A Throne of Souls Current and Future Content

Totally new to blogging to take it easy on me... :) I do want to interact with readers and let them have a voice in the content of A Throne of Souls. As I'm writing this, we're currently on DRAFT #4 of the e-Pub / .mobi converted versions of A Kingdom Forgotten (Book 1 of A Throne of Souls). I've personally attempted the conversion process myself some thirty-plus times, and finally decided to give it to Acepub to handle. I'm happy with it and it's definitely trending in the right direction, but with a book this complicated, with such heavy formatting, and iconography/graphics everywhere throughout the book (and series for that matter) you can expect a lengthy and difficult conversion process each time we complete a novel. I'm doing several things to help this process go smoother with Black Mirrors of the Souls (Book 2 of A Throne of Souls), like applying all lessons learned from AKF and so forth, creating a new word template with all style guides used, etc. However, I'm still going to plan for at least 3 weeks for the e-Book conversion process the next time around. I certainly could have made the e-Book conversion process more manageable by not using all the formatting that makes ATOS look & feel so elegant and beautiful, but that would have taken away from the reader's experience and that to me was unacceptable. If I have to suffer through a very grueling conversion process to give the reader a better, more professional-looking product, then so be it! I've always subscribed to the idea of 'if you're going to do it, do it right!'

Had to get that e-Book conversion struggle off my chest. Now, back to the ATOS content. I do have a specific set of content milestones that simply must happen in order for the story to make sense and be thoroughly fulfilling to the reader. However, I've done this in the past, where I listened to 'constructive' feedback about things such as, "I'd like more of 'x' from this character," or "I felt lost when I got to this point." Is that beta reader feedback? Sure. And, I'll certainly leverage that type of feedback to make the story better, but the point of this blog page, and this category of blog, is really more of post publication, "I loved this about book 1, but I'm hoping you'll go more into 'y' topic in books 2 and/or 3." Fair enough? I want to give the readers what they want, but I also have a specific framework of a specific story to tell here, so I'm definitely going to be the primary driver of the content. I'm just saying I'm open to listening to the readership as to things they'd like to hear more, or less, about.

Along with this post, I'll publish, for the first time to the general public a DRAFT of Radin with the Amulet of the Five Gates. Now, I will say this about this DRAFT image. I love the look of Radin in this image, but the Amulet of the Five Gates isn't exactly what I asked of my artist to deliver and he took some liberties. That's perfectly fine. That's what we love about artists, because sometimes their ideas are better than ours so we don't want to crush their creativity. However, I had a more specific image in mind for the Amulet of the Five Gates, and I'm hoping DRAFT #2 will be closer to what I asked for originally. So here it is... Comments welcome. US Copyright laws apply. All rights reserved.