Tonight, I’m very pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new chapter in the adventures of Vengar the Barbarian… The Salvaged Sword of Vengar!

Click on to learn more…

As some of you know, I lost my father this past November, and that put an unfortunate road-block in my progress on Arcana Universalis. Rather than letting that stop me dead in my tracks, however, I decided it was high-time to see Vengar’s triumphant return.

Welcome back to the Hyperbolic Age, a time that time forgot, when men were drunk, women were unhappy, and goat was the other white meat. Into this melodramatic yet somehow lost epoch strides a mighty figure, a king cursed to never again remember his homeland who wanders the thousand-and-one kingdoms in search of what he’s lost. His name is Vengar, and he’s a barbarian.

Shudder with anxiety as our hulking hero drinks foul concoctions unfit for human consumption. Thrill as he kidnaps dark ruffians and wages war against barbarians even bigger than himself, and shake your head in dismay as he does irreparable damage to his liver.

In this episode…

On a quest to recover his stolen property, Vengar arrives in the northern lands of Sunderia, a harsh and unforgiving region that sees little tourism. There, he enlists the aid of a mysterious rogue and then charges off to confront the monstrous warlord who holds what he once held dear.

Can Vengar overcome the warlord and his Glum Horde? Will his mysterious new ally stab him in the back? And what the heck is with the goat milk, anyway?

Clocking in at roughly 35 pages, The Salvaged Sword of Vengar is a whole lot of adventure in a petite package.

Vengar the Barbarian! The mighty strange adventures of a strangely mighty man!

The Salvaged Sword of Vengar is currently an Amazon exclusive, and will hopefully be part of the Kindle Singles program soon. If not, it will be available for free from all of the usual sources in a few weeks.

Click here to purchase your copy!

Hurry up and go read. What are you waiting for?
~Chris

And remember, if you buy 10… you’ll have 10 of them!

I’ll be digging through it tonight (happy National Coffee Day everyone!), and will hopefully have it up for sale tomorrow. Stay tuned, true believers!

Some background: before heading down the road to self-publishing, I entered Stars Rain Down (then called Legacy Undying, which still sounds like a weepy vampire romance novel if you ask me… which you didn’t, but I thoughtfully answered anyway… no need to thank me… wow, this aside has gotten mighty long) into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition. I passed the one-page pitch round, and then moved on to the second phase of the competition, in which two randomly selected Amazon Vine Reviewers take a look at a 3,000 word excerpt of the novel. Find out what they had to say after the jump.

Review #1

I’m not normally a fan of space opera, but I have to say that in this case I was drawn into the narrative. It is, in places, awkward but on the whole, competently written. It drops the reader right into the action and provokes all the right questions.

The alien names, so often a fudge factor in a piece of science fiction or fantasy, are simply rendered here, making it easy to remember the important ones without losing their essential otherness. This is no small feat. Too often stories in this genre are peppered with names that look as if they could be vocalized only with grunts and whistles.

Overall, I’d say that this story has a lot of potential.

Review #2

“Coordinates locked and ready to initiate scan, sir.” That phrase tells you this writing is from a science fiction story, sort of “Star Trek” meets “Contact” meets “The Right Stuff”. I liked “The Right Stuff” and have no interest in “Contact” or “Star Trek”, so now you know what type of books I read.
Writing was mildly interesting but because of the subject matter, it didn’t pull me in. I didn’t think it was too original, but the characters are well developed. But the concept is just not what I usually read and the characters didn’t overcome my bias towards science fiction. But for a sci-fi fan, it would probably be good.

Needless to say, I didn’t win the contest and subsequently failed to spend the rest of my days swimming in a giant pit full of money and barely-legal bikini models. However, aside from one very upbeat rejection letter from a literary agent, these were essentially the first scraps of feedback I ever received about the novel, and I think it could’ve gone a lot worse.

Hindsight is always 20/20 of course. At the time, this was simply a great excuse to drink. Heavily. For days.

I’ve since forgiven the reviewers and their senseless, barbaric prejudice against science-fiction. To date, my poor cirrhotic liver has not yet forgiven me, though.

Gah! There’s the paparazzi now!

But seriously, it’s been a weird and exciting ride so far, and the feeling of getting my work out there into the hands of perfect strangers has been in turns terrifying, exhilarating, and awfully damn gratifying. Total downloads are over 12,000 (!), and that’s a number I honestly don’t even know how to process. I just can’t imagine it, and believe me, I’ve tried.

Oh, how I’ve tried.

So, what’s next for me and my make believe press? Well, there’s one big step I’ve been dragging my feet on, and you can see what it is right after the jump.

Yep, it was time to chop off my afro and triumphantly return to the shark-fin. Shark-fin! Hot damn, my aerodynamics are amazing. Amazing!

Awesome, right?

Oh, I also got this in the mail today:

Oktopod Digital Press is officially entering the world of print thanks to the kind folks at CreateSpace. Copies aren’t available just yet as I’m still ironing out some fiddly little details, but you’ll finally be able to order your own print edition of Stars Rain Down in just a few weeks. We’re really close now. Wonderfully, awesomely, massively close.

