The Next Publishing Step

A few months ago, I began serializing my novel Songs of My Mother over on Royal Road. For the first week, I posted five chapters per day and then slowed down to one chapter per day.

We’re now well past the halfway mark and still going strong! At this point, there are over 170 chapters posted over there that you can read for free!

So do please head over there and check it out. I would love to have more people reading this and presumably some of you are interested in reading my fiction since you’re receiving this email at all.

A pitch on the book

It’s done all right on Royal Road. It was an experiment to see how serializing over there could work, especially given that my novel is not a very clean fit for the literary ecosystem. A subversive epic fantasy doesn’t necessarily gel well with the LitRPG crowd. But I’ve gained some consistent readers, which was my only real hope with this experiment. I’m satisfied enough that I’ll be trying a project over there more geared towards that audience.

My goal was to immediately lead this into a crowdfunding campaign for the whole series, which I will either publish as three or four books. I would like to publish it as one single book, but it is too long, I’m afraid. And while it might be fun to hold a 1,500 page novel in your hand and even for me to publish one, I think it would lead to a lot of frustration because I imagine the spines won’t hold up.

I decided to put that on hold for now, though, because I’ve decided to launch a different project with the Broken River Crew.

We’re launching a magazine!

You can sign up at the Teaser Page here.

You can read more about this project by clicking over there, but a magazine is something the The Broken River Writers' Collective has been talking about for a few years. We even nearly launched it here on substack a few years ago but ultimately decided against that iteration of the magazine. Much of this has to do with our desire to be less beholden to algorithms and to offer people something physical.

For the various bookfairs we’ve done this year, we’ve been selling zines and the reception has been delightful. People dig it! They like being able to grab a physical bitesized piece of literature like this. This started with what we’ve been calling the Broken River Sampler, which you can consider Issue 0 of this magazine. Six short stories, one from each of the Broken River Authors.

What Is Broken River Books?

Broken River Books is the award winning writers' collective from Rios de la Luz, J David Osborne, David Simmons, Kelby Losack, Grant Wamack, and e rathke with artwork by Tony Tran.

What Is A Year of Broken River Zines?

We’re launching the magazine in September as part of Backerkit’s Printopia initiative with the intention of mailing out a physical magazine to all of our backers every month for 2027, starting in January. Our goal is to keep doing this possibly forever. Just keep monthly issues coming out to all of you with a sustainable base of subscribers.

Each month will have work from the Broken River crew and maybe some surprises from various guest authors and artists along the way.

What Is Backerkit?

It’s a crowdfunding site where people (like me) offer a product that you can back to make it real. There’s a funding threshold so if we receive enough backers, the project will come to life! If we fail to meet our goal, then, well, nothing happens. And so you back a project you believe in and want to see become real.

Funds are collected when the campaign ends if it is successful.

Why Should I Back?

You’ll get monthly magazines delivered straight to your door at a discount! You’ll also get other various goodies to be announced during the campaign. Along with the zines, we’re also offering book bundles exclusive to the campaign, so this will be the most cost effective way to grab a handful of books together.

So do check out the Teaser Page and enter your email to receive a digital copy of Issue 0. This will also keep you updated on the campaign and notify you when we launch in September!

What About the Broken Katana Campaign?

This has not been forgotten! I’ve had a lot of people ask me when this is coming and the answer has been: soon. And while I meant to launch in the spring and then this summer, I’ve had some things come up that you may or may not be aware of. But it has been delayed until after the Broken River Zine campaign and the fulfillment of Briar Bay. I also want Beetle Battle to be finalized and just waiting on fulfillment before I launch yet another crowdfund.

I plan on launching this in October, which will make for a busy time for me!

But it will also lead to its best result, I think. So the completion of the Howl series is still on its way! It’s just taking me longer than expected to get it out the door, but it will be here sooner than you think!