Greetings and salutations. It is I, Greyson.

Wow, so many things I want to say. The last couple of months have been chaotic. My mental health has been wreaking havoc on my capacity to do almost anything. You may have noticed that I did not contribute a blog post for October first, much less this past Friday. I got down dark enough that I began talking about walking away from writing. As Wil Wheaton loves to quote, “Depression Lies”. But there. The bad stuff is out of the way.

Five more days to get through! Five more days that our debut novel is NOT available wherever books are sold. Clevenger keeps updating the reporting page on Ingram Spark, checking out reported presales.

As you can see, that is 94 units reporting sold: 72 hardbacks, and 22 paperback copies. Reported by whom? We have no idea. Those could be everything, they could be only Books A Million’s order, and we are still waiting to see Amazon’s preorder. This is also not taking into account preorders of the ebook. Word of mouth tells us that at least two of those are ordered.

This past weekend I was very fortunate to be able to travel up to Chicago and attend Lodgecon with Clevenger. Lodgecon is a smaller con about 45 minutes from Chicago. It is self-described as “Two days of Fantasy, Gaming, Sci-Fi, & more”, and they lived up to it. Clevenger has been talking up their friendly and sincere vibe for a few months now, and it lived up to the hype. The hosts were excellent, as were the guests and fellow vendors.

Prior to this, I’ve been to exactly one convention of any flavor, which was Gencon2014. So I had really no idea what to expect, especially as a vendor. Clevenger knocked it out of the park, picking this event. The timing was excellent, being a week before the official street date. And the size was perfect for whetting our appetites and answering our questions.

We learned a lot, answering many questions we didn’t even know we had. What worked best for setting up a display table. What supplies we needed, both for the book, and for ourselves. For example, even with this being a small event, we don’t need anything to occupy our time. When we didn’t have customers to chat with, we had amazing booth neighbors. However, a battery powered fan would have been invaluable. For being such a large space, there was surprisingly little air flow.

There were three experiences that were entirely unexpected. Of course I have been practicing my new signature, prepping for needing to sign books. It comes with needing a pen name. But it was another thing entirely trying to get used to answering to the new name. There are now people out there who know me only as Greyson! It’s taking some getting used to.

Second, it was quite surreal watching random people walk by casually carrying a copy of War of Night under their arms, having bought it earlier in their visit. Physically seeing our book out there. No longer under our control. Our babies, in someone else’s hands. I wasn’t expecting how strange that would hit me.

The final surprise was how much this past weekend woke a fire under me for Welcome to Avernus. There is an ad for the book in the back of War of Night, and it got brought up more than once over the two days. Several attendees asked about the maturity level of WoN, which turned into an opportunity to bring up a YA like Avernus. A conversation with Sanzaki Kojika, an artist near us, got us talking about younger Main Characters, which steered the conversation to Jason, the MC from Welcome to Avernus. I got struck with a real desire to get back to that story.

Overall we received amazing feedback and a wonderful vibe for our writing. Sure, we had some people who claimed not to read fantasy, or not to read at all. But of the people that stuck around long enough to hear the pitch, and particularly to read the synopsis on the back cover, nobody turned up their nose and said it wasn’t for them. Instead, we had people hooked over what they heard. As for Welcome to Avernus, Pretty much everyone who heard the book’s pitch perked right up. If we had finished copies, we definitely would have sold some.

An industry adage we keep hearing is the average title, when you take out all the truly famous bestsellers, only sells a hundred copies. And that the average of all titles, if you wrote a good book, will average selling a thousand copies in its lifetime. Well, we sold eight copies in person, and another 94 confirmed presales. So we have already broken that one hundred “average” number.

We don’t believe it, anyway. We have already applied for a table at C2E2 in Chicago for April. Talking to authors there the last two years, Clevenger was told over and over that we should expect to sell 100-150 copies there, easy, just in that weekend. And there are other conventions out there as well. I will not be surprised if we hit a thousand copies sold just in 2025, not merely “lifetime”. Then we will get to add book two, Avernus, and n 2026 even more titles.

We will not go quietly into the night. We will not accept others telling us what can and cannot sell. We know what we have to offer. We know what we have written.

One final note. I have to give a huge shoutout for making this weekend happen. My roommate loaned me his car, so I could physically make the trip. My good friend, Johnny Kape donated a good chunk of money all the way from Taiwan, to help fund the trip. And of course, Clevenger’s wonderful wife and boys tolerated hosting me, so that I could stay with them for the con! Thanks, all of you!

Don’t forget to love one another.

Greyson Black