Remember those adorable Younce plushies from last year? Well, it’s time for the first giveaway! In honor of reaching the halfway point in the Gryphon Insurrection series, this Twitter giveaway includes the following:
A signed hardcover of Eyrie
A signed hardcover of Ashen Weald
A signed hardcover of Starling
A signed hardcover of Blue Eyes & Other Tales
A Younce (gyrfalcon+snow leopard gryphon) plushie made by Rezzit
Your choice of a Brenda Lyons signed art print of any interior art piece in the series!
Wow! How amazing is that?! I’m pretty excited about reaching the halfway point, and I’m happy to share my excitement with all of my readers! If you miss out on this giveaway and are really hoping for one of the Younce plushies, I’ll be doing one more giveaway at the end of the series, too, so you’ll have one more chance.
PS – If you’re new to the series and are curious about Brenda Lyons’ interior art, she just showcased two of the pieces from Eyrie on her own twitter, a saber-toothed tiger gryphon named Hatzel and an emerald peafowl opinicus named Brevin. Check’em out =]
2019 has been an exciting year for me. It’s the year my fantasy novels were published, the year my autoimmune disorder got upgraded to catastrophic, the year I met two of my literary heroes, and the year I read almost 70 gryphon novels.
I don’t even know where to begin to look over it all. Maybe it’s best to start with the books themselves. Practically speaking, how did this year go?
The first words of Eyrie came in 2017, but the novel itself was published on March 31,st 2019. There was a lot of editing and feedback in there (special thanks to Dustin Porta, Tim Marquitz, Glenn Birmingham, and Roz Gibson for helping me get Eyrie from first draft to finished version). I had a hard time letting go of this book. I have a note that says “Eyrie ready to release” from August 2017. Instead, it went through several more iterations. Ultimately, I don’t know if taking two more years with it made a big difference, but I think new authors have trouble letting go of their books. Ultimately, I’m proud of it.
Like most authors, I wrote a few novels (and even edited them) that weren’t published before settling upon a more serious publication attempt with Eyrie. I did this for a specific reason—my health wasn’t great and it looked like they were going to be doing some fairly serious surgeries. My spouse has often complained that there aren’t enough stories about gryphons, especially not ones with gryphon protagonists, and part of how they deal with grief is through reading fantasy. I share a similar love for gryphons, and I felt like if I was only able to write one series before dying, I wanted something that would give my loved ones comfort.
No pressure, right? But I’d also read a lot of gryphon books growing up, and it always bothered me that there weren’t any epic nature fantasy books. And that gryphons were usually eagle and lion based. So I took everything I wanted but couldn’t find in the gryphon literary canon and went wild.
Thanks to the Gryphon Reading List, I had more preoders than I expected. I even had someone trying to get signed hardcovers months before release (Hi Saylor!). All of the fan mail and love made it a success. Of course, I’m the kind of reader who loves series, so I never planned on Eyrie being a standalone novel.
Ashen Weald released on June 19th, 2019. Eyrie had clocked in around 70,000 words, and as a fan of short epic fantasy, I expected my next book would be similar.
It was not.
Ashen Weald is over 120,000 words. It was an epic fantasy of the sort I loved reading as a teen—a Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince-style doorstopper. It had a lot of points of view and a lot of problems in the first draft. More than any other book, I felt sure this one would be the death of me. Between my creative writing degree, reading all those gryphon books, workshops, and everything else, nothing taught me so much about writing as Ashen Weald did.
I realize I make it sound like a problem child, but I love the book it became. I was worried sick that no one would pick it up, but readers were willing to give me a chance. I worried the added length and juggling so many points of views would be a problem, but instead those were the things that brought in more fan mail. And characters like Foultner who weren’t even in the first draft were fan favorites.
Starling released on August 6th. I was having health problems, so in retrospect, I would have spread out Ashen Weald and Starling’s releases so there wasn’t a gap in the autumn where the fourth book should have released. That said, I had a lot of big plans for Starling’s release, none of which I was healthy enough to do. (Look for some amazing giveaways and a Larry Dixon interview next year when I’m healthier.)
If Eyrie took two years of editing and Ashen Weald was getting reworked a hundred times in those same two years, Starling was the easiest book I’ve ever written. It didn’t hit 120,000 words, staying around a healthy 90k. While it has a good number of points of view, it feels like it’s specifically Tresh’s story. In fantasy, we call that heroic fiction versus epic fiction. Tresh is a wonderful character, and I loved getting to write her—though you’ve probably realized by now that every protagonist is my favorite character when I’m working on their book.
