Bounty Report – 2024

Introduction

It’s that time of the year again, and by again, I mean for the first time ever. This is a report on what Bounty Ink Press has done in the year of 2024! Below is an in depth update on various projects as well as what my plans for the future are! Hope you enjoy and maybe something in here gets you a bit excited about what’s to come.

Anyway, enough preamble, let’s get to the meat of it.

Chronicles of Gam Gam

A Necromancer Called Gam Gam

Yes, this book dropped in 2023, BUT it had an audiobook release this year! It’s currently available on Audible and is narrated by the incredible Jacqi Lynn. I’m so happy with how this book turned out, and I have plans to expand it for the future. I just need to figure all that out, which I had hoped to do by now, but life got in the way. So a goal for 2025 is to move the audiobook to other places for purchase!

Not only that, but Gam Gam has been entered into several competitions, of which results have come in this year. First, it had gotten cut after Semi-Finals in SFINCS (The Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship), which ironically began because of me to some degree! I mean, I didn’t do any of the work to get it going, but I did complain about there not being a novella competition, and Nathan took that idea and made magic happen. There was some vicious competition out there for its inaugural year, and so many amazing novellas were a part of it! Be sure to check them out, and keep an eye on SFINCS 2 which is currently ongoing.

For Indie Ink Award, Gam Gam made it further by snagging a finalist spot! And to top it all off, the results for BBNYA (Book Bloggers’ Novel of the Year Award) just announced the placements of their top 16, and A Necromancer Called Gam Gam placed second by a small margin! And given the winner is a contemporary romance/mystery mashup (which I’m very interested in checking out), that means Gam Gam was the best of the SFF entered into the competition!

It was a busy sophomore year for A Necromancer Called Gam Gam and I couldn’t be more proud of it!

The Wishing Stone

To add to an eventful year for Gam Gam, book 2 titled The Wishing Stone launched on October 7th! I had an excellent launch, topping my preorders for the first book and breaking my record for royalties made in a month. By over twice as much! Some of that was my mom buying nine copies of each book to give to my nieces and nephews for Christmas (I probably should have sold direct but oh well, it helped inflate my opening month!), but certainly not all. So thank you to everyone who excitedly snagged a copy! I’m flabbergasted and honored and such an incredible opening month. It will be a long time coming before I top that one, but, also, I won’t complain if it’s not that long.

There’s an audiobook for book 1, so what about book 2? Well, here’s the thing, audiobooks are REALLY expensive, and even though I just had a record month, that money is less than 12% the cost of producing the first one. And book two is longer! I haven’t had many sales for audio either, so it’s not making enough to pay for itself. I hope that by expanding the audiobook to new locations that helps to bring in more for it, and maybe some day I can bring Jacqi back to continue with the Chronicles of Gam Gam audiobooks. Until such a time, I unfortunately cannot move forward with this path. The audiobook for The Wishing Stone is currently shelved.

What’s to Come in the Gamiverse?

It will be continuing on! I had ideas for book 3 for a while now, and have just been waiting for the time to be able to work on it since I am deep into getting Bounty Inc ready for edits. I got impatient though, and I really wanted to draft something new rather than edit. So, I’m trying a new strategy. When I have some free time, and I have a good idea of the scene I want to write, I do it on my phone! Which is horrifying to me, I hate even typing long texts on my phone. But I’m happy to report it’s working a bit! It’s not nearly as consistent as normal writing, but it let’s me burn my creative flame when I need to.

That being said, book 3, titled The Knitting Club, is approximately 36% through its first draft! If I needed a motto to describe this book, I would probably use “Geriatric Avengers vs. a Dragon”. And, that about sums it up! I am having a lot of fun with this one, and hope you’ll be looking forward to it. I am hopeful for a 2025 release date, but Bounty Inc will be my biggest priority for 2025, so this may need to wait until early 2026.

