After a year of hard work, I've finally finished the fifth and final book of my Beyond the Lost Horizon series, The Promised Day. I'm going to do a quick read through of the entire series to make sure there aren't any glaring plot holes or continuity errors now that the whole story is finished, and then I'm going to start trying to shop it around again.
I had a lot of trouble trying to sell the first book a few years back, because the publishing industry, or at least the literary agents I propositioned, were not interested in books written by white straight men. Instead of giving up and moving on, I kept plugging away and finished the whole series. I'm hoping that enough time has now passed that that trend is on its way out and I may have a better shot, especially now that I'm offering an entire five book Epic Fantasy series that is completed and ready to go. I even had one agent tell me that he loved the book, and if I were black, gay or a woman he could sell it to a publisher by the end of the day, am I SURE that I'm not non-binary or something? Seems a bit stupid to me, but whatever.
Anyway, with that finally finished, I'm kicking around a few ideas for other projects, and we'll see what I end up doing. Until then, I'm just glad I'm done with this one. It's taken me SO FREAKING LONG to get this series written.
So, now we've got:
Book 1 - Sorrow of the Damned (81k words)
Book 2 - Darkness of the Heart ( 101k words)
Book 3 - Forlorn Hope (93k words)
Book 4 - Ghosts of the Past (91k words)
Book 5 - The Promised Day (103k words)
The full series is 469,145 words long which, for reference, is about the length of Brandon Sanderson's latest Stormlight book.
Originally, this was going to be a single volume, but it was way too long, so I split it into a trilogy, and it was still way too long, so I rearranged it a bit and came up with 5 books that are more mainstream sized, than epic fantasy sized. I'm hoping the shorter lengths of the books, as well as all 5 of them being completed, will help me to sell them. If I'm not able to sell them, I'm also looking into other avenues of publishing, but I'd really like to go the traditional route. It's kind of always been my dream.
Anyway, have a lovely day, and thank you for reading my incoherent ramblings.
