Update on the Sultana series

The official release date of Sultana: The Bride Price is Monday, June 30. At long last and after a little consternation and probably too much nit-picking, I'm finally able to offer the title as an ebook. The paperback will be ready one month later.

One of the changes made in Sultana: The Bride Price was the exclusion of the historical events from my Author's Note. For readers who are really interested, those details will be posted on The Sultana Series page of my website by June 30. The link will be embedded in all digital versions. While many readers have told me how much they appreciated the details of the past, the historical notes for The Bride Price added nearly twenty pages to the manuscript. In addition to the histories of the main characters, I've included information on the prominent ministers who served Muhammad V, as well as some of his descendants. Unfortunately for the Moors, the reign of Muhammad V was the last glorious heyday of the Nasrid dynasty before family squabbles began the downward spiral. The Nasrids proved too adept at destroying themselves from within, long before the intentions of the Catholic Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand came to fruition. That doesn't mean I plan to end this series on a somber note, but if there's been one consistent theme of each book, it has been that the bonds between family are very important and when those bonds begin to fray, disaster often follows. 

In other series' news, I'm looking into Arabic, German, and Spanish translations of each novel, and I've finished the outline and character list of Sultana: The Pomegranate Tree, which I'll start writing in 11 days. Wow, 11 days. The next novel makes a huge leap of eight decades from the time of Muhammad V to the tail end of the fractured reign of his grandson, Muhammad IX. Not that interesting stuff didn't happen in that 80 year  span - the problem is that too much happened! More importantly, no truly strong queen of the caliber of Fatima, Butayna or Maryam has come down through history for me to write about her in those times. Four books down, two more to go! Once the series is done in 2015, all six books will be bundled as an ebook only. Lastly, I'm working out a snafu with Amazon whereby Sultana has not been available as a paperback sold directly from their website since September 2013. Resolving this hasn't been fun, but I'm nothing if not persistent.