When I said I’ll be continuing on, I mean it. There’s no end in sight for Gam Gam and her adventures! I have an overarching plot for book 4, as well as a tentative title: A Kiss For the Elm-Cursed. That’s all I’ll share on it for now, but there are plenty of other ideas brewing to come after this! I’m hoping to keep the series going as little episodic stories, so they’re easy to pick up without needing a ton of context from earlier books. Little snacks between your chonky books!

Bounty Inc Series

Bounty Inc

Speaking of chonky books, this book has been giving me a lot of trouble! Mostly in the growth department. Like unbuckling one’s pants after scarfing down too much Thanksgiving Day turkey and potatoes, sometimes you just need to release the pressure and let it go. What started as a fun little story with a goal of 50k words, has breached 170k and will grow a bit more as I finish my last pass before edits. I think it will anyway, I just finished running through on my wife’s Remarkable (incredible for editing purposes!), and I think I added more than I subtracted. Oops.

Not only that, but a large universe exploded from this story, and now I have multiple other stories within the galaxy that I will need to tell! More to come on that.

But as for this year, I spent much of the year expanding Bounty Inc into what it needs to be, and have now wrapped my final revision pass before I hand it off for edits. I will need to run through and digitize the changes, but I’m hoping to complete that by end of January. Nothing big seems to need changes, so they should be on the quicker side. This story is my highest priority to release in 2025, and as long as things go well, that shouldn’t be an issue. However, it will likely be later in the year.

If you’re anxious to get to the story, though, I do have plans to open a Patreon where I will share pre-edits chapters early leading up to its launch! It’ll give you a sneak peak of what’s to come and hopefully build up some excitement. More on that in the future.

A Galaxy Expanded

As I built out Bounty Inc, ideas exploded from me for this story. There’s so much I want to do and play with, and I have so much lined up for it! I just need to release the first book to open the floodgates, and I am almost there, which is making me vibrate with excitement. Here’s a few stories to keep an eye on:

A Dream Resolute: An immortal deity joins up with famed bounty hunter Gremori Gote to better understand what it means for mortals to have a dream. A serialized story that I am hoping to release a chapter at a time after Bounty Inc’s launch. The chapters will be collected into volumes and released as normal for those who do not want to read the serialized route. It’s an experiment to keep me drafting even when I’m neck deep in edits.

Melody of a Lost Soul: A gay enemy-to-lovers story about a bounty hunter and his prey ending up stranded on a hostile planet and needing to rely on each other to survive.

[Untitled Sapphic Vengeance Story]: An experienced hunter shows the ropes of bounty hunting to a newer hunter, but ends up embroiled in traumas of her past for which she still very much wants her vengeance. Grumpy x Bubbly lesbians blowing stuff up.

Undead Planet books: What was originally going to be a single book about a bounty hunter delving into a zombie-ridden planet to stop a dangerous bioweapon from being released on the galaxy, has now turned into something a bit different. I’ve expanded it into two stories that cross paths with one another. It will now be two, interlocking stories (that can be read individually without issue) that occur during the same event (invading the zombie-ridden planet) but with different goals (capture the doctor responsible for the bioweapon/retrieve the research on the bioweapon). I have fun plans to try and print both books in one, special edition copy, which can be reversed to read the other story. This will be an interesting, exciting challenge, as I want to keep them relatively similarly paced so the story ends are right in the center of the book. We’ll see how it goes!

A board game? Before I gave authoring a shot, I was a fresh graduate of a Game Design and Development degree. It was meant to be for video games, but, well, I never really tried to take the jump into it much, and I’m happier for it. That industry is volatile… I like my stability these days. That doesn’t mean that I don’t stop thinking about game design, it’s just shifted a bit. Now I want to make a board game some day. Maybe it’ll be a one of one copy, and no one else will have it (I’ll probably still get a TTS mod made in that case, though), maybe, by some miracle, I can get it crowdfunded and it can exist in the world. I have enough on my plate for running an indie author business, so I’d love to partner with a company for that if it happens haha. (My dream would be IV Studio, who made one of my favorite board games of all time, Moonrakers.) But anyway, in the meantime I am brainstorming, and I am testing my concepts. I love the idea I have themed after Bounty Inc, which will take elements from all of the above stories and combine them. The main focus will be deckbuilding, you take on a company and you build out your bounty hunting skills to become the best in the galaxy. You can sabotage each other, recruit popular characters from the books, utilize weapons and equipment seen in the stories, and tackle several bounties to build up your renown. I’m very excited to keep working on it, and I hope some day you all get a chance to play it if you want!

