Going Wide... Again: The Nod/Wells Timelines - Volume 1

A quick post to let everyone know that my first omnibus edition "The Nod/Wells Timelines - Volume 1" has been widely released as an e-book and a 6x9" paperback, just in time for the holidays!

The Nod/Wells Timelines - Volume 1

As I mentioned in my previous post, this is the first time e-books of "The Big Men" and "309" have been available anywhere other than Amazon since 2020, and the very first time "Shards" has been similarly offered. Additionally, several new subscription and library services, such as Kobo Plus, Everand, Borrow Box, and CloudLibrary, now have access to the books via this release!

It's taken a lot of time and effort to get to this point as an author, where making the investment to put together and publish these collected editions of my works made good sense, so I'm beyond thrilled to have been able to do that.

Before I go, a quick confirmation that "The Nod/Wells Timelines - Volume 2" will be released in mid-2026, after the initial standalone publication of "The Nemesis Legacy" in January, and "The Nod/Wells Timelines - Volume 3" will arrive in January of 2027. Finally, look forward to the release of the official compendium for The Timelines in March of 2027 to celebrate my ten-year anniversary as an author!

Until next time, happy reading, everybody!

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Coming Attractions: 2025, 2026, and Beyond!

When I published "The Spiral and The Threads" back in 2024, it was a huge weight off my shoulders, having completed the last of the original seven books I'd planned as the "core" volumes for The Nod/Wells Timelines speculative-fiction literary universe.

Oddly enough, because I'd already started work on the first expansions in the form of "8: Tales of The Big Men from The Nod/Wells Timelines" and "The Nemesis Legacy," I never really felt "done" in spite of the huge sense of accomplishment reaching that milestone provided for me.

In a similar manner, with "8" published, and work on "The Nemesis Legacy" winding down, I still find myself busy as ever, with all sorts of projects remaining in the pipeline.

The first of those, a re-release of the novelette "Mr. Perkins Goes to Hell" will be hitting Amazon on October 3rd, 2025, with a snazzy new cover that will hopefully attract a plethora of new readers to The Timelines. Of course, those of you who already experienced that tale via Kindle Vella or as part of "The Spiral and The Threads" may not be particularly excited about this development but I've always felt Mr. Perkins' origin story had a lot of untapped potential as an initial experience akin to "Academic Displacement," so I'm very curious to see what comes of it, and eager to see it take its place on The Nod/Wells Timelines "value menu."

Mr. Perkins Goes to Hell (Amazon)

Next up in November of 2025 will be an omnibus edition, containing "The Big Men," "309," and "Shards." This will be the first time an ebook of "Shards" arrives anywhere other than Amazon, and the first time ebooks of "The Big Men" and "309" will be similarly obtainable in over five years. Again, I'm very excited and eager to provide such options despite remaining committed to keeping the individual books in KDP Select and available via Kindle Unlimited for the foreseeable future.

Of course, "The Nod/Wells Timelines: Volume I" will be followed by various editions of "The Nemesis Legacy" in January and February of 2026. It's been absolutely thrilling putting that project together and I can hardly wait for everyone to experience it next year. I don't want to oversell it, but I honestly think it's one of the coolest and most fun things I've ever written. Moreover, I feel very confident that fans of The Timelines are almost certainly going to thoroughly enjoy it!

2026 will also see "The Nod/Wells Timelines: Volume II," which will include "The Nemesis Effect," "Big Man Down," and "500," and similarly make those ebooks more widely available for the first time ever.

Finally, in 2027, "The Nod/Wells Timelines: Volume III" will combine "The Spiral and The Threads," "8: Tales of The Big Men from The Nod/Wells Timelines," and "The Nemesis Legacy" to "complete" the omnibus editions. Later that year, I will be releasing an official compendium for The Timelines to mark my ten-year anniversary as an author. Needless to say, that is going to be a massive tome, containing extensive book and character profiles, "The Story Behind The Timelines," and several all-new Tales of The Big Men, as well as some other goodies and surprises.

All of that, and various other projects I'm not ready to talk about yet, are going to keep me very busy for the next few years but the good news is that there will be no shortage of content for fans of The Timelines, new and old, to experience.

