September 2025 Newsletter
Hey, folks. Relatively on time this month. I’m a day late on account of the internet going out Monday evening. I swear. Not my fault (I think).
Anyways, I had lunch out the other day at an Indian restaurant and I had masala chai tea. I kept thinking, ‘man, this is really familiar, but I’ve never had it before.’ Then it hit me, it’s brewed in milk, like turkish coffee. So, I got the hankering for turkish coffee. I bizarrely didn’t have any cardamom on hand and I put way too much coffee in for way too little milk. I didn’t heat it correctly (apparently, you’re supposed to bring the milk almost to a boil, then cool it, heat it, cool it, etc. Almost boil it three times and then serve. That’s what makes it creamy.) Well, I screwed it up. But, still enjoyable in its way.
I WANT YOUR OPINION ON SOMETHING!
It’s been suggested to me that I start selling prints, whether through the website or at conventions/shows, etc. Specifically, prints of the maps. I’ve had some other feedback that the map prints should be in color. So, I had Luke put together a few. Here are some of the samples. I’d like your thoughts on which color palette you prefer. I’ll post this here, but I’ll also put some polls on facebook and Instagram. Give me a vote. Go ahead and reply to this email (if you’re getting this on email) with an answer: A, B, C, D, or E.
While we’re on the topic of feedback, I could really use a review from you. I am genuinely excited (not like all those pretend excitements in the past), genuinely excited, I say, that the mailing list rises to 71 folks (which is a new high for our community), I’ve sold about two hundred copies in all between direct sales and Amazon. But I have six (6) reviews. Reviews are more helpful than the pay from buying the book. Especially once books get past 50 reviews, Amazon puts them higher on pages and search results. So, I would genuinely appreciate an honest review from each and every one of you, for those that have a copy.
You can write me a review on the amazon page (you don’t need to be a verified purchase), here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DHZZQPFG
or here on goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218197964-the-witches-of-serna
For those that don’t have a copy yet – WAIT! Here’s why.
The body of book 2 editing is done. I’m working on two main things at this point. Fixing the lore appendices and re-editing book 1 for re-release. There are a few reasons for this. Through no bad blood or malice, just life moving people in a bunch of different directions, I have had a lot of staffing changes. Thus, I am on my third editor and my third cover artist. To keep the cover art consistent and resilient to staffing changes, it will get simpler.
What will happen to Dale’s beautiful painting? It will become an internal illustration in chapter 18 or chapter 19 (the scene could really be either one).
Why re-edit book 1? Well, there are a lot of things that are changing with the structure of the appendices in book 2. This will bring book 1 in line with that convention, which will continue on in books 3+. Also, simply, I missed things. A lot of people looked at book 1 several times over, but there are still little somethings that get missed or mistakes get made when fixing other problems. It was pointed out to me that it was enough to merit a relook.
Another thing, you may have noticed, but you may have not (I certainly have noticed and have been wrestling with anxious insecurity on the matter), we have no logo (until now). I don’t talk about it much, but I published under the imprint, Goblin Bride Press. You might ask, ‘what kind of weird name is that? Who would think of that? Where do you find these people? Why couldn’t you find someone else to work with?’
The truth of it is, folks, it’s not something or someone that I found. It’s me. That’s my imprint. I made it. Why?... read book 2 and find out. That in book 2 (or maybe it doesn’t become apparent to books 3 or 4, but you may be able to recognize, the woman pictured here as a goblin bride: Spara.
This is what I wanted, but it’s too detailed for the scale that it’ll be on the spine of a book. For that, it’s been simplified to this:
This isn’t the final, final logo, but it’s pretty close.
Other things that I’ve been busy with this month are drawing the graphics for the book covers. I drew these mountains, as well as the sword and the arrow.
For those of you that got through book 1, you might recognize this sword as the square-tipped swords that some orc tribes carry. Basically, a two-handed falchion or war cleaver as they’re sometimes called. Looks kinda like this.
Fun video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVU0uD2Uds4
For upcoming shows, I’ve been waitlisted for Kansas City Comicon, so the only show that I am pretty sure I’m going to be setting up a booth at is QuadCon at Omaha, 27-28 September. After that, there’s a strong possibility that I’ll be hitting up another QuadCon over the 13-14 December weekend, but there are a few things that need to get sorted out before I can say for sure.
So! You might ask, why were you drawing your own graphics for the cover? When we put together the first draft of this cover, we ran into a small hitch. When I go to publish, I have to affirm that I own the copyright for all of the material. That includes the cover. We used Canva to compose the cover, which is fine in and of itself. The problem lies in this. Canva has a book cover design tool. They have an image library that they let you use all kinds of images under license. License, not passing of the copyright. If they pass the copyright to you or me or anyone, then they don’t have the rights to that image in their own library. So, we couldn’t use the images in the Canva image library for things like mountains and swords or arrows. Hence, I needed to draw them. Was it relatively easy? Yeah, even for my (not high) skill level, but just a warning for some of you folks that also are thinking about publishing a book, you got to make sure that you have the copyright to anything you’re putting on it or in it – not a license to use it.
Last few things. I managed to finish Mercenary.
It’s a cozy (to me) military sci-fi. It’s the first in a trilogy. I enjoyed how the main character had to cope with the looming sense of life failure because of her health and constantly had to contain a health-related weakness while pursuing a career that’s as close to her dream as possible.
I’m still working on Newsletter Ninja and Loyal.
So, far Newsletter Ninja is telling me something surprising: even though we have all of these other forms of contact, through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, Threads, Substack, Reddit, Bluesky, Tiktok, what have you, apparently email is still the most intimate and essential form. People still hold email close. They don’t give it out as readily and they don’t like getting spammed.
Another thing it’s telling me is that I need to do more onboarding and automation of that. I will promise you now, that this monthly newsletter will always be written by me. For those of you that I met at O-Con, I sent you an onboarding email. Apparently, that’s the kind of thing that I need to automate. Apparently, I need to write one email for new folks on the list and that will be a greeting and intro to them when they first join. Those emails will be written by me, but once I can get my mind wrapped around it, it will be an automatic send off for people that join this list, like the seven new subscribers from this past week (thanks and nice to meet you).
Almost done. Just showing a house project. It started last year like this:
You might remember this picture from a few newsletters ago
It’s gradually taking form into something that looks more like this (don’t mind the mess):
Library in progress
As a departure from the music of the month, I have really enjoyed the long-awaited duel between Dequitem and Dash Rendar. These two have separate channels that are really helpful for all kinds of insight and inspiration when creating stories like this.
That’s about it for this month. Folks, this is still a relatively small community, so if you write me, I’ll write back. If I ask you a question in this newsletter, I want to hear your response. Appreciate you.
Stay classy, folks. Autumn is around the corner.
