Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial

Another retrospective, big news, and going forward

Hey friends, Sov here. Been a while since I’ve done one of these, but I’ve got some stuff to talk about.

This has been a pretty wild journey so far. I’ve been a web fiction author for going on eight months now, most of a year. After spending 6-7 years trying to find the right project to do a web story with and failing, this feels kind of incredible. Bonus points that I didn’t expect Alken’s tale to be the one I stuck with.

I just closed out arc 4, Bind, which ended up being my longest so far, and I think also my best. This one was weird, because I expected to get through the entire “summit and tournament” section of the story and wrap up the major events in the city all in one arc (some of you might have noticed that I changed the arc’s name partway through). Turns out I bit off a lot more than I could chew with this leg of the journey, and I ended up deciding to split it into two arcs. I hope to wrap up this section with arc 5, which I’ve already started working on.

I expect Garihelm might end up becoming a central location in the narrative that we return to on occasion, with Alken now in a position as a lord and peer to the realms, but we’ll see how that plays out. Things definitely won’t be easy or simple from him from here on out.

But that’s author thoughts about the narrative, and I’d rather keep my plans going forward vague to avoid spoilers. I have another bit of news to share, which is a lot bigger.

Not long back, I had a publisher reach out to me after finding my fiction on Royal Road. They seemed to just be poking about my future plans, which I gathered is pretty normal after talking to some other authors in the same spaces. Long story short, after meeting with one of their agents, some emails, and a long think, I ended up signing with Podium.

Oathbreaker is going to be published.

I’ve known this for going on a few weeks now, but wanted to wait for the arc to finish and for everything to be set in stone before saying anything. Right now, the deal is going to involve the first 3 arcs as full books being released across all platforms — including audiobook.

This is a big deal to me, and not something I expected. I had intended to quietly write my silly web fiction about a very sad paladin for years before even considering looking at anything more serious. I hadn’t even taken the step to start a patreon, mainly because I was never certain how much traction this story would get and didn’t want to distract myself from the project itself. The publishing thing kind of fell into my lap out of the blue. I almost didn’t take it, because being independent, while not lucrative, is simple and more relaxed.

But I’m not getting any younger, and after consulting with friends and family, I decided to take the win. Part of this is because I won’t actually have to change much about what I’m doing — Podium is going to take care of pretty much all the work, while I get to just keep working on the story. It felt like the best of both worlds, far as I could tell.

I admit, I’m anxious and excited about this at once. When Podium originally poked me, I was hyper skeptical — what publisher would reach out to me, a little web fiction author with a story that’s already very niche for the space it’s in? I agreed to a meeting call, which went well, but I was kind of in the camp of just staying independent. After the pub reached out again very soon after the first meeting, offering a contract, and I saw what they were offering, I gave it some harder thought.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

So what does this mean for Oathbreaker? Well, for most of you, nothing much will change. I am going to continue to write and release the story on Royal Road, for free, until it is done. The deal only involves the first 3 arcs right now. Eventually, they’re probably going to be stubbed for a kindle release. I don’t have any projection currently on when that will be, but probably not for a long while. We’re still in early days.

Part of this deal does involve some new work being done to get the earlier parts of the story ready for publication. I’ve said many times before in comments that the first 2 arcs, particularly the first, are the roughest parts of the narrative to me. I didn’t have as strong a handle on the story and characters at the time, and I’ve wanted to clean them up and revise them for a while. I asked the publisher if they would be alright with me doing my own major revisions before we got to the copyediting phase, they agreed, and I’ve been doing that for most of the last couple weeks. Arc 1 in particular will probably end up looking pretty different when done, with additional scenes and a lot of edits made to make Alken more consistent with his later characterization, shore up some less satisfying plot beats, and correct inconsistencies with the lore.

I’ve already revised the first 9 chapters of arc 1, which are basically the same, only a lot cleaner in my opinion. I plan to switch those chapters out in Royal Road over the next couple of weeks, to give new readers a better early experience. After those chapters, my revisions become a lot more intense, with additional scenes and alterations to how arc 1 plays out. Eventually I’ll give arc 2 a similar treatment. Arcs 3 and 4 I’m more satisfied with, and part of the reason I’m doing this is because they’re getting turned into real books, and I’d like them to be a bit longer and more satisfying as standalone reads.

It’s something I’d wanted to do anyway, this deal is just giving me the push to roll up my sleeves.

As for the heavier changes… I’m on the fence about how I want to handle that. It’s all my own work at this point, with the pubs own editors only coming in after I’ve gotten a manuscript ready, so I don’t feel any need to keep those hidden. That being said, I don’t know if I want to fully release my revised version of arc 1 on Royal Road before stubbing so those of you who’ve stuck with this through its run can see the differences first (this is what I’d most like to do), or if that would be annoying since it almost feels like obligatory rereading.

The other option is to make that a potential patreon benefit, which I am expecting I may set up soon — this is because the pub has told me I’m allowed to keep my original versions of the story behind a patreon even if kindle unlimited rules compel me to remove the published parts from Royal Road. Since I don’t tend to be far ahead of you folks and have held off on a patreon mainly because I don’t really want to do advance chapters, this could be one benefit I can have there. Let me know what you think in the comments, for now I’m on the fence about how I’ll go about this.

Other than that, the saga continues. Arc 4 was a doozy, and arc 5 I expect will also be pretty heavy. I’ve been releasing 3+ chapters a week for most of a year now, and while I don’t feel any need to stop or slow down, I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. I want to have my revisions of arc 1 done by the end of December, and I need to have an action plan firmly in place for arc 5.

So I’m planning to take a little break from posting. This is NOT a hiatus, not really. I don’t expect it to last more than a couple of weeks while I make sure I’m not overwhelmed, and I may have some posts in the meantime, possibly more lore blurbs and map updates if I can find the time.

And that’s basically it. This is just the start of things, but I won’t deny it’s kind of a life changer for me personally. I am just some rando on the internet who had a story he wanted to tell, and this all came at me really fast. My writing is a real job now… that feels weird, but good?

If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading my work. The regular comments, the number of readers who jump into each new chapter within hours of me sharing it, the discussions and reviews I’ve been left, they’ve all been far more than I expected when I started this. We are still in early days, as far as my journey as a writer and for Alken’s story, which I intend to make an epic saga spanning many arcs and a number of years of my life. Thank you for being part of that.

With much gratitude,

Sov