"King's Champion" is published!

I'm very pleased to announce that my first fantasy novel, "King's Champion", is now available for sale.  It's currently in Kindle e-book format, and a print edition is well advanced, awaiting only the arrival of the proof copy before I release it for sale.  The dead tree edition should be available within two weeks.

Regular readers will recall that, late last year, I asked you to choose which of two fantasy novels I would write.  You did so, voting with your comments and e-mails after reading excerpts from early drafts of both books.  Last month, I published another excerpt from the project you selected, which you can read here if you're interested.

The blurb reads:

After decades of peace, war is threatening the Kingdom of Avranche. Its old foes are stirring, in a new alliance with darker powers. Black wings bring death and torture in the night.

Owain, former King’s Champion, hears rumors of sorcery. Visiting the grave of his sword brother, he stumbles into a deadly raid, and uncovers coded orders for a larger plot.

The kingdom’s enemies know Owain is now their greatest danger. He must race against time to find and deal with them… before they deal with him!

I thoroughly enjoyed writing this one, particularly because I chose to write in the tradition of epic, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, with which I grew up, rather than the modern trend towards urban fantasy. I don't know whether I could do justice to urban fantasy (although I might surprise myself and try it someday, just to see what happens).  At any rate, I'll be very interested to hear what you, dear readers, think about this book.

My usual plea:  when you've read the book, please leave an honest review on Amazon.com.  Reviews are the lifeblood of independent authors like me.  They're the best way for other potential readers to learn about our work, and give them an unbiased opinion about it.  We don't have publishers and distributors advertising on our behalf.  We're utterly dependent on word-of-mouth to sell our books, so you're vitally important to us.  (In the same vein, if you like the book, please spread the word about it through your social media accounts;  blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever.)

Thank you all for your encouragement and early feedback.  Now you get to see whether your enthusiasm was justified!  I hope you'll find that it was.  If you like the book, I think I might develop the second project I mentioned last year into either another stand-alone fantasy novel, or perhaps a three-book series.  We'll see what happens.

Peter