Tag Archives: star portal universe

Reading, Science Fiction, Writing

Valor’s Child on Kindle Scout!

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Valor's Child by Kal Spriggs
Valor’s Child by Kal Spriggs

Hello everyone!  Valor’s Child is now on Kindle Scout.  The excerpt there contains the first five thousand words.  Those of you who nominate it (if it gets selected for publishing), will then receive the entire novel for free.

The planet Century lies at the very verge of human space.  It is a frontier world, where hard work is not only essential to survival, it is a way of life.  Jiden knows all about hard work, and she’s ready to buckle down and fulfill her dreams, to rise above her parent’s modest background and to stake her claim and be successful on her own merit. 

Yet there’s one hurdle she has to face, her grandmother insists she attend the Century Military Academy’s Prep School.  She plans to keep her head down, to get past this last obstacle, and then to pursue her dreams.  Yet nothing goes to plan: she becomes the center of controversy, she finds herself drawn into infighting among the other candidates, and worst of all… she finds a resonance within her heart at the ideals of duty and service. 

Remember: your support is what will get this book published.  Please take the time to go to Kindle Scout and nominate it.  Here is the direct link: Valor’s Child on Kindle Scout

Reading, Science Fiction, Writing

Valor’s Child Coming Soon to Kindle Scout

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Hello everyone!  I’m happy to announce that Valor’s Child, my military science fiction/space opera young adult novel is coming to Kindle Scout.  I’m really excited about this book, I’ve had some great feedback on it and I hope it will appeal to a broad audience.  The general theme of this series is going to be a cross of Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers.

So what is Kindle Scout?  I’m glad you asked!  Kindle Scout is a publishing service within the umbrella of Kindle.  Basically, Kindle has stepped up things and created their own in-house publisher.  The way it works is actually quite novel: Authors upload their manuscripts to Kindle Scout, where anyone with an Amazon account can view their work.  Those who like it can vote for it (you get up to three votes at a time).  The best part for readers is that if the book they voted for gets selected for publishing, then they’ll receive a free copy when it is published.  That’s right, just for participating you get a free copy.  Pretty cool, huh?

In this way, Kindle Scout is crowd-sourcing books.  What they provide for me as a writer is that they have all the assets of a publisher: they pay for copy-editing and they help to promote the book.

This is something of an experiment to me, so we’ll see how it works.  Hopefully a lot of my readers will check it out.  I’ll post the link on Friday when it goes live. (Edit: It will go live on Saturday 13 Feb)

Edit #2: here’s the link   https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/1O90BJY4NZ797

Reading, Writing

New Site Content: Character Biographies

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As part of the new site content, I’m introducing character biographies to the website.  I’ll have background details and general descriptions of central (and some side) characters for each of the series I write in.  Up first (because it’s the smallest cast of characters) is the the Star Portal Universe and the cast of Fenris Unchained.

I tried to strike a balance of giving enough background to develop the character without including any real spoilers.  As one might imagine, on Fenris Unchained, this was more difficult than I’d like, but I think I did alright.

Ideally I’ll add pictures of the characters at some point, but for now, I’m taking the time to go through and do the same to all my other universes.  The good news is most of this is already done in the form of notes I keep for myself, I’ve just got to scrub those and make sure I don’t give away any spoilers.

Up next I’m working on characters from the Eoriel Saga and then from the Shadow Space Chronicles.  If this is well-received, I’ll continue to do more of them.  As always, I value feedback on these, please let me know what you think!

You can find the first set of character biographies here or just check in the Star Portal Universe section.

Thanks for reading!