Another retrospective, big news, and going forward
Hey friends, Sov here. Been a while since I’ve done one of these, but I’ve got some stuff to talk about.
This has been a pretty wild journey so far. I’ve been a web fiction author for going on eight months now, most of a year. After spending 6-7 years trying to find the right project to do a web story with and failing, this feels kind of incredible. Bonus points that I didn’t expect Alken’s tale to be the one I stuck with.
I just closed out arc 4, Bind, which ended up being my longest so far, and I think also my best. This one was weird, because I expected to get through the entire “summit and tournament” section of the story and wrap up the major events in the city all in one arc (some of you might have noticed that I changed the arc’s name partway through). Turns out I bit off a lot more than I could chew with this leg of the journey, and I ended up deciding to split it into two arcs. I hope to wrap up this section with arc 5, which I’ve already started working on.
I expect Garihelm might end up becoming a central location in the narrative that we return to on occasion, with Alken now in a position as a lord and peer to the realms, but we’ll see how that plays out. Things definitely won’t be easy or simple from him from here on out.
But that’s author thoughts about the narrative, and I’d rather keep my plans going forward vague to avoid spoilers. I have another bit of news to share, which is a lot bigger.
Not long back, I had a publisher reach out to me after finding my fiction on Royal Road. They seemed to just be poking about my future plans, which I gathered is pretty normal after talking to some other authors in the same spaces. Long story short, after meeting with one of their agents, some emails, and a long think, I ended up signing with Podium.
Oathbreaker is going to be published.
I’ve known this for going on a few weeks now, but wanted to wait for the arc to finish and for everything to be set in stone before saying anything. Right now, the deal is going to involve the first 3 arcs as full books being released across all platforms — including audiobook.
This is a big deal to me, and not something I expected. I had intended to quietly write my silly web fiction about a very sad paladin for years before even considering looking at anything more serious. I hadn’t even taken the step to start a patreon, mainly because I was never certain how much traction this story would get and didn’t want to distract myself from the project itself. The publishing thing kind of fell into my lap out of the blue. I almost didn’t take it, because being independent, while not lucrative, is simple and more relaxed.
But I’m not getting any younger, and after consulting with friends and family, I decided to take the win. Part of this is because I won’t actually have to change much about what I’m doing — Podium is going to take care of pretty much all the work, while I get to just keep working on the story. It felt like the best of both worlds, far as I could tell.
I admit, I’m anxious and excited about this at once. When Podium originally poked me, I was hyper skeptical — what publisher would reach out to me, a little web fiction author with a story that’s already very niche for the space it’s in? I agreed to a meeting call, which went well, but I was kind of in the camp of just staying independent. After the pub reached out again very soon after the first meeting, offering a contract, and I saw what they were offering, I gave it some harder thought.