THE AFTERWORD

First and foremost, thank you for reading Trial of the Alchemist in its entirety! I must also quickly thank my wife for helping with the cover and my friend and agent for selling audio rights. Before you depart, I would like to make a quick request and share an important update regarding what’s next—and why you should keep following this story.

How you can support this novel

If you do me just one favor, I would ask that you leave an Amazon review on Trial of the Alchemist. I’ve put the Kindle version live precisely for this purpose. I’ll be doing a big promotional push of the book coinciding with its audio release, and having a number of positive reviews on Amazon will be critical to successful advertising campaigns.

And if you’ve taken the time to write a review, please consider leaving it on Royal Road and Goodreads as well.

As mentioned before, an audio version of Trial of the Alchemist from Podium Audio will be published on April 4. You can support my work by pre-ordering Trial of the Alchemist on Audible (Canadian link) or Kindle. The narrator, Vikas Adam, is absolutely fantastic, and it will be a whole new way to experience the story.

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What’s next (and why you should keep following me)

I’ve spent a number of months working on another story intended to be more marketable to audiences on Royal Road and Amazon, based on an idea I’ve had for a while. It’s progression fantasy (but more in the Name of the Wind / The Last Orellen sense), though I think both the setting (a merchant republic in the mountains) and the system are quite novel. Here’s a quick synopsis:

Elias Vice, a supposed nobody from the backwater town of Acreton, has already written his destiny, and it ends with him building the greatest business empire Sailor’s Rise has ever known. But to get there, Elias will need to turn a pocketful of relics into a company worth millions. The Rise’s caste-like business and political system stratifies power and access in the dock-ringed merchant republic, and Elias is starting with neither. And yet he isn’t the nobody he first believes, as Elias’s connection to an enigmatic people—airship travelers with a unique mastery over space itself—will both help and haunt his ambitious endeavor. Elias, it turns out, is a collector.

Expect Sailor’s Rise to launch sometime in late spring or early summer. Unlike Trial of the Alchemist, it’s actually being written as a web novel. I will send followers of this story an update as soon as it goes live—so please, keep following! And thank you again for reading my book. I spent a lot of time writing this one, and building an audience—even at this early stage—has been a uniquely rewarding experience.

Again, if you could take two minutes to quickly leave an Amazon review, it will help make this book a success. Thank you. 🙏