Power & Empire

Power & Empire started its life along time ago in 2007 although it would take another five years to finish, and was intended to be a quartet of books. And for most of its life so far, that’s what it was. However, the print version of the final book, Unleashing the Power, was a monster and print costs being what they are, it wasn’t that practical a book in terms of what its price had to be. I was also torn over e-book pricing, because there was a huge amount of work in those books that I didn’t want to denigrate by selling cheaply; but also recognised that there would be a limit to what most folks would want to pay for an e-book.

So in 2019 I made the decision to re-divide the series in up into five. The first book, Chasing Sorcery, is as it ever was – there just isn’t a natural break in that one where I could have ended it earlier. However, the second book, The Darkening Storm, now finishes a handful of chapters earlier than originally. Those remaining chapters went into a new middle volume, Fleeting Victories, which also contains most of the original third volume. Summoning Spectres as a title always fitted the latter part of its original content, and so that title went on to the fourth book with its later chapters along with a goodly chunk of what had been the final volume. This means that Unleashing the Power is now primarily focused on the great battle at the end of the series, and is the slimmest volume of the lot – though far from short!

Calculating e-book pages is never easy, but for a standard kindle-sized e-reader you have approximately 6,000 pages to dive into and enjoy. The series is complete, and I have no plans to go back into that world and start a new series with the same characters. As I love them all dearly, there’s only so much I feel I could inflict on them in their lifetimes!