Saturday, November 16, 2013

Dark Legacy: The End of the Kai featured on Wattpad


Over the summer I received an email from Gavin Wilson, a prolific writer and Wattpad Ambassador from the UK, who had come across Dark Legacy: The End of the Kai on Kobo. He encouraged me to join the Wattpad community of more than 15 million monthly users as another online outlet to expose and share my written work. I soon created my account and uploaded The End of the Kai and the first three chapters of Book I - Trinity of Dark Legacy. I was happy to discover within a few days of joining the site that authors I greatly admired such as Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tail), Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist), and Brandon Sanderson (The Wheel of Time books 12, 13, and 14), along with indy authors Daniel Arenson (Blood of Requiem: Song of Dragons) and Amanda Hocking (Trylle Trilogy) were members. A few weeks later Gavin connected me to Pam and Samantha Pennington at Wattpad headquarters in Toronto, Canada, to begin the process of having Dark Legacy: The End of the Kai featured on their site during the month of September. It was a very pleasant, encouraging, and professional experience working with them.

Dark Legacy: The End of the Kai was launched as a featured work on Wattpad on September 3, 2013, and within three weeks it hit 70,000 reads and 599 votes.











Wattpad was also kind enough to promote The End of the Kai via their Twitter (https://twitter.com/wattpad) and Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/wattpad/) sites along with a cover-off query on their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/wattpad) where users voted for The End of the Kai cover they liked the best, which you can see in the photo to the left. The majority of people voted for the red cover version and as a result I may release a free "red cover" ebook collectors edition of Dark Legacy: The End of the Kai in 2014.

As of December 2013 Dark Legacy: The End of the Kai has hit 180,000+ reads on Wattpad. I am very grateful to Gavin and the Wattpad team for the incredible opportunity to have been featured on their site and for their continued support. I strongly encourage any and all avid readers and writers to join the Wattpad community where one can connect, read, write, provide and receive constructive feedback from members from all parts of the globe.

Before signing off I will mention that I have over 200 pages written for Dark Legacy: Book II - Travels. I am very excited about the direction and pace of this book. The sequel will begin right where Book I - Trinity left off. The world beyond Lemuria's western coastal borders will come into greater focus as the political, economic, and military complexities of the Atlantean Empire are revealed. The story and direction of this book has become very clear to me over the past year and provided the time I know I can finish the first complete draft of this book sometime next year.

The very talented Tiberius Viris and I have also moved forward with the details in using his painting Hall of the Dragon Mist as the cover for my 2004 travel memoir, Travels in the Land of Hunger. A final cover design should be completed and revealed in early 2014. All that remains is for a small group of outside eyes and an editor to read through and edit down the completed draft of the memoir before it is to be released for publication.

With Warmth and Gratitude,

Friday, April 12, 2013

Update: Travels In The Land of Hunger, Dark Legacy: Book II - Travels, & Reviews of Trinity

Dark Legacy: Book I - Trinity
ebook, paperback, and hardback cover
I apologize for the long delay in updating The Legacy Cycle blog site. It is a beautiful spring day here in Barcelona and I finally have a moment to sit down and write a new post as beams of sunlight shine through my apartment's window.

Over the past few months I have received emails and messages from readers and fans of Dark Legacy: Book I - Trinity wanting to know when Book II - Travels of the series will be released. I remember when I was in junior high school going every week to the Waldenbooks store that was next to the music shop where I took drum lessons hoping that the third book in Stephen King's The Dark Tower series had been released. This was before the Internet so there was no immediately accessible means for readers like me to know when King planned to release the next book. It was in the years after graduating college that Stephen King had finished the series, and so I grew up reading each book as they came out throughout my adolescent to young adult life.

In the long spaces of time between each Dark Tower book release I developed within my own mind a story that would ultimately become the Dark Legacy book series. Although Dark Legacy has almost nothing in common with The Dark Tower, Stephen King's series was what inspired me to create my own world of fantasy and my own series of books.

While I waited for King to release the next book I grew agitated that instead of working on the series he had written other books within the genre of horror. I kept thinking, Why doesn't he finish the series? Little did I know of what the writing process was like for an author and how at times it is good for an author to take a break from writing their series by working on other stories and books.

This painting entitled,
Hall of the Dragon Mist, by
Tiberius Viris may serve as the cover
art for my travel memoir,
Travels In the Land of Hunger
In the time since Dark Legacy: Book I - Trinity was released I have written the first one hundred plus pages of Book II - Travels, but I have also worked on a steampunk short story entitled, The Astor House of Old Shanghai, and I have been editing a travel memoir of my 2004 journey through East and Southeast Asia. I have also written an incomplete science fiction short story entitled, Rise of the White Lion. These side projects have been healthy for my writing and leave room for books not within the Dark Legacy series, but within a much wider Legacy Cycle series.

I now plan on working and completing each project before moving on to the next. I have been editing the travel memoir over the past year and will finally finish the first complete edits next week. I will then leave it and focus on Book II - Travels. Ideally, I would like to work on Book II a little bit each day and now that I have my summer holiday around the corner I will be able to accomplish quite a bit. It is my hope that I will have the first complete draft of Book II finished by early 2014, while also releasing my travel memoir entitled, Travels In the Land of Hunger, by early 2014. Once Book II has been released, hopefully by late 2014 to early 2015, I will take a break from Dark Legacy to develop the steampunk short story, The Astor House of Old Shanghai, into a full length novel. Then I'll be back to Dark Legacy to write Book III - Tribe.

I would like to share with you some of the reviews of Dark Legacy: Book I - Trinity from the past couple of months.

"This was one of the most unique books I've read in a long time; in style if not always in content. As I read it, I definitely came to the conclusion I was reading some European author, as the style was so different from anything I had read in a long time (he's not :))." - Mitchell Tyler
Read the full review on Goodreads @ http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/375996637

"Overall, this was a great read ... Domenico has an excellent tale to tell and tells it very well. I am anxiously awaiting further installments in the Dark Legacy series." - George Jaros
Read the full review on Goodreads @ http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/409215305

"I originally started out with the intro book: Dark Legacy: The End of the Kai, which is basically the first 1/4 of this book. After reading through the incredible blend of fantasy and sci-fi, mixed with Eastern philosophies, I had to buy the full book and finish it." - Mike Pearce
Read the full review on Goodreads @ http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/484677199

"In short it was an excellent book; a wonderful blend of science fiction and fantasy. I haven't checked to see if the other books in the series are released yet, but its something worth checking out if you are done with cliché books like Divergent series, the Hunger Games series, etc." - Justin Yan
Read the full review on Goodreads @ http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/285417642

"Not only does this book offer a beginning to what could become a new epic story worthy of endless numbers of fans, it exposes humanity at multiple levels. As readers, we can identify with most of the characters at one point or another, thus creating an opportunity to explore our own dark, rejected, and neglected facets coming to terms with ourselves as a whole unit. On a less personal note; it is a story that surprises the reader at every turn. Entertaining, different, NEW. Totally worth it! Can't wait for the story to continue. Hopefully we'll see a sequel soon." - Manu M.
Read the review on Amazon.com.br @
http://www.amazon.com.br/review/R2W9EUJ0B71RY9/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B006VJQCSS&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=5308307011&store=digital-text

I would like to thank each reader and fan for all of their support. It is greatly appreciated!
Now I best be getting back to writing.

With Magic,
Domenico

If you would like to buy Dark Legacy: Book I - Trinity please visit: