AJ Lancaster

Tag: publishing

  • Cover Reveal: How to Find a Nameless Fae

    I can finally reveal this BEAUTIFUL cover, designed by Holly Dunn:

    The cover image of How to Find a Nameless Fae. It is green with a frame made of intertwining wildflowers. Two figures are featured, facing each other in an antagonistic pose. The woman is wearing a purple dress and holding a dagger threateningly. The man has cat ears and a tail and is in an apologetic pose. A ginger cat sits at his feet.

    BLURB:

    What happens when a first-born bargain goes wrong?

    Princess Gisele has spent her life preparing for an evil fae sorcerer to claim her. That was the bargain her mother was tricked into: one royal first-born in exchange for spinning straw into gold.


    But it’s been decades, and he still hasn’t shown up.


    The unfulfilled fairytale-debt, however, is refusing to lie quietly. When its chaotic magic reaches unbearable levels, Gisele takes matters into her own hands. Terrifying fae sorcerer or not, she’ll hunt him down and force him to stop ruining her life.


    But instead of an evil mastermind, she finds the scholarly, nameless lord of a magical house. He wants nothing to do with the angry knife-wielding spinster on his doorstep. Unfortunately, the fairytale-debt has other ideas.


    Now magically bound to her lifelong nemesis, the only way to break the magic between them is to work together to find the nameless fae’s lost name. Assuming they don’t strangle each other first.


    HOW TO FIND A NAMELESS FAE is a cozy romantasy retelling of Rumplestiltskin with spice, featuring a middle-aged heroine, a buttoned-up hero, and an interfering sentient house.

    Order now

    ARC Applications are also open!

    Can’t wait until release day in June? You can apply to join the ARC team for How to Find a Nameless Fae using this form:

    Apply for an ARC

    But wait, there’s more!

    Pre-order Nameless and Get A Bonus Novella

    How To Find A Nameless Fae is set in the same world as my novella How To Marry A Winged King, but they are each standalones that can be read in any order (though there is a small cameo of the Winged King characters in Nameless Fae).

    I originally wrote Winged King under a tight wordcount constraint for an anthology. Since then, I’ve re-edited and expanded it, giving it a bit more room to breathe. The new version is about twice as long as the original story (roughly 20k words total).

    I’ve decided to offer this new version as a pre-order reward for How To Find a Nameless Fae, which means that if you pre-order Nameless Fae, you can get the new version of Winged King to read right now, FREE.

    Just fill out this form with proof of your pre-order to claim the reward!

    Claim your pre-order bonus novella
  • Less than one month to go…

    Less than one month to go…

    Soooo… THE LORD OF STARIEL ebook is available to pre-order on Amazon!

    LordOfStariel_FC_R4 medium res
    It will release 1 November and I am COUNTING DAYS GUYS OMG. I am both incredibly excited to show it to the world and nervous for precisely the same reason!

    I think of books as a long, time-delayed conversation between authors and readers. You can keep your writing in the back of the wardrobe and never show it to another living soul. This has the advantage of keeping it safe from criticism, but it’s also a lot like talking to yourself. It also means the book is never truly finished, because there’s nothing to stop you fiddling with your wardrobe-book forever.

    It’s been a long journey, getting this series ready for release, and part of me still can’t quite believe that book one is really truly actually going to be published IN LESS THAN A MONTH.

    Where will the book be available to buy when it releases?

    Ebook

    In the long run, I plan to make my books available on all ebookseller platforms, but in the short run they will only be available on Amazon. This is due to Amazon’s exclusivity requirements for its subscription programme, Kindle Unlimited, which I plan to enrol my books in initially.

    Print

    You’ll be able to order books from your preferred bookseller of choice (I can recommend Book Depository for free international shipping). I’ll let you know when and where they’re available.

    A sneak peek

    I’ve also put the prologue and the first chapter up on the website. You can read it here. I plan to put a few more chapters up before release date, to psych myself up for it!

  • Genre: What even is ‘gaslamp fantasy?’

    Genre: What even is ‘gaslamp fantasy?’

    When I finished the first draft of The Lord of Stariel, my friends and family asked, not unnaturally, what it was about.

    “Well,” I said. “It’s a fantasy novel.”

    This was and remains 100% true. It is a fantasy novel. There is magic. Excellent – genre nailed down.

    However, fantasy is a giant genre, so I tried to be a little more specific. The attempt to pin down my subgenre quickly became a depressing exercise in things my novel lacks. It isn’t medieval, grimdark, epic, urban, or steampunk. It’s historicalish but it’s set in its own world. It isn’t about sword fights or going on a quest. There are fae, but it isn’t a fairytale retelling.

    For a while I called it ‘fantasy romance’ because those are two things it definitely contains – even though the romance isn’t exactly the main plotline.

    Eventually I did find a weird niche subgenre label for it in addition to fantasy romance: gaslamp fantasy. This is a subgenre that (a) most people have never heard of and (b) is basically defined entirely by what it’s not. Hoorah!

    Wikipedia defines gaslamp fantasy as:

    ‘a subgenre of both fantasy and historical fiction. Generally speaking, this particular realm of fantasy employs either a Victorian or Edwardian setting. The gaslamp fantasy genre is not to be confused with steampunk…’

    The way I see it, gaslamp fantasy is the magical cousin of steampunk. Steampunk I think draws more from science fiction than fantasy, and has a big focus on machines, cogs, corsets, goggles, Victorian-aesthetic, and, er, steam. Gaslamp is less about the technology and more about fantastical elements in a late nineteenth/early twentieth century setting.

    Today I found out that Amazon recently created a category for gaslamp fantasy books, which heartened me until I glanced through the books listed and found that most of them appeared to be steampunk. Oh well. It’s only a little baby subgenre at the moment – maybe it will grow into something big and popular! After all, a few decades ago most people had never heard of urban fantasy either.

    Bring on the gaslamp fantasy revolution!