Category: Publishing

PREORDERS OPEN!

Posted on by Austin Gunderson in News, Publishing

A Sea Sought in Song, first installment in “The Heir and the Herald” epic fantasy tetralogy by Austin Gunderson, is NOW AVAILABLE FOR KINDLE PREORDER and will be released on February 7th! Creative Texts will follow up soon with books two and three, and Austin is currently hard at work crafting the saga’s cataclysmic conclusion.

The savior of legend is a clueless barbarian. The woman who spent her life preparing for his advent is having second thoughts. Can they overcome their differences long enough to avoid snuffing out civilization?

When a brash foreigner by the name of Hugh Conrad washes up on the doorstep of Ilina Lightkeeper, daughter of those left behind by the king, her bookish hermitage becomes a fulcrum of history. Hugh, late of mythical Earth, is heir to a lost global kingdom. But his brutality disturbs the woman born to be his herald. To her own alarm, Ilina finds herself opposing the embodiment of her ancestors’ hopes.

While Ilina must judge between observation and prophecy, Hugh must adapt or die. He left Earth to rescue a friend, not a nation, but his arrival in this alien world changes everything. Can his power unify the last free people of Arlam? Or will his ignorance destroy them forever? And does he have to embrace his father’s false divinity in order to salvage what’s left of the old man’s domain? Really?

As he and Ilina hunt desperately for answers, they are propelled into battle against an evil more insidious than even their fairytales recollect.

A Sea Sought in Song is a breathtaking plunge into peril and intrigue that only accelerates over time. Ferocious action, amplified by a unique magic system, unfolds against culturally-complex backdrops. This Indiana Jones-goes-to-Narnia adventure will delight fans of Tad Williams, Brandon Sanderson, and Patrick Rothfuss.

Preorder it today!

TITLE GOES HERE

Posted on by Austin Gunderson in Design, News, Publishing

Design update! The series name of my epic fantasy tetralogy has changed from “Seed of Glory Sown in Sorrow” to something much simpler and more concrete: “The Heir and the Herald.”

Don’t worry: no one forced this change on me. I actually came up with this new series title myself, and I like it. It’s punchy, visualizable, and representative of the series as a whole. And it works much better on the book covers (yes, the covers are currently being designed, and yes, they’re awesome, and yes, “Seed of Glory Sown in Sorrow: A Sea Sought in Song” was too much of a mouthful even for me).

As a phrase, seed of glory sown in sorrow is still near and dear to my heart, and it’s still the first line of text you’ll see upon cracking open Book One.

Which is an event you’ll get to experience very, very soon.

PUBLICATION DECLARATION

Posted on by Austin Gunderson in News, Publishing

Ladies and gentlemen, I’VE SIGNED WITH A TRADITIONAL PUBLISHER.

Creative Texts will publish the ENTIRE “Seed of Glory Sown in Sorrow” saga.

Seventeen years’ worth of creative labor—half my lifetime—is about to go before the reading public. Hugh Conrad and Ilina Lightkeeper are about to conquer your library.

The first three novels in my epic fantasy tetralogy will be released relatively soon, and the fourth will follow as soon as it’s completed.

All the waiting … all the hoping … all the dreaming … all the imagining … all worth it. So worth it.

So if you yearn for fresh epic fantasy with depth, ambition, and flair … if you’ve been itching to find out what’s going on inside a 1,100-pages-and-counting series that wins Honorable Mentions from the Writers of the Future contest every time a chapter gets submitted … now’s the time to get really excited.

Arlam awaits. Are you ready?

Flying Monkeys See the Forest

Posted on by Austin Gunderson in News, Publishing, Writing

Wow, has it really been only two months since my last progress report? Seems like longer. A lot has happened.

First and foremost, Book Two is now complete. I finished those two additional chapters I mentioned last time, and a new prologue, as well as various minor insertions throughout the preexisting manuscript, juuuuust eking it over my 100k-word target. These efforts deepened some of my characters’ motivations and fleshed out a key subplot, firming up the novel’s narrative arc by shifting its emotional emphasis slightly. (Dear reader, you’ll have to forgive all the abstraction for now. This is a spoiler-free blog, after all!)

So with Book Two behind me, I updated my generic query letter accordingly and turned to my Book One synopsis. I hadn’t revised it since the Big Split, and knew it needed some finessing beyond simple subtraction before I could feel comfortable dispatching it.

However, it quickly became apparent to me that Book One, in its then-current state, simply couldn’t support a good synopsis. I found I kept having to provide supplemental information. I’d finally climbed high enough above the treeline to see that parts of the forest were missing. Fortunately, fixing these omissions proved easier than replanting timberland. All it took was a few surgical insertions here and there, followed up by a continuity sweep.

So now I have two completed novels—the first at 115,000 words, the second at 101,000 words. The first half of my tetralogy could theoretically hit the presses tomorrow.

Of course, that part’s not up to me.

So now I must loose another swarm of queries and manuscript submissions upon an unsuspecting publishing industry. Fly, my pretties, fly!

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