Hello All-
I submitted the Phantom Series materials to Tammy (copyeditor) last Monday and today I added the pre-release pages to Amazon. They’re on the website with an October 10th release date, which after 3-plus years is very exciting!
The series (so far) is about 1,650 pages. The final word counts for the books include about 190 pages of “Marstone’s Databases,” which are detailed character indexes individualized for each book with 100-plus characters included. Excluding the databases, the series through the first 5 books is about 1,385 pages, far more than I’d planned on writing when I started conducting research in late 2011 and early 2012 into synthetic biology and quantum physics!
| Words | Pages* | |
| The Song of the Jubilee | 48,032 | 192 |
| The Gambit with Perfection | 73,276 | 293 |
| The Synthesis and the Animus | 74,389 | 298 |
| The Descent into the Maelstrom | 98,258 | 393 |
| The Restoration of Flaws | 99,754 | 399 |
| The Phantom of the Earth | 393,709 | 1,575 |
| Marstone’s Database (combined) | 47,500 | 190 |
| The Phantom of the Earth (ex-Marstone) | 346,209 | 1,385 |
| Appendix 1: Thirty Precepts | 677 | 3 |
| Appendix 2: Terraforming the Underground | 6,890 | 28 |
| Appendix 3: Interstellar and Time Travel | 1,288 | 5 |
| Appendix 4: Dictations and Songs | 971 | 4 |
| Appendix 5: Transhuman Theology | 1,973 | 8 |
| Appendix 6: Transhuman Terminology | 6,954 | 28 |
| Appendix subtotal | 18,753 | 75 |
| Total | 412,462 | 1,650 |
| *Assumes 250 words per page. |
For now, the individual books are all priced at $0.99 with the OMNIBUS EDITION priced at $4.95. So from a cost perspective it wouldn’t matter if you picked up the individual books separately or the OMNIBUS. (At some point I expect to offer Books 1-2 for free with Books 3-5 priced somewhere between $0.99 and $2.99.) The OMNIBUS is long enough that when the sample becomes available, THE SONG OF THE JUBILEE can be read in its entirety. If you want to avoid spoilers I suggest ignoring the product pages for all the books except THE SONG OF THE JUBILEE and the OMNIBUS EDITION.
While I set the go-live date for October 10th, I expect (hope) to have the final formatted versions ready by mid-September for the NetGalley listing. I’ll post more about it on my Tumblr and on my website as that deadline approaches, but if you’d like a copy of the OMNIBUS prior to the official go-live date, either go to NetGalley beginning September 29th or email me at raedenzen@gmail.com and I will send you a free copy as soon as it’s ready. Of course, you can purchase it for $4.95 on Amazon if you’d prefer to receive it on the go-live date. Either way, though I can’t guarantee you’ll have fun with the series, you should expect to receive a well-edited (5 rounds, including 1 developmental edit, 1 line edit, 1 partial line edit, 1 copyedit, and 1 partial copyedit), thoroughly beta read (20-plus readers), highly researched (15-plus sources including nonfiction books and articles, and expert feedback), and professionally formatted product.
The product pages are still building, and I’ll be adding more information to them when I receive the edited materials, but you can view them here. Again, to avoid spoilers, ignore the synopsis blurbs for Books 2-5. Stick to THE SONG OF THE JUBILEE and the OMNIBUS EDITION.
More information, including the unbelievable concept art, is available on my website: http://www.raedenzen.com.
Best wishes,
Raeden Zen
(p.s. Please excuse any typos! No matter how many times I reread my posts, I miss my own mistakes!)