by Rex Baron
Anyway, having read it, I started wondering how we might share it with more people. I wanted to see if there was a way of giving Rex’s story the best chance of being found by likeminded folks.
Having had a year publishing myself by then, I wondered how hard it could be… Famous last words ;-). As I write this I have no idea how well received it will be – not because of the quality of his work, but more around ‘have we found the right readers for him’? What we ended up doing was taking his original story and breaking it up and expanding it to a book series – which is how indie publishing is working right now.
As you may realize, I’ve already published in Urban Fantasy. But UF is very prescriptive. It demands a main character that we follow throughout the series – so this is what my readers largely expect. At the same time, these are the wonderful folks I can email and say, “hey check this out. My friend just released this book, and I think you might like it, given that you like my stories…”
Rex’s masterpiece is more of an epic, by contrast, following a thread of magical inheritance and destiny through the ages. What I love about this is how a spanning view of lives across time can give us a different perspective – without making the challenges the characters face any less meaningful or heart-wrenching. I realize that this work isn’t really UF, but more literary fiction and historical fantasy. At the same time, after sharing it with some of our beta readers it became apparent that a large number of folks who loved UF would also love Hexe…
However, since this format is quite different from what most indie readers are used to, I’m still apprehensive.
So the bottom line is, this is Rex’s original work – just shaped and edited, and fact checked by our team in order to present it in a form that would make it a little more palatable for what we’ve learned is an essentially indie audience.
I really hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. I also hope you will continue to enjoy the rest of the series, too.
If you have feedback for us, please do be in touch at www.ellieverse.com/Rex
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