The First Kingdom is available for purchase now, even though I haven’t begun promoting it aka begging all my friends and followers to buy it.  That’s all coming this July.  Be prepared for my desperation!

On the cover, you will see the title and my name, but you will not see the series name.  Why?  Yes, it would make the cover more crowded and my friend recommended not including it.  But I never planned to have it on there, simply because I didn’t have a series name.  Is that bad?

The title came easily to me, but the series name was never set in stone.  On the page where I jotted down all the first bits of information for the series, I called the series The Five Kingdoms.  It was simple, and always hung around in my mind.  But it was also tentative.  I never loved it, and was always trying to think of something better.  Three years after work began on The First Kingdom, I never did.

But crunch time came as my self-imposed self-publishing deadline approached.  This book was going to need a series name, and I had to think of one.  So, a month or so ago, I jotted down possible names that had been bouncing around my mind.  Here they are:

The Five Kingdoms

Kingdoms & Keys/Keys & Kingdoms

Key of the Kingdoms

Ghumaic Chronicles

Kings of Ghumai

I was giving myself options.  The next step was to look into each of them.  And by that, I mean seeing if they’ve been used before.  I typed each one into Amazon, and found two of them previously existed as series titles.  The Five Kingdoms was used before, as was Key of the Kingdoms.  I could’ve used them if I really wanted to, probably, but that just seemed like a dumb idea.  So I crossed those two off my list.  The others were free for the taking, and out of the three, one stood out to me.  But I wasn’t going to trust myself on this.

So I turned to one of my friends who had read The First Kingdom and asked their advice.  He told me that Keys & Kingdoms sounded too much like a Dungeons & Dragons rip off.  And then basically reinforced my personal selection.  My series was going to be called Kings of Ghumai.  No one in the English language had used it before.

With the series named, I hastily rethought the cover.  Should Kings of Ghumai be squeezed in there?  No, the cover artist argued.  Just put it in the front of the book.  So that’s where it is.  Right under the title  The First Kingdom: Kings of Ghumai, Book One.