Wait … what?

If that was your initial reaction to seeing the new artwork for The Landkist Saga along with old and once-familiar titles, I don’t blame you.

To try to make a very long story a bit shorter, The Landkist Saga is going back to its original titles. While I can’t get into ALL of the details here, this largely has to do with algorithmic changes at both Amazon and the incredibly infuriating and highly influential Goodreads platform. In fairness, these issues were so weird that even Amazon Publishing employees were surprised at how confused the database was regarding the new versions of The Landkist Saga.

When we relaunched The Landkist Saga, Monolith Books and I took a calculated gamble, changing the original titles while leaving the series name unchanged. Part of this decision came down to promoting a new lease on life for the series, since the prose has been reworked, and there were significant changes to the earlier volumes, and we thought it made some sense to hit a new audience by matching the new titles to the new artwork by the ultra talented Pierre Reveneau. 

That said, the title changes not only resulted in the aforementioned algorithmic issues (which can lead to a whole host of problems for the publisher, from advertising campaigns to review linking, edition linking, etc.) but said changes also just flat-out confused my existing readers and new readers alike. 

Lesson learned.

Sometimes, the only thing we can do in these cases is admit to a bad call and try to react accordingly. Effective immediately, The Landkist Saga is BACK, like it never left, with the original titles returning to grace Raveneau’s new artwork.

Aside from smoothing out the issues with Goodreads listings, Amazon search functionality and algorithmic confusion, one huge silver lining to this whole thing is that the original Landkist titles just … work on Pierre’s artwork. In fact, I think they look rather stunning, and I hope you agree.

Books 1-3 (Valley of Embers, The Emerald Blade, The Midnight Dunes,) are going live this month, while Book 4-5 (The Frostfire Sage, The Forever Night,) will follow, likely in the Summer and Fall, before the never before released Books 6-7 (The World Apart, Valley of Ashes,) release in 2022.