As we hurtle towards the Tenth Armadaversary, it's slightly daunting but also extremely satisfying to acknowledge that in a few months' time, this is what the line-up will look like... 

In the run up to the release of the long-awaited finale Whom Gods Shall Fear, the season of discounts continues with not one but two Kindle Countdown offers!

If you have not yet entered the Armadaverse, this offer is one you will not want to miss. These two books are best read back-to-back for maximum effect. And if you started reading, but never progressed beyond the first book... let's just say you might want to avail yourself of book two. Things heat up.

On Wednesday 15th February and Thursday 16th, the early bird discounts will be:

• Steal from the Devil for £0.99 / $0.99,
• List of the Dead for £0.99 / $0.99.

On Friday 17th February and Saturday 18th, the weary weekender discounts will be:

• Steal from the Devil for £1.99 / $1.99,
• List of the Dead for £1.99 / $1.99.

On Sunday 19th February and Monday 20th, the lazy latecomer discounts will be:

• Steal from the Devil for £2.99 / $2.99,
• List of the Dead for £2.99 / $2.99.

These offers are running from 0800 hrs GMT (Amazon UK) and PST (Amazon USA). Other regions' start times may vary. There is no paperback or hardcover offer, these discounts apply to Kindle editions only.

You read that correctly: hardcovers!

With the release of A Storm to the Savage comes a smorgasbord of new hardcover editions. Every single volume in the Armadaverse can now be bought in a weighty, hardback edition with a very nice matte cover! Typesetting is consistent between all the volumes, and they all contain the latest versions of the texts.

​Go to the Books section to get direct links to your most local Amazon region, for your favourite volumes!

The following books are now updated, and you can download the updates for your Kindle immediately:

• Steal from the Devil — Fourth Edition (rev. 4.0),
• List of the Dead — minor updates (rev. 1.2),
• The Ravening Deep — minor updates (rev. 1.2),
• From Shattered Stars — minor updates (rev. 1.2).

You can check which version of each book you have by looking for the revision number on the copyright page. If there is no revision number, your edition pre-dates the adoption of that system.

If you don't have automatic updates turned on, you can push the updated files to your Kindle device/s or app/s using the "Manage My Content and Devices" page in the Kindle area of Amazon's web site. That page is also available in the "Digital content and devices" list, found on the "My Account" page.

Please leave a comment if you have any problems obtaining updates — KDP had some communication issues this week, and I'm eager to ensure everything has gone smoothly.

The Fourth Edition of Steal from the Devil adds some new material, and changes the order of scenes up to the climax in order to make the flow of text far better. The climax is more robust, and key characters have enhanced scenes or background added throughout the book. Grammar and punctuation have received a very comprehensive scrubbing.

In all other books, including SFTD, other tweaks have been made. Fonts have been replaced since their accidental removal, the NCX files which build the "Go To..." menu have been repaired in the omnibus editions, typography has been brought in line with the printed editions, and so on.

Armadaverse Kindle books have always included "publisher fonts", so that you can read the book exactly as it was intended to be presented. These cause the eBooks to mimic the printed editions, both in style and typography. You can turn them on in the display options for your Kindle device or app.

A previous update accidentally omitted the font data, but it has been replaced across the updates above.

Another advantage of including fonts is that it allows stylistic differentiation in the text, such as for the incident in which Bruiser discovers anti-human graffiti in his home town:

As I mentioned previously, refreshed versions of the current novels (volumes 1–4 at time of writing) will be released soon. The plan is to release them all together for both the Kindle and paperback editions.

Books 2–4 will only be getting minor tweaks and corrections — nothing major needs changing. The files for the paperbacks, Kindle individual titles, and Kindle boxed set versions will be getting a hard reset to the "master version" of their respective texts (I've noticed slight discrepancies between the editions, thanks to a sloppy workflow.) The rear covers of the paperbacks will also be tweaked to make them look a bit more professional.

However Steal from the Devil has had a massive overhaul. I consider this the fourth edition, and some of you won't like this but there's... like... more material. I know, I know, I thought I was making tweaks and I guess I just got carried away. What I can say is that the longest new passages have all been character-based additions with the exception of the climax which gets some more action.

I will make sure Amazon KDP pushes the refreshed SFTD as a free update to Kindle customers. For paperback customers, you'll have three options:

1. Buy a new paperback (don't worry, it'll be the same size and cover style as the current one).
2. Ignore the changes — no plot has been altered so nothing that follows on from SFTD is affected.

So what has changed in Steal from the Devil? Here are some examples:

• The entire first chapter (intro to Hammer, Santani, and Caden) has now been restructured to reduce the choppiness of it all.
• Chapters 18 and 19 were swapped for pacing reasons.
• The super-long chapter 20 was split into two, creating Chp. 20 "Hammerfall" and Chp. 21 "Light the Dark".
• The order of scenes in the last three chapters has been rearranged to improve the flow of action and make the pacing far better.
• The climactic confrontation is no longer just a case of finding Morlum, having a quick chat, then shooting something real quick. A lot more is said, the tension is raised considerably, and a lot more actually happens.
• Maber Castigon is fleshed out slightly more, and we get to read a little about the way he sees the world.
• Euryce Eilentes is also fleshed out more, and we learn things which preface her arc in the later books.
• Bruiser has been given a bit more of a role, seeing as we all love him so. 
• Some very sneaky foreshadowing has been made more obvious.
• Mobile Air and Ground Assault has been changed to Conventional Air and Ground Assault (CAGA), as it will now be known across all books and supporting materials.
• "Skinprint" is now written as "skin-print", to aid people whose first language is not English. I mean they deserve some chance, right?
• Significant numbers of tweaks and edits to sentence structure, grammar, etc.
• Improved typography and punctuation has been modernised.

