This blog post was published on and may be out of date. Visit starshipsmage.com for current information on the Starship’s Mage universe.
The day after I launched Starship’s Mage Episode 4, I got on a plane to England and became roughly eighty percent out of communication for ten days. The United Kingdom was gorgeous, much greener than Calgary is left by this time of year, and we had a fantastic trip. Even got to spend a good while at Stonehenge – you apparently have a specific half-hour timeslot you’re allowed to be at the circle during busy times, but its quiet enough in September that they’re okay with you walking through the barrows up to the circle and spending a good long while hanging out there.
When we got back, I checked how Starship’s Mage had been doing while I was gone. The answer was “stunningly well”! Checking Amazon for reviews, the novella was up to six five star reviews and had careened its way to #8 on the Kindle Science Fiction Short Reads list.
The reviews have continued to fly in for Episode 4, and the earlier episodes as well! Right now, Episode 4 has ten reviews, and is still (almost twenty days after launch) holding down spot #20 in that SF Short Reads list. September was my best month for sales yet, by about forty percent XD
The serial as a whole now has 44 reviews on Amazon, 29 of them five stars. (The remainder are 4 stars, except for the one two star reviewer who was apparently looking for Harry Potter in Space, not Mages in Space.)
Episode 5 is under way and I fully expect to meet the target release date of December 15.
Alongside the release of Episode 5, I will be releasing an omnibus edition of all five novellas as a single e-book. If everything goes well, the Omnibus will also be available as a physical trade paperback through CreateSpace on the same day.
I have a couple of other projects on the go that I want to keep at least a little under my hat for the moment, but the plan is that the Starship’s Mage Omnibus will be the second full length novel I release through Amazon and Createspace.
Now, the not-so-fun discovery of the last few weeks.
A short while ago, I finally got a fully functional Google Alert set up for ‘Starship’s Mage’ to send me any sites or posts about the series. Every alert I have received so far has been some kind of pirate site.
I understand the appeal of piracy, to be perfectly honest. Sometimes, you can’t afford something, or you think the price demanded is too high, or you just can’t get something in a reasonable way. But for a series of 99 cent e-books, it seems a little petty to go out of the way to pirate them.
Today, my google alert was a link to a forum post where someone had posted the covers, the blurb text, and a zip file of all four epubs. I’ve been ignoring the weird random ugly looking ‘warez-style’ pages, and the strange videos on dailymotion… but this was a very well done, cleanly assembled, package of all of my work. I was, and remain, somewhat boggled.
I’ve asked the site to take down the post, which is as far as I currently plan on going (it is NOT worth my time to chase pirates, as the impact on my sales is pretty clearly negligible) but I am a little stunned that someone would put that much effort into pirating MY work.
Guess its as much a sign of popularity as all the Amazon reviews, huh?
Glynn Stewart
I greatly enjoy reading Starship Mage and look forward to episode 5 and will buy the omnibus as well. Sorry to hear about the piracy, .99 shouldn’t break anyone.
keep up the good work and writing.