What is The Art of War Trilogy? A Note on my Self-Pubbed Work

Hello!

If you are reading this, you have most likely read or heard of The Justice of Kings, my debut fantasy novel from Orbit books. Which is great! You might have even seen my Goodreads page or my Amazon author profile and noticed a bunch of random sci-fi novels on there too.

What are those books, you wonder? Are they the product of some erroneous concatenation of two profiles, me and that of another sci-fi author called Richard Swan?

No!

The Art of War trilogy was indeed written by me, and self-published by me between 2015 and 2016. Knowing that those who enjoyed The Justice of Kings might be interested to see what else I had produced, I thought I would write this post to explain precisely what the Art of War trilogy is and where it came from.

I have said a number of times before in interviews that I have been writing since my early teens, and for a very long time it was normal for me to turn out a book a year. I did this until my final year of university, and then I took a break from writing. I had written so much in the previous ten years (especially in the previous three; like, a shit-ton of Black Library fanfic on the [now long gone] official forums) that I was feeling a little bit burned out. I was also entering the heady world of corporate London, which monopolised my time and brainpower and left little room for the fairly cerebral hobby of novel writing. As a result, I had a writing hiatus of perhaps two or three years.

In about 2013, the itch to write was back, and I picked up an abortive attempt at a manuscript I had started a few years before, re-read it, brought myself up to speed, and continued to chip away at it until it was complete. This manuscript would eventually become “Reclamation”—replete with loads of epigraphs from Sun Tzu’s the Art of War.

At around the same time I had just found out about Kindle Direct Publishing, a way to self-publish that wasn’t a vanity press. I don’t think KDP was particularly old at the time — in fact a quick Google search tells me it was started in 2007. I could see that some authors had really got in at the ground floor and were flourishing, in a time when the algorithm didn’t seem to distinguish books by published and self-published (in other words, self-published titles appeared next to traditionally published titles, rather than being algorithmically ringfenced).

Buoyed by this, I wrote the rest of Reclamation. It was in many ways the book I had always wanted to write; a proper space opera in the vein of Tiberian Sun / Mass Effect / StarCraft / Halo / Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (my biggest sci-fi influences outside of sci-fi literature), with English-speaking humanoid aliens, political manoeuvrings, diplomacy, espionage, and proper high-tech ultra-ballistic action sequences.

(Pic related; it was this cover that provided the initial spark of inspiration for the series)

After Reclamation came The Ascendancy War, and then to cap off the trilogy, Empire of the Fallen. I also wrote a couple of spin-off military science-fiction novellas (the VIPER series), and a prequel to Reclamation, Hadan’s Reach. Collectively, I refer to this body of work as my “UN-iverse”, since the human empire is simply called the UN. Together they form a military space-opera full of techno-ultraviolence and dripping with GWOT paranoia.

(The John Harris artwork I initially licensed for the first edition of Reclamation)

I released Reclamation in around 2015 to very little fanfare. I was a million miles away from the top indie self-publishers of today, around whom has grown an entire cottage industry of editors and cover artists, and who turn out work of remarkable quality. I never had the time or patience to put in the huge marketing efforts that self-published titles require to flourish—though I’m pleased to say that the books did do pretty well, notwithstanding. Eventually, though, per the laws of entropy, it all dried up into nothing.

You can only imagine my delight to see people unearthing the trilogy again thanks to the visibility that The Justice of Kings has brought me. I am extremely fond of those self-published titles. As some point I may find the energy and effort to do paperback copies, but for now they exist as e-books only.

So there you have it. That is the Art of War trilogy! If you do decide to pick them up, do leave a review or reach out to me to let me know what you thought!

Cheers

Rich