Realm of Khaos

A YA Epic Mystery Adventure Fae Fantasy Series

Nymeria and Sylvaine, the princesses of the Kingdom of Avadine, are blessed with the finest clothes, jewels, and art from across the ten kingdoms.

But their lives are far from perfect. The winters are becoming more and more unbearable. The food is disappearing. And the dark shadow creatures are hunting them. A treaty with the evil fae might be enough to save them all… but only one princess may live to see it.

Marked by a destiny she did not ask for, the weight of her kingdom’s survival rests on her shoulders. But the brooding Prince of Khaos has other plans, and not even a pretty princess can stop him from taking control of his own fate.

Book 1 in the Khaos series: A YA Epic Mystery Adventure Fae Fantasy Series

BEHIND-THE-SCENES

I have been working with self-published authors since about 2015, and started my own bookish/publishing business in 2022. Despite having worked with hundreds of authors, I was not fully prepared for the absolutely life changing experience of publishing my own book.

I made a few mistakes, learned some life lessons, and made the leap from being a reader, to being a self-published author.

Here are a few of the challenges that I faced when publishing Realm of Khaos.

First and foremost – time management!

Ordinarily, I don’t have much of an issue with managing my time. In fact, a year ago I was confident in the fact that I was successfully balancing my time between Books4Movies and Order of the Bookish. When I realized that I was ready to finally share my book with the world, I underestimated the time that I should have put into all of it. And by “all of it” I mean the writing, editing, rewriting, more editing, formatting, struggling with IngramSpark… and the marketing.

That’s where I really failed – the marketing. It was not only ironic, but also disappointing, since my entire career is all about supporting new and indie authors with their marketing. I love my job, I really do. So every time I sat down at my computer to work on marketing Realm of Khaos, I ended up working on projects for the authors that put their trust in me to market their books. Which meant that my book didn’t get enough of my attention.

There are so many things that I wish I had done when I published Realm of Khaos in December of 2023. Interviews, street teams and ARC reviews, blog posts, networking, reaching out to stores and libraries, book fairs and events, consistently posting on social media… pretty much all of the things that I tell authors to do, are the things that I didn’t do.

Ironic, right?

Not only was I putting aside Realm of Khaos, but I had also been neglecting my puppy, my partner, and my friends.

But, after a small intervention about my workaholic nature, I gave myself proper work hours (and stopped doing consultations calls at 3am), and created a schedule so that work, my life, and my book were all in balance.

The next challenge I faced was, in hindsight, a little annoying, but at the time it felt like the end of the world. For some reason, I had A TON of issues with uploading my book to Amazon and IngramSpark. I kept getting rejection notifications because the cover was slightly off center, or the dimensions of the photos inside the book were not correct… and the formatting. Oh my gosh it took like 3 weeks of REFORMATTING over and over again to get the book accepted by IngramSpark. It was like every time one thing got fixed, a new error popped up.

I had NEVER dealt with anything like this in all of the other books that I had helped publish on behalf of indie authors.

Needless to say, it felt like the universe was against me.

But I finally managed to get Realm of Khaos published!

You can get a copy for yourself as an ebook or paperback, and patiently await the next book in the series, which will be coming out in 2024!