Celebrating 10 Years and 1 Million Downloads of Spinward Fringe With a Summer Sale

I didn't think I'd get the chance to write this blog post when I set out on this journey. I started writing Spinward Fringe as a fun Space Opera adventure that I wanted to see but couldn't find. Science Fiction television shows were ending and being cancelled: Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, Universe, and Farscape were all either over or ending. Battlestar Galactica (Ronald D. Moore's reboot), ended in lacklustre fashion and the spinoff, Caprica, failed to live up to fans' hopes. Star Wars was hibernating for the most part, Star Trek was back in reruns and I'm pretty sure I'd seen everything at least five to ten times, and newcomers like Firefly didn't last.

It was a dark time for SciFi, and it wasn't the first time in my life when the force was weak with the serialized, space bound science fiction adventure sub-genre. Instead of weeping in front of more reruns or seeking out obscure box sets of more obscure series, I decided to try writing my own with the purpose of entertaining myself.

I wrote fantasy before that along with a little horror but took a couple years off after my first self publishing adventure in 2004. In 2008, starting on new years' eve, I dug into a Space Opera idea that I had been daydreaming about for a year. That became the First Light Chronicles, which was eventually collected into one volume and renamed Spinward Fringe Broadcast 0: Origins.
I released it in eBook form on a site made by a company in France called Mobipocket, unaware that Amazon already bought the company and was using the tech to develop the now dominant Kindle platform. A year later, I was firmly making a living and spreading my books out to Amazon, Smashwords and other retailers.

It's with gratitude and a little disbelief that I look back at the decade that followed. I've written and published twenty-two novels in that time, twenty-one of which can still be downloaded. Last year I verified that over a million copies of my books were downloaded legally with at least six times that number pirated (that's a gross underestimation).

Granted, many of those legally downloaded copies were free, but it's still a number I wouldn't have dreamed of hitting when I started out in 2004 with my first in-print self published novel, then started writing and releasing SciFi in eBook format.

Starting today, I'm celebrating ten years of successful self publishing. In that time that's all I've been doing to earn my living, and to kick it off I'm participating in the Smashwords Summer sale. All my books are on sale or free there now, and I invite you to take a look, leave comments on your favourite books, maybe follow me there as a favourite author if you like and be a part of it because they have been a part of my success. Here's a direct link to my page there.

I'm also having a poster made and updating most of the formatting for all my books while I correct errors throughout the series. The updates will be free for everyone, available through your dashboards wherever you purchased or downloaded them.

I'm wondering if you have any other ideas to celebrate this anniversary. Please, leave them in the comments, but don't forget the Smashwords Summer Sale, especially if you missed Highshield, Brightwill, Dark Arts, Spinward Fringe Broadcasts 6.5 or 10.5.

Thank you very much for reading and buying my books through the years. I hope I can do this for the rest of my life. I love creating this kind of entertainment, first for myself, then for you!

RL

Spinward Fringe Continues With The Broadcast 11: Revenge Preview!

Despite a few issues that were caused by yours truly, Spinward Fringe Broadcast 10.5: Carnie's Tale is a success. Sure, it didn't chart high, but over a thousand of you downloaded it and the reviews are largely positive. Thank you so much.

A few typos and minor errors weren't caught before it was uploaded, so an update addressing those will be posted next month, you can update for free wherever you bought the book.

Right now I'm working on Spinward Fringe Broadcast 11: Revenge, which is due out at the end of February. That doesn't mean that you have to wait that long to read it though. Chapters are already being posted on my Patreon page. Every Saturday a free chapter will appear, with subscribers getting a bonus chapter every Wednesday. We're following Alice's journey through the novel until it comes out. For the sake of Patreon, I'm calling the serialized preview Alice's Revenge. You can find the Index here.

Spinward Fringe and everyone who loves it has kept the roof over my head for nearly ten years now, and as we approach the tenth anniversary of the series, I'm going to concentrate on delivering more content in that universe. I'm constantly tempted to work on other projects, and in 2017 I gave in, finishing a lot of work on two role playing games before completing the first part of an epic fantasy series I've been imagining for over twenty years, Highshield.

Rounding out the year, I decided to develop characters and settings that I knew I wouldn't have room for in Spinward Fringe Broadcast 11: Revenge. Many of the chapters in Carnie's Tale were cut from Broadcast 11 because they wandered too far from the main story, and wouldn't have seen the light of day if it weren't for this side project. I'm proud of what that turned into, and I'm glad to see people like it in general.

So, that brings us to the main point, and the next two Spinward Fringe Broadcasts, Revenge and Invasion. The development of these novels has now taken over two years, and over twenty chapters have been written then cut (including content that reappeared in Carnie's Tale and in a short story on the Patreon page), representing some disappointing false starts but good ideas that led in the wrong direction for Broadcast 11. There are great stories waiting to be told in these books and the one that will follow Invasion, but digging down to them has taken longer than anticipated. Now, I believe I've got an outline I'm happy with for Broadcast 11 and Broadcast 12 is in great shape too. It's all I'm working on, and for the tenth anniversary of Spinward Fringe it's all I want to work on. I want to celebrate 2018 by moving the story forward in meaningful, exciting ways, and by wrapping up storylines before moving on to a new era in the Spinward Fringe universe that will see a crossover with Chaos Core and much more.

So, until my holiday and afterwards I'll be working on Broadcasts 11 and 12, and you can get a great big piece already. 

RL