I worried that this book was too big a departure when some readers compared it to a horror movie with gryphons or when someone would comment that they loved 120k epic fantasy books. Ultimately, though, Starling was well-loved, and I’ve decided to stop worrying about little things like heroic vs epic and 70k vs 120k.
Unfortunately for me, what came next was a break from writing as I went through a litany of invasive medical tests. They drew so much blood that I had to spread it out over several days. Catastrophic APS had tried to kill me a few times, but now it was giving me fatigue and constant pain, which required testing out a lot of ineffective treatments to make my case to insurance about covering real care.
Thankfully, that gave me time to try out something a little different, something I may not have tried otherwise.
While it was hard to keep all 100k of Reevesbane in my head while in pain, it was a lot easier to take a set of good days and combine them to do short stories. Thus, Blue Eyes and Other Tales was born.
I’m no stranger to short stories. My first publications on my literary fiction pen name was a short story about a little old lady who just wanted to be happy and ended up as a serial killer. Writing fantasy short stories, though, was a different cup of tea. I was unsure of myself, but there were characters whose stories I wanted to tell, and nothing was going to stop me.
I also discovered a secret. There’s a saying that every reader has a ‘cookie’—a trope they love to a high degree. I suppose that’s probably books with gryphons in them for many of us. But as I ran my short stories through some friends and beta readers, I was excited to watch what happened as a short story turned out to be someone’s cookie.
A beak-cute lesbian gryphon love story with terror birds? That sentence more than tripled my mailing list size. (I decided to release the stories one at a time for free on my newsletter and Patreon to help tide readers over while I recovered.)
Thenca and Deracho together on a rescue mission? There were readers who just liked seeing them be a couple and do good in the world.
Connixation? Let me tell you, “one small gryphon versus the end of the world” was definitely several people’s cookie.
Blue-eyed Festival combined the cookies of Christmas stories, gryphons, and extended epilogues, showing Younce and Satra after the events of Starling. I won’t spoil it, but I’m already getting happy feedback.
Did I plan to write a linked short story collection this year? No. Would I have rather released Reevesbane? Definitely yes. But watching readers’ eyes light up as they see a story that’s their cookie was rewarding. I might do this again sometime if my health gets me down. And my hope for this year was to give readers four books, and a short story collection made that happen.
How did the series do?
There’s a saying that readers won’t try out a new author unless they have out at least three books, usually five. After Starling released, while I was mostly dead and recovering and not doing any promotions, sales started to crawl up. Where before, a reader might try out Eyrie, now I was usually seeing sales on all three books at the same time. It’s an exciting feeling to watch sales start slow and creep up and up and up. For the second half of the year, every month has had more sales than the previous one.
It’s not “quit the day job money” (author’s note: health insurance is important for me to have right now), but it’s a great start that fills me with hope. It’s also had some rather unusual quirks. Let’s talk about the things I expected as a new fantasy author and what they were really like. (Author’s note: literary fiction doesn’t come with fan mail or gryphons or making money, but I like selling short stories to literary magazines. My heart is fantasy, but I do have that other pen name, so I’m specifying new *fantasy* author here.)
Myth: “Most of the money from fiction comes from ebook sales on Amazon.” That’s a big statement and precisely what I was expecting to happen. There are four editions of each book: a Kindle-exclusive ebook edition, a paperback edition, a dust jacket hardcover, and a case laminate hardcover large print edition. The ebook being exclusive to Kindle allows it to be in the Kindle Unlimited program, sort of Netflix for books except I get paid around half a cent per page read with certain restrictions. So I released Eyrie fully expecting there to be limited paper sales and everything to have come through Amazon.
That’s not what happened.
I’m still figuring things out for taxes, but Amazon was maybe 20-25% of my income. Really, it was the hardcovers (especially the large print) where the bulk of my royalties came from. I suspect this is because readers are done with dust jackets and love having the cover printed directly on the book. I’ve noticed that there’s a selection of readers (including myself) who love having paper copies of books with beautiful mythical creatures on them, especially gryphons and dragons. I received a LOT of fan mail that showed off gryphon shelves, which I always reply to with a picture of my own gryphon shelf.
Next up, since I released a Telegram sticker pack and I was getting a lot of fan mail from furries and gryphon megafans (gryfans?), I was expecting those to be where most of the sales were coming from. That wasn’t the case.
Actually, they make up a much smaller percentage. They’re just very supportive of authors and artists and love reaching out to let them know. So thank you to all of the furries and gryphon megafans =] I’ve loved your emails!
