Glynn Stewart

Science Fiction & Fantasy Author

2018

2018 Retrospective and 2019 Plans

2018 was the longest year that ever was a year. That was the repeated description from one of the handful of Youtube personalities I follow and I can’t help but agree.

I have to actually look at the spreadsheets to see what the first book we launched in 2018 was (ONSET: Stay of Execution, apparently. Wow.)

Seems like we wrapped up ONSET longer ago than that.

2018 was a year of missteps for us. We ended up shifting our mix more towards Urban Fantasy than we meant to, which hurt our overall sales, and we spent a lot of our own capacity on trying to break into more traditional print sales.

Most of that effort culminated in Book Expo America, where we received a rather thorough if painful education in just how even successful independent publishers are regarded by the mainstream publishing and distributing world. Distributors insisted on handling our electronic distribution as well as print distribution and, well, that wasn’t happening.

 

Then we came home from Book Expo America and I had a heart attack. Stress and pneumonia induced, primarily, but still a horrid wakeup call that I was burning myself out. Fortunately, our plan had been to use 2018 to build a lead time in our publishing schedule. That lead time ended up being used to allow me to take most of the summer of 2018 off without us falling behind on the release schedule.

I’m better now, I promise 😉  WorldCon 2018 was better than BEA, with a lot more positive moments and 100% less critical health issues! We’re going back to WorldCon in 2019—we are most definitely NOT going back to Book Expo America.

 

We learned a lot of lessons in 2018. My urban fantasy doesn’t sell as well as my space opera, so we’re moving away from that for the immediate future. Noble’s Honor will wrap up the Changeling’s Blood trilogy and that will be my last urban fantasy release for a while. Future new novellas will be launched along the Ashen Stars model, not the Spaceships and Spellcasters model.

 

And I’m going to try and breathe a bit more. We have six books definitely planned for this coming year. Scheduling is still tentative, but they are as follows:

Noble’s Honor (Changeling Blood Book 3)
Shield of Terra (Light of Terra Book 2)
Sword of Mars (Starship’s Mage Book 7)
Refuge (Exile Book 2)
Imperium Defiant (Light of Terra Book 3)
Raven’s Peace (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 1)

Terry and I will also finish up the third Bound  / fifth Vigilante novel, Bound By Blood. That will launch sometime in 2019. I have a couple of side projects on the go that I don’t expect to be huge commercial gangbusters as well, so we will probably have eight launches this year.

 

We have set a primary goal for everyone at Faolan’s Pen Publishing of “don’t die.”

It seems like a low bar, but it’s also a good place to start!

 

Happy reading everyone,

-Glynn Stewart

UnArcana Stars Available Now on Amazon

UnArcana Stars is now available on Amazon and in Kindle Umlimited. This marks the beginning of the UnArcana Rebellions arc and the return of Damien Montgomery to the page.

Excited? Read the blurb below:

A humanitarian mission into unfriendly stars
A training cruise under the watch of a fortified fleet base
The closing jaws of a trap years in the making

It has been over a year since the UnArcana Worlds of the Protectorate of the Mage-King of Mars seceded, shattering the unity of the human race. The new Republic of Faith and Reason has raised new banners in defiance of the power of the Protectorate’s Mage aristocracy.

Now, Hand Damien Montgomery commands a relief mission to a Republic world ravaged by famine. His humanitarian mission collides with a newborn military beginning to flex its muscles—and a newborn nation prepared to accept no violations of its sovereignty, regardless of their needs.

Elsewhere, disaster strikes the Nia Kriti Fleet Base as an earthquake shatters their only communication with the rest of the Protectorate. Officer-in-training Roslyn Chambers is in the middle of the recovery effort when she realizes Nia Kriti is under attack.

The Republic is done with peace. They are coming for the Protectorate—and they will see the fleets of Mars break!

Darkness Beyond Preorder Available on Audible.com

Darkness Beyond, the first book in the Light of Terra series, is available for preorder on Audible.com. It is set to be released December 18; then it will be available on all Audible regional sites as well.

Darkness Beyond, set fifteen years after the Duchy of Terra series, starts a new trilogy involving Duchess Annette Bond and her step-daughter Morgan Casimir:

A newly-founded human colony world burned from orbit
A warship squadron of the galaxy’s oldest race ambushed and destroyed
An ancient enemy reborn in the darkness beyond the known stars

The A!Tol Imperium and their new human subjects have had fifteen years of relative peace. New colonies have been founded, new worlds explored, new ships built. Formal and informal alliances have been built with the ancient powers of the Core, leaving humanity and the Imperium seemingly on the brink of a new dawn.

The devastation of one of the newly-founded human colonies sends ripples of shock through the Imperium, and a battle fleet under Fleet Lord Harriet Tanaka is dispatched to the edge of the Imperium to find the culprits and bring them to justice.

Meanwhile, the destruction of a Mesharom Frontier Fleet squadron calls the Duchy of Terra’s newest warship, Bellerophon, into action and combat with a strange new power that bears all the signs of the Imperium’s age-old enemy, the Kanzi.

Aboard Bellerophon is Annette Bond’s stepdaughter, Morgan Casimir. The recently promoted junior officer will be thrust into the crucible of war and challenged to rise to her mother’s example in the face of this both new and ancient enemy…

We hope you enjoy this new story set in the Duchy of Terra Universe!

