Greetings readers, Ross here!
It’s a real pleasure to see Eroberung up-and-running at last, providing a unique space to keep track of my endeavours, especially when that space is so marvellously sleek and modern (my thanks to Tim Colwill of NotSoUnwashed for his assistance in this)! But what do I actually hope to achieve here, and how do I intend to do it? Allow me, if you will, to elaborate a little…
Much like Servatesh in Memoirs of Conquest, I have always enjoyed language. For me, as I should imagine for many other prospective authors, words provide the building blocks from which almost anything can be crafted. From the viscerally concise to the most esoterically complex of ephemera, language allows me the capacity to be utterly exacting in my specificity or to be deliciously and deliberately ambiguous with equal measure. Thus I have always enjoyed the act of writing. I was incredibly fortunate, growing up in the 80’s and 90’s to be part of first generation to use the burgeoning Internet for social communication and community building, where Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and Bulletin Boards were de rigeur, and a well-written man with a verbose vocabulary could rapidly establish himself as a pillar of any virtual community. This setting fostered my enjoyment of writing, and combined with an upbringing where reading for pleasure was actively encouraged by a father who owned (and continues to own) some 4000+ Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, formed an environment which naturally instilled in me a desire to write. A three-year sojourn at University, learning to write to an academic standard, where stringent word counts and strict boundaries of topic are an ever-present companion, only served to refine this desire into a drive for self-improvement in the application of language. So it seems only natural, I attempt to distil this into an actual, literary artefact, hence Memoirs of Conquest.
However, writing is one thing, getting published is quite another.
I am under no illusions, whilst the digital age and the growth of the Internet has provided the fledgling author with a variety of routes into getting published, it’s still a challenging aspiration, especially if you’re choosing to write in a genre which is already well-populated (such as Science Fiction), using a trope that is well-known and arguably over-represented (Invasion). So how do I intend to realise my dream? Well, Eroberung itself is the start – Having a place to inform prospective readers, such as yourselves, about the project’s progress, and using social media to draw people to it, would certainly seem a wise choice. Similarly, placing adverts on community sites which service a potentially receptive audience would also seem to be key (so watch out for those!), but one also needs to have measured aspirations. As a first time author, I’m not going to bombard the high walls of the establishment with my literary cannonade and hope to bring them down overnight, but rather seek out more readily accessible lines of engagement that allow me to infiltrate the establishment on my own terms. Many of you will already be familiar with the rather superlative Books Unbound, who are currently establishing themselves as a formidable and much-loved ally of the undiscovered writer, but other routes worth travelling also include Kickstarter and the various e-publishing endeavours such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing offshoot, so expect to see these feature as part of Eroberung’s strategy moving forwards.
At the end of the day, whilst the key aspiration remains to get published, I intend to enjoy my time exploring how I arrive at that lofty goal, and hope that you will too.