I may not be a bestseller or have any awards to decorate my shelf with yet, but I’m so much closer than I was just a few years back. Things are in motion after an eternity of waiting, and as much as I may joke or make sarcastic comments about it all, this whole thing is colossally important to me. So is every single one of you reading this. I just want to thank you all for checking out my work and giving me a chance, and I hope you’ll stick around as I embark on my sophomore year. I can’t guarantee what that year will hold, but I know it’s only going to get better from here on out.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ve got some writing to do.
~Chris

Sales are slow, and even free downloads are a bit on the poky side. I sell 16 books a month on average, and give away about a hundred times that, but only Cthulhu knows how many of those are ever actually read.

So, I’m obviously keen to revamp how I go about it. Previously, I’ve advertised on sites like Mobileread and Kindleboards, and contacted whichever random book bloggers I’ve managed to drunkenly stumble across. I also sent emails off to minor internet celebrities in hopes of catching someone’s eye, but pretty much all of that ended up being a massive waste of time. After months of getting little in reply but silence, my efforts tapered off.

The single most effective thing I’ve done in the past few months was make a comment at Slashdot that got modded insightful, and it just so happened to have a bit of advertising artfully tucked inside. Sadly, that’s not the sort of thing I can do regularly, and the mystique would surely wear off if I tried.

So, what next?

Seems I have to aim lower and wider. I’ve previously been targeting folks who have readerships in the thousands (or tens of thousands) who likely receive enough random mail every day to find it annoying. What I need are people with readerships in the hundreds who are still delighted whenever someone contacts them. Prime targets would be creatives in connected fields (comics and indie games should be strong candidates), and science-fiction/fantasy book bloggers.

The other strong possibility is to start marketing locally, looking for sci-fi and fantasy clubs in my area who I could possibly invade. The problem with that is that I’m effectively a recluse who hasn’t met a soul since moving up here, and I have no bleeding clue how or where to start.

I’m not too proud to say that I need help, so here’s my plea: if you happen to know (or just know of) a book-blogger, a comic creator, a mildly successful writer, an indie game studio, or anyone with some kind of audience who might be receptive to helping out a writer in need, please let me know.

Thanks for listening.

An hour, or two at most, should be enough to get through Arcana Universalis: Terminus and will leave the reader anxious for the followup.

You can find the full review at Terminus’ Amazon page. Hustle up and get clicking.

Welcome to the world of Arcana Universalis, a strange universe filled with fabled creatures, vile demons, and starships driven by mystical energies. It’s a time of fantastic powers that defy belief and vicious bloodshed that spans the stars… most of which belong to the Imperium, an oppressive feudal society ruled by a millennium-old dictator.

More after the jump…

Enter Caleb Gedley, a bright but neurotic apprentice fresh from the academy who has a beautiful fiancee and a lifetime of mind-numbing research waiting for him back home. The only obstacle left between Caleb and this cozy future is a six-month externship aboard the Imperial Dragonslayer Ashkalon, an ancient and powerful warship patrolling the lesser spiral arm.

It was supposed to be a routine tour, just a few months of hard labor in exchange for a land-grant and entrance into noble society, but things in Caleb’s life never work out like they’re supposed to. When the Ashkalon is sent to investigate the disappearance of a prospector ship, Caleb and his best friend, a young warrior named Bibbs, find themselves on the surface of a mysterious planet. That’s when everything begins to go terribly, horribly wrong…

Terminus is the first segment of the upcoming fantasy novel, Arcana Universalis: The Hanged Man’s Revelation, due out in late 2011. This novella-length release is the first of five planned episodes that will together form the final novel.

Arcana Universalis: Terminus is now available almost everywhere ebooks are sold, and can also be downloaded here free of charge, and shared to your heart’s content.

Download Links:

• Amazon Kindle
• Barnes & Noble Nook
• Smashwords
• Free High Quality PDF
• Free Epub
• Free Mobi (Kindle Format)
• Free Downloads @ Feedbooks.com

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the start of a strange new adventure for us here at Oktopod Digital Press. Feel free to grab a copy, and please let us know what you think!

More gritty details after the jump…

The image was produced using Photoshop, Illustrator, Blender, and my cheap point-and-shoot camera. The final Photoshop source file is composed of 30 layers, is 425MB in size, and has a native resolution of 4890×7924. Just how big is that? It’s so blasted huge that at normal zoom, the thumb completely fills my screen. Yowza!

Special thanks to my brother for his kind assistance taking photos, and thanks also to my chubby hand-model whose sausage-like fingers are surely destined for fame and fortune.

The sharp eyed among you will have also noticed the full title, and that’s my other announcement today: Universalis is now officially Arcana Universalis, and this novella is subtitled Terminus. That’s two whole scoops of Latin in each and every box.

As for details about the story itself… well, you didn’t expect me to drop the veil of secrecy entirely, didja? I promise that all will be revealed very soon, but please feel free to speculate in the mean time.

~Chris

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to break open the bubbly… and by bubbly, I mean bargain basement whiskey. Cheers!