Ya’ know, I probably should have mentioned this a lot earlier, but hey I’m a novelist not a salesman, and it’s much easier to see how big a print book is than an electronic one. Anyway, it occured to me that I haven’t said how long the first book is. I mean, most ebooks being put out nowadays that are being proclaimed as “novels” usually top out at around 60,000 to 80,000 words, with many being much less. But this makes them novellas at best, and some of the shorter ones are little more than short stories. Novels start in at around 100,000 words. That doesn’t make the shorter efforts any less good, I’m just trying to set the stage here. That’s why most ebooks cost a buck; they’re usually about 30,000 to 60,000 words.

Okay, so where does Maldene stand on all this? Well, the first novel– that is, Volumes 1 and 2 combined– is 330,000 words. To put that into perspective, that’s equal to the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy Combined! Both in length and scope of plot. And this is just the first novel… there are 13 novels in all, and most of them are even bigger.

Then there’s the appendices. Like any good epic, the end of each novel (in the case of this first one, that’s at the end of Volume Two) has some extras. An alphabet, dictionary of local words, and some added notes about the world of Maldene that vary for each novel. Things like the Maldene calendar, the local visual spectrum (Maldene has some colors not seen by the eyes of Earth), and more (there’s even a Maldene Tarot that comes up in one of the later books).

So you see, when buy a copy of Maldene, you’re really getting a lot of story (And that’s not counting the re-readability factor of my stories).