{"id":10767,"date":"2016-11-02T10:00:02","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T16:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=10767"},"modified":"2016-11-02T00:06:18","modified_gmt":"2016-11-02T06:06:18","slug":"whats-going-on-with-sons-of-the-starfarers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/whats-going-on-with-sons-of-the-starfarers\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s going on with Sons of the Starfarers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ssf-i-large-cover\"\"ssf-ii-large-cover\"\"ssf-iii-large-cover\"\"ssf-iv-large-cover\"\"ssf-v-large-cover\"\"SSF-VI<\/em><\/p>\n

I don’t know how many\u00a0people are looking forward to the last four\u00a0Sons of the Starfarers<\/strong> books, but I feel like I owe you an explanation for what is (or rather, isn’t) going on with the series.<\/p>\n

I started the series back in 2014, after publishing\u00a0the last\u00a0Star Wanderers<\/strong> novella.\u00a0Star Wanderers<\/strong> was an experiment with the trendy advice among indie authors\u00a0at the time, to split up a wider\u00a0story arc into lots of short books\u00a0in a linear series, with the first one permanently\u00a0free.<\/p>\n

For the first two years, the experiment paid off\u2014so much so that I decided to write another series using the same trendy publishing advice. That series was\u00a0Sons of the Starfarers.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But then, things started to go downhill. Amazon introduced Kindle Unlimited, and the algorithms changed\u00a0in ways that no longer favored the trendy publishing advice.\u00a0Star Wanderers<\/strong>\u00a0began to languish, and\u00a0Sons of the Starfarers<\/strong> never took off in the way I’d hoped that it would. Up to this point, 90% of my sales were on Amazon. Needless to say, my career took an enormous hit.<\/p>\n

Most\u00a0indie authors in my position reacted by going all in with Kindle Unlimited. Essentially, they dumped\u00a02012’s trendy advice for 2014’s trendy advice. I took the opposite tact<\/a>\u00a0and went back to basics.<\/p>\n

This still left the awkward question of what to do with the unfinished\u00a0Sons of the Starfarers<\/strong> series. Abandon it? That was unthinkable. But it wasn’t practical to finish it either, seeing as I needed something that would actually pay the bills.<\/p>\n

So I kicked it around for a couple of years, working on it between other projects but not making it a huge priority. In this way, I wrote and published\u00a0Friends in Command<\/strong> and\u00a0Captives in Obscurity.<\/strong> But as more time passed, it soon became clear that this wouldn’t work. The books were getting harder to write as I became more distanced from the story, and releasing them piecemeal wasn’t exactly boosting sales of the previous books in the series.<\/p>\n

A couple of days ago, I wrote up\u00a0a publishing schedule for 2017. My goal is to have a new release every month. A couple of novels are on the schedule, including\u00a0Gunslinger to the Stars<\/strong> and\u00a0The Sword Keeper,<\/strong> but as of now there are no\u00a0Sons of the Starfarers<\/strong> books.<\/p>\n

This is not because I’m abandoning the series, however. Far from it. My goal is to release all of the last four books together, within a month of each other. In order to do this properly, I’m going to write them all together in one big sprint, probably sometime\u00a0next year.<\/p>\n

I haven’t planned out everything yet, but I do have all the titles figured out. They are:<\/p>\n