Until next time, happy reading, everybody!

Visit my official website.

My Thoughts on Amazon's Virtual Voice Technology after a Year of Using it as an Author and Publisher

As many of you may already know, I've been participating in the beta program for Amazon's Virtual Voice technology via its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform for well over a year now. In that time, I've published seven novel-length books and four "story singles" using the tech, and have therefore gained a level of familiarity with the tool and its nuances that I'd say goes a fair bit beyond what a casual or average user of it might experience.

As with any new, in-development software, there have definitely been some growing pains with Virtual Voice from a user perspective. Lost data, poorly implemented or undesirable "features," and general struggles when attempting to report and resolve issues with the system have all reared their ugly heads and been "par for the course" throughout the beta but thus far, I'd have to say that my overall experience with Virtual Voice has been fairly positive.

A bit of context: I have a BA in journalism with an emphasis on publication production. I have been actively working as an author and publisher of speculative fiction for a little over eight years. Before that, and indeed throughout some of that time, I have worked as a software engineer for well over twenty years, using a variety of tech stacks in support of a variety of industries. I also published one traditional, self-narrated audiobook via Amazon's ACX platform just prior to my acceptance into the beta, which I suspect may have factored into my early inclusion in said program. All that to say that this is not my first rodeo when it comes to writing, publishing, and a plethora of technologies.

That said, let's address the elephant in the room as I did in my previous post about this subject. In my estimation, "no," Amazon's Virtual Voice technology is not "AI," either in the proper, traditional sense of the concept or the highly-questionable and suspect way it's thrown around in the tech industry at large these days. To put it simply, Virtual Voice is a natural evolution of the same synthetic voice technologies that have existed for decades. It is not a "push a button, get an audiobook" sort of thing, and in point of fact requires a significant amount of time and effort from anyone using it to produce valid and acceptable results. 

"How much time and effort?" I hear you asking. It can vary somewhat but in my experience, about three to six times as long as the audio of the finished product ends up being. So, a five-hour audiobook, something in the neighborhood of 40-50,000 words, will take between 15 and 30 hours of fairly diligent, detail-oriented work to complete. That's certainly no trivial task, however, comparing it to the time and effort associated with traditional audiobook recording, editing, and post-production, the potential advantages of Virtual Voice will quickly become apparent to anyone with sufficient experience to make such judgements.

But wait! Before you run off and fire up ye ol' KDP Dashboard, there are a few significant caveats to consider:

• Virtual Voice is still very much an "in-development" technology. That means changes to it, which are at times quite significant, occur on a regular basis. One of the most potentially-devastating can be updates to the virtual voices themselves. While those generally improve their potential to sound "better" in a variety of circumstances, they almost always require a full review of the published material and copious editing of it in the Virtual Voice Studio, not just to achieve those at times marginally-better results, but to correct any issues that may have been caused by the update. This has happened to me several times throughout the beta with various books, requiring me to effectively re-do all of the work on them to keep them sounding their best. That can be particularly brutal with longer books, featuring 10 hours of audio or more, as the 3-6X production time estimate applies to them as well. For example: My longest book, which is a bit over 134,000 words, had to be completely re-worked twice in the past year: once from scratch as a result of data loss triggered by a voice update, and again, with significant tweaks to that voice-training data required by a subsequent voice update.

Virtual Voice Studio allows authors and publishers to "teach" virtual voices to properly read their works. This involves adding data points that represent pauses, pronunciation and punctuation changes, voice speed alterations, and more. The process to achieve the best-possible result for a given publication is generally quite extensive and time-consuming.

• No matter how much effort you put into it, Virtual Voice is never going to sound like a top-tier human narrator. It can sound very good if proper care is taken to get the most out of the system that it's capable of producing but at best, it can deliver a solid, dry reading of the text, with occasional bits of emphasis to prevent things from sounding too monotonous. In fairness, certain types of listeners may enjoy, or even prefer, the consistent, predictable delivery Virtual Voice tends to provide, when the rough edges are smoothed out via editing in the studio, but I think it's highly unlikely that it will ever be able to approach the level of a dramatic reading from an author, or an experienced and talented narrator, or cast.
• Any audiobook work you do with Virtual Voice is tied to that system since it produces the audio for you. This means that if Amazon decides to pull the plug on the project at some point in the future, as it recently did with Kindle Vella for example, you may find yourself scrambling to salvage your investment, or simply out any work that you put into it, depending on how that hypothetical scenario might unfold.
• As alluded to previously, there is a lot of confusion and misinformation floating around the internet about what Virtual Voice is and what's involved in using it properly, which isn't helped by the fact that, in its typical fashion, Amazon has been fairly quiet about the tech throughout its development, relying on the authors and publishers such as myself using it to "take the lumps" and communicate the realities of it to potential readers without much in the way of assistance in that regard.