So who is buying my books? There are a few groups. Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar fans make up a lot of paperback sales, and also a bit of ebook sales. There’s a group of YA creature fantasy fans who read Jess Owen’s Summer King Chronicles or Warriors, Wings of Fire, Guardian Herd, FoxCraft, or similar books who also enjoy mine. There’s a selection of nature and low fantasy fans like those who enjoyed Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons. There’s fantasy/scifi war fans. There’s a large number of readers who love fancy mythical creatures on covers (especially hardcover sales here). There’s fans who like fantasy that isn’t comedy but has fun comedic elements.
It makes sense. Those are all elements in the books. While I’d love to have found out that there are thousands of gryphon ultra fans, it’s a little reassuring that if I write non-gryphons in the future, I should still be okay.
Phew, this is running long, and I’m running out of energy. In addition to fans, fame, money, and working towards my dream of publishing a hundred novels, I also met a lot of other authors. Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon (The Black/White/Silver Gryphon) invited me out to their home for a week. Roz Gibson (Griffin Ranger) helped me along my path. Jess Owen (Song of the Summer King) was there to talk gryphons. I was able to help out both John Bailey (Dire) and Alexander Bizzell (The Gryphon Generation). My favorite person, Glenn Birmingham, put his hat into the dragon author ring while also supporting gryphon authors like me. I had fun with a lot of my peers.
What does 2020 hold?
I wasn’t able to get Reevesbane out this year, but it’s in edits and it’ll be here next year. My goal for 2020 is to release books 4, 5, and 6 for the Gryphon Insurrection, wrapping up the main story arc. I also plan to release a standalone fisherfolk novel with Rorin and Tresh. Like Blue Eyes, its ebook will start as a free newsletter/Patreon exclusive and get listed for sale everywhere much later on. Brenda Lyons is painting the cover for this one and the excitement is high.
Assuming I get coverage to treat my catastrophic APS and have more energy next year, I’d like to take things a step further and start on a dragon series. I’ll talk more about that when I get there, but I have some ideas for high fantasy that I’d like to write. If all goes well, I’ll get at least one dragon book out next year when gryphons wraps up.
Lastly, my editors and the authors I idolized as a kid want me to take one of my books to the Big 5 Publishers. I like being small because it gives me power over the cover, editing, and content of my books. But I have a novel I’ve been wanting to rewrite that my editors keep telling me sounds like it’d be a perfect fit for the biggest publishing houses, so I may try to work time in to write and edit it so it can make the rounds. If it gets rejected, no big deal—I’ll release it like I did with the gryphon books later on sometime. If it gets picked up, it’ll probably be years before it’s released, but I’d love to see what it’s like to work with the big publishing companies. I’m nothing if not a student of the publishing industry.
Well, this certainly ended up feeling like a “Dear Diary” entry. If you read this far, welcome to the end! You should go take a nap. That’s what I’m going to do. And then I’m going to go through the latest round of edits on Reevesbane!
-Vale
PS: In total, I published 329,682 words of fiction this year!
November’s newsletter short story has been sent out and it’s….. Connixation! For anyone who’s read at least Ashen Weald, that should be an ominous title. While the other short stories have been set within a few years of Eyrie, this is the first short story that goes all the way back to a time when the taiga ‘pride’ was actually dozens of prides which stretched from Sandpiper’s Dune all the way up the continent to the northern coast. It’s one small Williwaw gryphon against the end of the world.
The term “connixation” is a fun word. Imagine con-flagr-ation with the word for fire replaced with the Latin for snow, ‘nix,’ and you have the ultimate blizzard. I could go on a little, but I don’t want to spoil anything in the story. If you aren’t a newsletter subscriber, you can sign up and the first email should have a link to download all the free stories. And Patrons of any level have access, too.
Next month, we’ll wrap up the Blue Eyes series of short stories with a Blue-eyed Festival tale involving Younce. If all you wanted for December was a Gryphmas story, I’ve got you covered. You didn’t think I’d do an entire series of taiga gryphon stories and forget about Younce, did you?
On the writing front, Reevesbane is still coming along nicely. I have a dragon rancher story out on submission that I hope will get published after the Gryphon Insurrection is finishing up. Jeff Brown just sent me an amazing new gryphon cover, probably my favorite so far. And one or two secret projects should hit the point where I can talk about them.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of my American readers =] Be on the lookout for the tastiest of gryphs, the ham-turkey hippogryph.
After all the travel and medical tests, it’s been good to get back to my usual schedule. Health-wise, I’m just waiting to hear back from insurance before I start treatment. I imagine from my author’s notes it isn’t a secret, but catastrophic APS (antiphospholipid antibody syndrome) has made life exciting the last six years. I’m on enough medication that it shouldn’t still be trying to kill me outright, but I’m still tired and in pain all the time. There are treatments that would get me back to 100%, but I’ve spent the last few months trying other treatments first and making the case to insurance to cover the better treatments. Right now, it’s just a waiting game. But if it’s covered and the treatment works, you can probably expect my writing output to double, so fingers crossed! (Or paws, talons, etc.)
