Imagine William Wallace meets Saladin and they combine forces to fight a brutal enemy.

• The first release of my medieval adventure series, Oath of Iron, is available on Amazon.com! 

After some ups and downs in my efforts toward traditional publishing, I decided to self-publish – but here’s the twist – I am releasing The Kingdom in four parts. Here’s why:
1) The book is large. In its entirety it will run at least 500+ pages. While I didn’t write it as a serial, I am releasing it as one using the divisions I already created. This way, I can provide readers content faster as I plan to release the parts within months of each other.
2) It’s a daunting task to tackle the entire book in one fell swoop. I had to come up the learning curve to discover the ins and outs of self-pubbing while also doing a final edit.
3) It’s kind of like a soft opening of a business to test the waters and see how much interest I can stir up, starting slowly and building up as each part gets added. And at the end, I can combine all the parts into a single download. At that time I may do a paperback release as well.

After the initial sting of early criticism wore off, I decide to take what the professionals said to heart. They said my book is too big and that I should think smaller. They said e-pub was the place to start.

But some of their advice I’ve rejected, like dividing my book into 4 smaller ones – no, The Kingdom is still one book. While I could rewrite it to fit a “more books” model, the story would suffer too much. Also, I was told putting Muslims and Christians on the same side is a bad idea and not true history – no, on both accounts. It’s a good idea in that I can set the characters around a campfire to engage in conversations about the similarities and differences of the two religions. In fact, alliances between Christians and Muslims happened quite often during the Crusades. Even while pitted against each other in battle, King Richard the Lionheart and Saladin had the utmost respect for one another. All of that was the catalyst for Oath of Iron. Oh yeah, and the advice about how a Christian story can’t have a Muslim hero. That I rejected outright.

Available now on Amazon.com – The Kingdom: Part 1 of 4