Still, even with all those considerations, I wouldn't discourage any interested author or publisher from investigating Virtual Voice for their own projects. For all its potential pitfalls, there are as many or more opportunities for benefit and success related to it in my opinion, assuming that it's used with caution and care, just like any other tool.

My audiobooks - both virtually voiced and traditionally narrated.

The Nod/Wells Timelines Expand

As I come to the end of my eighth year as an author and begin my ninth, I'm pleased to report that The Nod/Wells Timelines have officially begun to expand with the release of "8" earlier this year and the announcement of my next novel, "The Nemesis Legacy," which will make its debut in January of 2026!

At this point, The Timelines have become a real powerhouse in the world of speculative fiction, attracting new readers of sci-fi, horror, and thrillers of all sorts from around the world on a daily basis. I'm therefore certain that more than a few reading this are more than a little excited about the new books, so I'll be sure to talk more about "The Nemesis Legacy" in particular as its release approaches.

The Nemesis Legacy at Amazon (Kindle Edition Pre-Order)

That said, I'm also very aware that The Timelines have reached a level of intricacy and complexity that some readers may find at least somewhat daunting despite the standalone nature of each tale. I've therefore decided that my tenth book will be a compendium that I'll be releasing in 2027 to, among other things, thoroughly document the ins and outs of the universe as a whole and the relationships between its constituent parts. As you might imagine, that's a fairly significant task, which is why I'm giving myself quite a while to accomplish it, and in truth started that effort in earnest back in 2024.

Finally, I have a few additional "special projects" related to The Timelines in development that I'm not quite ready to talk about just yet, so I'll likely be posting about this subject at least once more this year.

All that to say that The Nod/Wells Timelines are indeed bigger and better than ever in 2025, and poised to be enhanced significantly over the next few years in ways that should be very interesting and compelling for fans of my various works set along them.

Until next time, happy reading, everybody!

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The Next Level

The toughest hurdle any author attempting to earn a living from their work has to clear is the creation of a "fandom," a group of readers who consistently care enough to show up, open their wallets, and engage with said works each time the author publishes something new. That's a feat far easier said than done and after nearly eight years of attempting such a thing, I believe I may finally be on the verge of accomplishing it.

That doesn't mean I'm "rich," or "loaded," or any of the things the average person tends to associate with "success" in the literary world but what it does mean is that I'm closer than I've ever been to being able to "pay the bills" and live a decent, modest, "normal" life as someone who exclusively focuses on writing and publishing works of fiction.

Still, that would make me an extremely rare person, a fact that I'm constantly very aware of, even as I continue to pursue that goal. It's a funny thing, really, because there were so many times over these past eight years where things almost fell apart, where the sales dried up, or attention for and interest in my works appeared to wane, but in all those cases, things bounced back and, eventually, grew stronger and more consistent. The end result is, when looking at the "big picture" in terms of year-over-year growth, there's been a noteworthy increase in all the metrics that matter, indicating that I have indeed attracted and retained a significant number of "fans."

That said, with the release of my next book looming, I find myself once again wondering if this will be the tipping point, where I make the jump from just eking by to being able to move forward with a new level of confidence and, for the first time since this all started, certainty.

I'd very much like that to be the case as the next two writing projects I have in mind are going to require a considerable amount of time and focus to pull off properly, which would certainly be easier to do if "8" does as well as I hope it might.

So, if you are a "fan" of my efforts as an author, please don't hesitate to throw your support behind this upcoming release, or any of my existing works, as ultimately, you all truly are the only ones who can help me reach the next level.

Thanks, everybody!

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