And many, many more to come! But this should tide you over for now.

Other Projects

“There are others?? Is not what you’ve listed above enough?” – You probably. And yes, it should be. And yet, it’s not?? I don’t know, I don’t control this brain of mine. Sometimes ideas just strike me, and a few of those stick around until I can’t unwedge them. Two noteworthy examples are The Disappearance of Veronica Lane and Tales From a Post-Apocalyptic Cafe.

The Disappearance of Veronica Lane started as a short story based on a random dream I had of a blood magic user having to find her missing twin sister. It’s evolved a few times, but became a story I really liked. I just couldn’t nail it down as much as I wanted to, and beta reads on it say it’s good, though some parts are confusing or incoherent a bit. Which is fair, I was making the same mistake I made before. Which was putting too much into too small a space. It can be a short story, but I liked the world too much to leave it there. I wanted to grow past it, but if I did that nothing vital could be in the short story, or I’d have to repeat it in book one. So why not a novella? Worked for Gam Gam! It could work here. Except I already have a series of novellas I’m working on, and I didn’t want to juggle two of those. What I really wanted was to be able to submit to SPFBO, which meant it would need to be a novel. So yes, I’m expanding a short story into a full novel. Someday. I have a lot more I want to work into it that would have been introduced in follow-ups, but I don’t want to wait anymore. It’s not a high priority for me, so I’m not sure when I’ll get to it, but I love the idea enough I know that I will get to it. This book series will be a blood magic crime thriller. Think Jessica Jones x Gotham (TV Show). Maybe I’ll do early look chapters on Patreon to stay consistent with it.

Tales From a Post-Apocalyptic Cafe is another troublesome little book. This is a love letter to Fallout basically, people trying to survive in a post nuclear apocalypse. Radstorms race across the land, and if you’re caught in one, you’re not coming out the same (dead or mutated). So you gotta hunker down in little places like this underground cafe. The book follows several people telling their own stories from the nuclear wastes, so it would be an anthology with a framing story to it. Think, drinking buddies talking about their time in the wastelands. The issue is, I have to come up with a bunch of short stories, which is a lot of work. So this get’s picked up every now and then as I workshop it a bit and refine it. I hope someday it sees the light of day and can be what I envision it to be. I know I won’t be giving up on it any time soon, but it is a lower priority for the time being.

The Store

I’m happy to announce that Bounty Ink Press now has its own online store! You can visit it here or by clicking “Store” in the top menu. This allows you to purchase signed copies directly from me, and will let me create pre-order bundles to provide some other fun merchandise with. Right now, I’ve got A Necromancer Called Gam Gam and The Wishing Stone available to purchase, and a link to the Tee Public store where you can get the t-shirt I have available. I also have plans to slowly add some fun merch ideas to the store as I can get them. Purchases from me are unfortunately refrained to US only, due to generally high shipping costs. If you do not live in the US however, don’t hesitate to reach out, and I’d be happy to see what can be done!

But I also wanted to celebrate A Necromancer Called Gam Gam reaching second place in BBNYA, so through the rest of the year, you can purchase a bundle of both books signed (either hardcover or paperback) and shipping will be free! Be sure to check it out if you want signed copies.

Conclusion

That’s a lot on my plate, but what really makes me happy is that I’m truly excited for it all. Yes, this is probably several years worth of work, but Bounty Inc has taught me to be patient about it, and enjoy the process. I’m sure some ideas will come hound me between these stories, but these being the core of what I work on for a few years is a very bright spot for me.

I hope you find many or all of this interesting and exciting, and I look forward to seeing your reactions for each new release. One step at a time, however. For now, it’s all about Bounty Inc, it has waited too long to not see the light of day!