiobooks
being Audie Award Finalist, he offered to go ahead and do this as an Audible Original directly
with me. Just me and Audible with no publisher in the middle - because I didn't have a publisher.
So we did that. And they got me a great editor. They gave me a nice advance. And R.C.
Bray returned. And we released that in early 2018 as an Audible Original.
Meanwhile, my buddy and former Ragnarok author C.T. Phipps had reached out to me. He had
severed ties with R
agnarok about a year earlier, but he managed to move all his books over
to Crossroad Press. And he was absolutely glowing with how well that they treated their
authors, and they paid everything on time, very punctually. So with his referral, I got them
to accept all of my former Ragnarok titles - or at least the Print and versions. I
maintain all the Audio titles of my own now. But then, 6 months after it was released on
Audible, Redemptor was finally released in Print through Crossroad pr
ess. And I
have been extremely happy with them. It's really great having a publisher that
does all the stuff that they're supposed to do - like pay ya on time.
Ragnarok, meanwhile, went under a November of 2017.
Broke my heart to see them go, but business is business.
So that's the story of my Valducan series. And it's had its share of triumphs and
setbacks. But I am extremely proud of this series. And in the 10 years since its
debut, my life has changed so much because of this - including t
his entire channel here, which
I originally started as a way to help promote my books. But because I'm also really terrible at
self-promotion, I'm sure a lot of my longtime viewers probably watching this video and only now
realizing that I'm a published author because I never really talk about that all that much.
Now, of course, I've got links to where you to buy all these books in the video description
below. If anyone wants to buy them, then GREAT. And and if you enjoy them, then please
l
eave a review for them. That' be wonderful. But this video isn't about promoting the
Valducan series - once again, I'm pretty bad at self-promotion - but it's really more about
just the journey itself and reflecting on that and where it was and how it brought me to where I am.
And that's really all I wanted to say.
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