I’m still hard at work on Reevesbane, but I don’t have a release date yet. While undergoing the other treatments, it was a little easier to write short stories, hence the newsletter and Patreon short stories. There are two more in the Blue Eyes series that’ll release this month and next. I’ve had a lot of fun writing them, and I appreciate all of the fan mail. It seems like Satra and Mignet is the favorite so far, but wait ’til you read this month’s. Here’s a tiny spoiler: it has snow.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t much of a spoiler. December’s story will serve as a capstone to the anthology, touching on all of the previous stories. A few people have asked about adding a paperback or hardcover to their shelves. Fleeks is working on the back cover and spine, so I’ll see what I can do. I’d like to keep Blue Eyes exclusive to the newsletter/Patron, but if you really want a paperback or hardcover, use the contact form and let me know. We can figure something out once I actually have author copies.
Despite the medical tests, it’s been a good year, writing-wise. Three gryphon books released, a gryphon short story collection wrapping up, and next year should be even better than 2019. I have at least two exciting announcements coming up, but I’ll save those for later. I’d rather announce them with a bit of flash (and a chibi gryphon heart).
“The only people who are against escapism are the jailors.”
Google wasn’t sure if that quote was Tolkien, Neil Gaiman, CS Lewis, or a slew of other authors. I suspect, like most quotes that resonate, people just wanted to lend it credibility.
It’s a good quip for when someone tells you that reading fantasy is “just escapism.” I don’t believe that fantasy (or any genre fiction, or novels, or poetry) are necessarily escapism, but I understand where that view comes from: when people’s lives are terrible, fantasy offers them relief. There’s a reason people dive into Valdemar or Harry Potter when their parents die, when they get a cancer diagnosis, when depression is taking over. Engaging the creative part of the brain makes everything feel able to be handled.
I’ve certainly read my fair share of books to cope, though my love of reading really began with Sherlock Holmes. Before 4th grade, I still read a lot: Frankie! (a gryphon classic), The Laughing Dragon, Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher, all the usual suspects for Millennial children. But in 4th grade, I picked up The Complete Sherlock Holmes, over a thousand pages long, and I read through it all.
And I thought: “If I can read a thousand page book, I can read anything.” So I did. I read all the books on the shelf in my dad’s office, starting with Lee Iaccoca’s biography on the automotive industry. I started using my allowance to buy books at the local Walden Books.
(For those who don’t remember Walden Books, it was owned by the same company as Borders. For those who don’t remember Borders, it was like Barnes ‘n Noble except constantly in bankruptcy. The salient point is that Walden Books had free coffee, which was really nice for a 4th grade saving all of his money for novels. I drank a lot of coffee back then, which is why I’m so tall now.)
I stepped into Walden Books with three weeks of savings (read: $9) and the first thing I saw was the Michael Whelan artwork for Sunrunner’s Fire. It was just on a bookmark display, so I went to try to locate the associated book. That led me to Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince series and the entire fantasy shelf: Mercedes Lackey, Irene Radford, Andre Norton, Anne McCaffrey, all of the classics. I seem to remember that The Silver Gryphon had a huge display back then, so I picked up the first book in the series, The Black Gryphon.
I’d say the rest is history, but that’s not really the case. At school, a friend had a huge fantasy collection of novels and let anyone borrow them. My dad’s cancer returned and he passed away. My aunt came to live with us and I was moved out of my room to a sleeping bag in my dad’s old office. The friends of the family who were helping out with my brother and I also passed away the next year. While fantasy had always been a joy, it became a bit of an escape for several years as I learned to cope with death as a fact of life.
During that time, I’m not sure I really enjoyed the books I was reading. I’d get trash bags of used books that people were giving away and go through them. Obviously, if you’re a kid and your parent has passed away, therapy is the best option. But reading helped fill the time when I couldn’t do anything else or when I felt out of place, like having been moved from my room into an office.
I don’t want to downplay the role books played in my life during that time. Even now, when someone gets hit with a life roll as an adult and needs time to process and recover, I suggest they borrow the Valdemar books off of my shelf to help them cope. It’s worked many times.
But I didn’t really enjoy reading during those times. It’s hard to enjoy anything when you’re overwhelmed. It was only later, once I got a room to myself again, that I began to read for enjoyment instead of survival again.