Darkness Beyond, the first book in the Light of Terra trilogy that follows the events in Duchy of Terra, is now available!

Darkness Beyond, the first book in the Light of Terra series that follows the events in Duchy of Terra, is now available on Amazon! This military space opera adventure is not to be missed.

Intrigued? Here’s the back cover copy:

A newly-founded human colony world burned from orbit
A warship squadron of the galaxy’s oldest race ambushed and destroyed
An ancient enemy reborn in the darkness beyond the known stars

The A!Tol Imperium and their new human subjects have had fifteen years of relative peace. New colonies have been founded, new worlds explored, new ships built. Formal and informal alliances have been built with the ancient powers of the Core, leaving humanity and the Imperium seemingly on the brink of a new dawn.

The devastation of one of the newly-founded human colonies sends ripples of shock through the Imperium, and a battle fleet under Fleet Lord Harriet Tanaka is dispatched to the edge of the Imperium to find the culprits and bring them to justice.

Meanwhile, the destruction of a Mesharom Frontier Fleet squadron calls the Duchy of Terra’s newest warship, Bellerophon, into action and combat with a strange new power that bears all the signs of the Imperium’s age-old enemy, the Kanzi.

Aboard Bellerophon is Annette Bond’s stepdaughter, Morgan Casimir. The recently promoted junior officer will be thrust into the crucible of war and challenged to rise to her mother’s example in the face of this both new and ancient enemy…

The print book and audiobook versions of Darkness Beyond will come out soon.

Exile out today! ★ Starred Review of the Exile Space Opera from Publishers Weekly

Exile, a new space opera from Glynn Stewart, is out today! This release is a little different than the rest; the book is launching wide on all ebook platforms. Exile is available from the following vendors:

No need to wait for the audiobook!

There is also a simultaneous audiobook, live on Audible! The Exile audiobook was produced by our friends over at Podium Publishing and is narrated by JD Jackson (the same narrator as the Ashen Stars prequel novella audiobook on AudFans).
Exile audiobook by Glynn Stewart, narrated by JD Jackson

Starred Review!

Glynn and everyone on his team was so excited to see Exile received a starred review from Publishers Weekly! A starred review from Publishers Weekly is a big deal in the publishing world: the magazine puts a star next to certain books to indicate its “a book of outstanding quality”. Which, according to one of the biggest industry magazines in book publishing, is amazing.

Check out the whole of the review below:

★ A failed rebellion against a tyrannical space confederacy is exiled to a remote corner of the galaxy in this political space drama, the first full novel in Stewart’s Exile series (after the novella Ashen Stars). In the colonized cosmos of 2386, Isaac Gallant, the son of the dictatorial president of the interstellar Confederacy, is a high-ranking officer in the Confederacy fleet. He’s also secretly part of a rebellion against the Confederacy. Alongside rebellion leader Amelie Lestroud, a former movie star, Isaac helps to colonize a verdant planet. Moral dilemmas and political intrigue follow as they struggle to establish a new government on an idyllic world that might belong to someone else. Though there are few complicated relationships, the diverse cast of characters is refreshing, and Isaac and Amelie’s agonies over their growing romantic feelings are convincing. At the center of the story is the human will to adapt to new modes of existence. This fast-paced starfaring adventure succeeds with a thrilling mix of space battles and tender emotions. (July)

Want to know what got these reviewers so impressed? Check out the Exile blurb below:

A shackled Earth, ruled by an unstoppable tyrant

An exiled son, and a one-way trip across the galaxy

A perfect world, their last hope for survival

Vice Admiral Isaac Gallant is the heir apparent to the First Admiral, the dictator of the Confederacy of Humanity. Unwilling to let his mother’s tyranny stand, he joins the rebellion and leads his ships into war against the might of his own nation.

Betrayal and failure, however, see Isaac Gallant and his allies captured. Rather than execute her only son, the First Admiral instead decides to exile them, flinging four million dissidents and rebels through a one-shot wormhole to the other end of the galaxy.

There, Isaac finds himself forced to keep order and peace as they seek out a new home without becoming the very dictator he fought against—and when that new home turns out to be too perfect to be true, he and his fellow exiles must decide how hard they are prepared to fight for paradise…against the very people who built it.

Get Exile today:

 

Bound by Law, the first in a new trilogy following the near-future space adventure Vigilante Duology, is now available!

Bound by Law, book one in the Bound by Stars series, is now available on Amazon.

Check out this blurb for the newest in this near-future space adventure:

An uneasy peace broken by an old enemy
An old ally owed debts and obligations
A new mission to bring light into darkness

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Cadre’s main base, there was a period of quiet in the Solar System. Now, however, pirate attacks are on the rise again. When the Cadre ambushes a medical convoy under the protection of Brad Madrid and the Vikings Mercenary Company, the attacking warship turns out to be of a type and class the pirates should never have come into possession of.

The Cadre is no longer limited to pirate corvettes and scratch-built destroyers. Somehow, they’ve come into possession of a modern fleet of warships no one outside the Commonwealth should possess.

Brad Madrid owes the Agency and the Commonwealth his allegiance and his life. So when Kate Falcone calls on him to help seek out the Cadre’s new shipyard, he answers without hesitation. Their investigation, however, will draw his mercenary company into a newborn conflict unlike anything he’s ever faced before.

Get the Book