Kirkus let me know this week that the review of The Mountain Throne was selected for inclusion in their mid-march issue of Kirkus Reviews. This means it will be circulated to about 5,000 industry professionals, an honor given to less than 10% of their indie titles. I don’t have great hopes for this (it will still be one title among many; I don’t have a marketing firm) but getting a strong work in front of interested eyes can only be good. It at least implies that their editors found it so.

The Mountain Throne’s first professional critical review came out this week, and it’s positive! You can find it here. The summary line reads, “This striking tale whips up a fresh storm in familiar fantasy territory,” which I translated as “good and not too weird.” That’s a good place to be for a new author. It was also favorably compared to modern fantasy legend George R.R. Martin: “Sterling’s lushly realized novel should scratch the itch for those awaiting more material from Game of Thrones mastermind George R.R. Martin.”

The reviewer seems to have a soft heart, however. Some of the talk about the setting and plot include things like “Terryth is an aggressively horrible place” and “The finale to this first volume in a trilogy is staggeringly violent.” I think that’s overstrong language, but hey, subjective.

Funny anecdote. I showed this review to a friend who’s an electrical engineer. He agreed with my opinion of the reviewer. “It’s obvious they’re not an EE,” he said with a thousand-yard stare. “They don’t know what real darkness is…”

One of the first (also, only) reviews at Amazon is five stars. “Oh my, this was a good find. The author has successfully mixed the key components of good epic fantasy: compelling characters, intrigue, magic, betrayal, secrets, battle, heroism, and modt [sic] all a vast world to explore. Be warned there is enough lust and brutality to raise the eyebrows of even the most jaded GRRM reader but the author keeps it pertinent to the story and, while graphic, it is not simply thrown in for cheap thrills. I eagerly await the next installments.”

Again with the Martin comparison and reference to a brutal world, though this reader seemed less shocked.

Goodreads reviews are so far similarly positive, though with an average of 4.4 instead of 5. “I’ve had the privilege of literally watching the faces of other people as they read this book,” and “Extremely well written and engaging, The Mountain Throne is certainly worth reading.”

If you’re ready to see what they’re happy about, go buy The Mountain Throne! It’s on Amazon Prime right now, or available from Kindle for $2.99!

Pages for The Mountain Throne were established at each of these locations faster than expected. There are a handful of formatting errors that seem to have occurred when the data was transferred between systems (e.g. the editor for this book is not the same as the Nebraskan Goodreads author listed on that page; it’s a naming coincidence), but no big deal. I’ll try to get them cleared up, but I don’t have direct control of any of these pages. The companies do them.

The Amazon page can be found here. Two-day shipping is available.

The Kindle page is here.

The Goodreads page is here.

And the Createspace e-store that gave higher author royalties was here, but now forwards to Amazon directly. Turns out that Createspace e-stores were scheduled to terminate on October 31st, 2017. Who knew? Not me.

Well, I’ve done it. I authorized The Mountain Throne for sale. The Amazon pages for print and ebook should be up sometime this week. Once that is done, I’ll need to set up a Goodreads page, but that’s less important.

For now, the book is available here. Between you and me, this is the preferred method of ordering print copies; for some reason, it pays higher royalties, but doesn’t charge any more.

This is a trepidatious relief; I’m nervous releasing my first book into the Wild, but pleased to finally be able to attack the second book. I’m a respectable four-and-a-half chapters into it, but preparing The Mountain Throne for publishing has sucked up all of my (limited) free time since July or so. Time to move forward.