King Arthur's daughter rides again! @AuthorKatherine

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According to legend, when King Arthur fell in battle fighting the dark knight Mordred, his body was taken to the mystical Isle of Avalon, where he sleeps under enchantment until Britain needs him again... and considering the current situation here in the UK, this seems the perfect time to raise him from his slumbers! My Pendragon Legacy series for young readers, featuring King Arthur's daughter Rhianna and her friends, 'died' in book terms when it went out of print last year, which means the books have been similarly slumbering ever since. Templar (now part of Bonnier) sadly no longer publishes fiction, so I reverted the rights and am using this period of house arrest to resurrect all four titles digitally in the form of ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks.

I loved Templar's covers with artwork by the talented Scott Altmann, but these are the publisher's covers so cannot be reused - at least not without negotiating the proper permissions. I decided it would be easier to design a fresh series 'look' for the books, which is not a bad thing for reissued titles as it avoids confusion with the original editions. However, since this series is aimed at the younger end of my readership, I wanted to keep some artwork on the covers rather than photographs. I had already created my own picture of Rhianna riding her mist horse and carrying King Arthur's sword Excalibur for inspiration during the writing process, so I just needed matching pictures featuring the Lance, Crown and Grail for the other three books... a welcome activity to take my mind off lockdown! To give the series the same 'look' as my other backlist titles, I enclosed my artwork in a circle, then used canva.com to design all four covers using the same cover template for simplicity. This meant playing around a bit with the paperback formatting to get the pages to fit, since the books are not quite all the same length, but happily they are near enough to work.

The ebook of the first title Sword of Light is now available at the special Lockdown price of just 99p/99c. A new matching paperback edition is also available. Links below.



Books 2, 3 and 4 will follow soon. Here's a sneak preview of the new covers:



Find more details, and all the links as they become available, on my website

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Katherine Roberts won the inaugural Branford Boase Award for her first book Song Quest. She writes fantasy and historical fiction for young (and older) readers. If this lockdown continues much longer, she might even find the time to write a new book.

Comments

Sandra Horn said…
Congratulations on these beautiful books! I wish you all the luck with them - they deserve to be read widely and celebrated!
21 April 2020 at 10:13
Umberto Tosi said…
Wonderful! They look gorgeous. I'm in the middle of redesigning and issuing new editions of my own historical novel. You give me inspiration. Best of luck!
21 April 2020 at 18:25
Katherine Roberts said…
Thank you, Sandra! Thanks, Umberto. It's quite fun doing a cover redesign... have fun with yours!
22 April 2020 at 16:20
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