Let's get this out of the way immediately — we're not talking about 2020. 

2021 has arrived, and as you've probably noticed already things are back in full swing in the Armadaverse.

This post is a round-up of the plans for this year. Don't forget that there is a mailing list for the Armadaverse. It's recommended that you subscribe, because there's a good chance that the Armada Wars brand will abandon mainstream social media in the near future.

I am now resuming my original plan of interleaving the novel releases with the novella releases, albeit with the following changes:

• Significant elements from The Granite Whistle have been merged into A Storm to the Savage, so it is unlikely that I will write TGW in the form I originally planned. Watch this space.
• Forge Ruinous will now very likely end up being a full novel, rather than a novella, and it will be released after Whom Gods Shall Fear.

My aim this year is to knuckle down and keep up a steady pace. I Dream of Damastion is already available for Kindle, with the paperback proof on its way to me even as I type. I am planning to have A Storm to the Savage ready for a release soon, then all efforts will be focused into Whom Gods Shall Fear.

You may have noticed the artwork for IDOD changed in the past week, and the same iconography and cover design has been used for ASTTS. It will also be used for Forge Ruinous, although I have not yet chosen an image for the central glyph of FR's cover. Feel free to suggest your thoughts in the comments below.

I've said before that there are aspects of Steal from the Devil which I now find embarrassing and or problematic. As a debut novel, although many readers do enjoy it, one can only really say that it was released way before it was ready.

I've previously floated the idea of making some quite large changes. On those occasions I have received mostly negative responses, with people saying they would rather it was left just the way it is.

I've decided to split the difference. As well as being generally tidied up (see below), SFTD is going to get some enhancements, clarifications, and — of course — a thorough stylistic edit. I want to be very clear that nothing will change substantially as far as the plot goes. What will happen is that characters and situations will get expanded text, so that it is clearer what is happening, and the consequences further down the line are more understandable. I will try to bring the style of the book into line with the sequels, without losing any of its weird atmosphere.

I also aim to trim just a little fat — this means the teasers and references that ultimately went unused as the story found its own way through the sequels.

If you have strong feelings about this, then please do say so in the comments.

Over the years, with me having to update the same stories in various alternate files, discontinuities have crept into the published materials. These include vanishing custom fonts, different typographic conventions, and in some cases even material differences in the actual words of the books.

There is also the cap-wearing elephant in the room. A poll was conducted across Twitter and Facebook, and the overwhelming majority favoured a retrospective change to the lore where a certain acronym is concerned. The conventional air and ground assault forces will have to be called something different. Perhaps I just solved it there, and CAGA will be the replacement. The point is that I've had it up to the eyeballs with people assuming that the old acronym is a nod to Trump, despite it obviously having nothing to do with him, so I'm just going to change it.

"AGRO" won the polls (standing for 'Air and Gound Recon Operations'), but I think I will save that label for a team of specialists in a future story :o)

For all of those reasons, every single Kindle edition and paperback is going to be overhauled over the next couple of months. ​With the exception of I Dream of Damastion, which from today has the latest typography, corrections, and defined lore, all the updated versions will be released together. I will do my best to convince Amazon to push the Kindle updates out to existing customers, but only the changes to Steal from the Devil are likely to be considered significant enough to justify doing that.

Over the past couple of weeks, the paperback editions have been quietly migrated from Createspace to Kindle Direct Publishing. This means faster and simpler delivery (now fulfilled by normal Amazon means), and full Prime availability. The opportunity was also taken to make some tiny tweaks to the content and covers.

As you might have heard, every Armada Wars novel available on the Kindle platform now has X-Ray content available. But what is it? And where?

Put simply, X-Ray content gives you a compact, dedicated database right alongside a Kindle book. It contains profiles for characters, significant terms, and definitions. It can add depth to the world of the book, provide you with a means of quickly refreshing your memory, and give you quick and simple explanations.

The X-Ray system can show you all the terms or characters on a page, or for the whole book, ordered alphabetically or by relevance. It also generates "notability" scores for some content, and it picks out passages which might be of particular interest.

All in all this is a feature that succeeds in combining functionality with entertainment, and when you're exploring an expansive and subtly detailed world like the Armadaverse it's an invaluable companion. It's available from the tool strip at the top of any Kindle's reading page, or in the book menu on mobile devices.

All the X-Ray content in the Armada Wars novels comes straight from the source, and it is designed to be consistent and spoiler-free. Due to the character limit for X-Ray entries there are of course much more extensive articles on this site: the web site's entry on the Rodori, for example, is vastly more interesting than the abbreviated version found in X-Ray. But the idea is to give you a quick summary of what a Rodori is, right while you're reading.

How to get the latest X-Ray content:

Simply delete the Armada Wars novels from your Kindle reading device/s, and then download them again. That's literally all there is to it!

• You of course do not get charged again, because the book is in your account.
• Even if you've downloaded X-Ray content this week, the latest versions (released 20th Jan 2018) have been improved and refined. It's recommended that you update all books.
• Whom Gods Shall Fear will launch with X-Ray content.

As mentioned yesterday on the Facebook page, there has been a universal update to all of the Armada Wars Kindle eBooks. The purpose of the update was to:

• Make the eBooks totally consistent with each other,
• Make them appear much closer to the paperback editions
• Fix a couple of minor errors.

 
The new editions are a huge improvement over previous versions, and the eBooks have never looked so good. Read on to learn more!