I just wanted to take a moment to say that it’s okay to read to help you cope, and it’s okay to read for enjoyment, and there’s nothing wrong with escapism. Fantasy is great for that, but that’s not all it is. When you get back to a good place, definitely reread some of the things that helped you cope and just take a moment to enjoy them. The black gryphons and dragon princes of the literary world read just as well happy as they did when you were overwhelmed.
(The artwork of Soft Paws is by Kelley Goodwin @kelleygtattoo on Twitter. It seemed a good match as I’d spent so many hours on AIM as a teen chatting with Kelley about gryphons and fantasy.)
How’s that for a short story cover? Fleeks did a great job with the artwork! I’m releasing a series of short stories to my Patreon and my newsletter. The first one just went out, but they’ll all be available even if you sign up later. Once they’ve all been released sometime in December, I’ll combine them into a book and make it available on the usual stores and formats.
So if you love taiga gryphons and need something to tide you over until Book 4, consider joining my mailing list to get them for free =] The first story is about Satra and Mignet and doesn’t have any spoilers for Ashen Weald or Starling.
And if short stories aren’t your thing, no worries! They won’t be required reading, and I’m 40,000 words into Reevesbane. It should be out this year if nothing goes wrong health-wise.
Are you getting tired of seeing my kitchen in these?
For everyone waiting to see what the different editions of Starling look like before you purchased, I’ve got you covered! Starling looks a little thicker than it is because there’s a detailed character list at the end.
All four editions. I was really excited that the Amazon paperback’s cover looks perfect this time. Yay!Large print on the left, dust jacket hardcover on the right.The large print (left) is 280 pages thicker than the dust jacket hardcover (right).The Amazon (left) and everyone else (right) versions of the paperback. They’re close this time! The main difference is that the inner margin is kinder in the Amazon version for people who prefer that kind of thing.The Amazon paperback (left) uses thicker paper than the normal trade paperback (right).
And there we go =] As always, for your convenience, here are the ISBNs if your local bookstore isn’t carrying Starling and you want them to special order it.
Trade Paperback: 978-1-64392-021-4
Ebook (Kindle): 978-1-64392-020-7
Dust Jacket Hardcover: 978-1-64392-022-1
Large Print Hardcover With the Cover Printed Directly on the Book: 978-1-64392-023-8
As I was getting ready to take pictures of the different Starling editions I realized I hadn’t posted pictures of the Ashen Weald editions, so I got a few pictures taken. The paperback through Amazon has a slightly lower quality cover than the other bookstores get just because of what printer handles what orders. So if you want the highest quality paperback, you’ll have to go through Barnes ‘n Noble or someone else.
The large print edition (left) with the cover printed onto the book and the normal dust jacket hardcover (right).The thick large print edition (left) and the dust jacket hardcover (right) with Younce on top.The Amazon version of the paperback (left) versus the trade paperback everyone else gets (right).The Amazon paperback (left) is thicker than the trade paperback everyone else gets (right). Last, but not least, all the editions lying down.
Sorry about the delay =] I know some people are really excited to see the different editions! I know having Amazon with its own edition is a little strange, but it helps keep the costs down there. That’s why Eyrie’s paperback is sometimes as low as $9.99 through Amazon versus $15.99 elsewhere.
Oh, if you’re looking to special order a specific version from your local bookstore, it can be helpful to know the ISBN.
Trade Paperback: 978-1-64392-011-5
Ebook (currently Kindle only): 978-1-64392-010-8
Hardcover (with dust jacket): 978-1-64392-012-2
Large Print (hardcover with cover printed directly on the book): 978-1-64392-013-9
Rachel Neumeier of Griffin Mage Trilogy fame convinced me that I should put my own books face-out on my bookshelf. The ground parrot is a garnish.
Just one more day! It’s exciting. Starling was finalized awhile back, but about two weeks ago, I reread it. All authors secretly worry that a book isn’t as good as they think it is. There’s something about the months of editing that puts you in that frame of mind. But when I read through Starling one last time before release, I enjoyed it even more than when I wrote the first draft. I hope everyone else enjoys it just as much.
A few people have reached out to say they found having links to the different editions to be helpful, so here you go! I even included the ISBNs to help people ordering from local bookstores.
And for anyone who wants to order a signed copy directly through me, I should have my author copies soon. They’re on the way, but mail takes awhile to reach us out here. Just use the contact form to reach out, and I’ll make sure to hang onto one for you. Don’t forget to let me know what version you’re interested in.
It’s crazy to think we’re already three books into the Gryphon Insurrection. I’m hard at work on book four, Reevesbane, but I’ll post a blog about what’s coming next once everyone has had time to enjoy Starling. Speaking of which, if you read and like Starling, don’t hesitate to let me know =]
