Well, we made it to the last 50 out of the original 300 titles before our book was cut. While The Black Lily didn’t make it into the top 10 finalists, our reviewer Kitty G enjoyed our book and left us a wonderful review on her Youtube channel. Check it out!
Video not loading? Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/lkM7fQMnmR0?t=780
Heart of Sherwood was an enjoyable read. I love the idea of Robin Hood being a woman in disguise, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen it done before (the closest I’ve seen is the movie Princess of Thieves, in which Keira Knightley played Robin Hood’s daughter disguised as a boy). The story included the well-known beats and characters of the Robin Hood legend but also sprinkled in historical details and political intrigue appropriate to the time period of the Third Crusade.
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Our dark fantasy novel The Black Lily is a contestant for SPFBO 6. SPFBO is short for Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off. It is a competition for self-published fantasy books that is currently in its sixth year.
This year, 300 books were entered in the competition. We’re currently in the first round, where the 10 judges read (and often review) the 30 books, weeding out the ones that won’t go on to the semi-finals.
After that, each blogger chooses their favorite book to go on to the semi-finals (10 total). Then, they each read the semi-finalist and choose their favorite book from those. The one with the most votes is the winner.
The judge assigned to our book is Kitty G, a booktuber. Her channel can be found here.
We adore our book, but the competition is fierce. While we have no expectations of winning, we would be happy if we just got a review from Kitty G, as she has a large audience (15.1K subscribers)!
I absolutely loved this book. I love faerie lore (both traditional and reimagined in a second world setting), and Shadowfell is full of faerie creatures. While there are your more well-known creatures like will-o-wisps, pixies, brownies, and redcaps, there were a few new ones to me, such as the stanie mon, brollochan, and urisk. Probably my favorite was the Guardian of the South, a trickster figure of fire that can shift between an old man, a young boy, and a fierce warrior. He definitely reminded me of Loki, and I’m anticipating reading more about him as the series goes on.
The steampunk anthology Gears, Ghouls, and Gauges (and its companion Cogs, Crowns, and Carriages) is now available for purchase. Distribution was exclusive to Kickstarter backers and authors for the first four months of publication. If you weren’t able to get a copy from us directly, you can now order it on Amazon by following the link: https://www.amazon.com/Gears-Ghouls-Gauges-Steampunk-Anthology-ebook/dp/B085MN5KJK/
We are so pleased by the new cover for The Black Lily. The cover was created by J Caleb Design, who is an absolutely amazing artist with very fair prices. He was willing to do multiple versions to make sure the cover perfectly captured Lily and Adrian. He even worked our self-designed Arestean Crest into the banners and book spine. If you are looking for a badass cover designer, definitely check him out. He also posts a weekly premade on his Facebook page. https://www.jcalebdesign.com/
One of my favorite storytelling tropes is the found family. I thought Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the best movies of the past decade. I still unironically enjoy pirate stories. Badass ladies are badass.
So Seafire by Natalie C. Parker is checking a lot of my boxes.
Seafire is a swashbuckling dystopia following Caledonia Styx, a young woman on the run from a powerful warlord Aric Athair. After her family is ambushed and murdered by a crew of the warlord’s Bullets — loyal soldiers groomed from childhood for violence and controlled by mandatory drug addiction — Caledonia is forced to turn from refugee to pirate captain, sailing the high seas with her all-female crew of rebels and renegades aboard the Mors Navis, taking the fight to Aric’s forces by targeting his fleet of floating garden barges where the flowers that fuel his drug production are grown.
But when one of Aric’s Bullets tries to defect to Caledonia’s side, saving the life of her best friend in the process, the captain’s survival tactics and deep-seated beliefs are called into question. On the one hand, he represents everything she and her crew despise, and keeping him aboard could mean all of their deaths; after all, trusting a Bullet was what led to her family’s deaths. On the other, if he’s telling the truth, he might hold the key to taking down Aric once and for all — and to Caledonia being reunited with the little brother that she thought she’d already lost long ago.
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