I am very pleased to announce that I have completed writing Dawn of Chaos, the first full-length novel in the Sanctum of the Archmage Saga. The final draft comes to about 143,000 words, or just over 400 “paperback equivalent pages.”

Now that the book is finished, the next phase of preparing for publication begins. I’m currently going through a technical edit of the full manuscript to identify and correct typos and misspellings, inconsistent word usage, and the like. After that I’ll do a full read-through to give the book a stylistic edit and make sure the final version is as polished as possible. I’ll also be looking to hire a copy-editor to review it. And I’ll be working with my illustrator, Charles, to finalize the cover and in-line drawings.

I’ll also be working on starting to put together a “marketing plan.” This will involve a lot of the kind of things described in the self-publishing references I’ve been studying such as the terrific Write, Publish Repeat, as well as updating my website and establishing an author platform (on Amazon at least).

So when will it be published? That will depend on how much time all of the above takes, but I’m estimating roughly three to four months. That makes my current target to release Dawn of Chaos on the Kindle store sometime this August.