Series announcement and new art

I've been kicking around the idea of writing serial fiction or a series for some while now, so I thought I would test the waters with a five-part series. If I enjoy the process, and if it turns out to be somewhat successful, I have plans for future projects. Time will tell if this works for me.

This first series is title Mage Hunter, the first book being titled Mage Hunter: Blooded Snow. It should be live in e-book format on Amazon and B&N on Monday, August 27, and available about the same time on Smashwords and its related sites (since I have little control over actual publishing dates at Smashwords, I can only guess when my e-books will appear on the sites to which it distributes). Each Monday thereafter for the next month, a new episode of Mage Hunter will appear, each being approximately 20,000 words. Through Nov. 1, each e-book will be priced at 99 cents apiece. After Nov. 1, those prices will rise. I will also eventually publish an omnibus edition collecting the Mage Hunter episodes into one package, but I have yet to decide upon a particular date for that.

The first episode of Mage Hunter has been written, edited, formatted, and is ready to go. I'm not releasing it just yet, giving myself a little time to work on the other episodes, which have been started and are in various stages of completion.

The covers, however, have all been completed. You can see the first of them at the top of this post. Each cover actually consists of two paintings, one being my 'Background' piece and the other an icon figure related to the story, in this first case a salet type helmet. The blue leather backdrop to the whole cover was something I came up with in Photoshop, the covers themselves being put together in Photoshop. I think they're pretty cool covers, and I'll release the others as time draws near for each episode's release.

I really hope this series works for me. Until recently I had never really considered writing serial fiction and its like, but I'm kind of drawn to different ways to tell stories, and this one I find appealing, worth trying and tinkering with. Also, I've got a lot of story ideas which didn't seem to fit the more traditional molds of the novel or the short story, and I've never been quite sure what to do with these tales, but now I find many of them would lend themselves well to a serial story format.

For those who are interested in such details, the story of the Mage Hunter series is part of my Ursian Chronicles, the same world as my Kron Darkbow and Belgad characters, though this tale takes place a couple of generations before the births of those characters. Mage Hunter is an origin story of sorts concerning one Guthrie Hackett.