No filler this week. Two things worth your time.
A Song of Legends Lost by M.H. Ayinde (Orbit UK, 2025)
This debut has been circulating quietly among readers of serious epic fantasy since it published last spring, and it has begun accumulating the recognition it earned. A Compton Crook Award finalist for 2026, longlisted for both the BSFA Award and the Aldiss Award for worldbuilding, it follows Temi, a commoner who accidentally invokes an ancestral spirit in a world where that power is supposed to belong exclusively to the nobility. What follows is less a story about magic and more a story about what happens when power appears somewhere it was never meant to go.
The worldbuilding is layered without being tedious. There is no romantic subplot, which sounds like a small distinction but changes the entire texture of the novel. The conflict is rooted in class, inheritance, and the stories that people in power tell themselves about why the system is just. Readers who want epic fantasy that earns its scope will find it here.
Available from Simon and Schuster and independent booksellers.
The Written Word Media 2025 Indie Author Survey
Every year Written Word Media surveys working indie authors about income, catalog size, email lists, and what is actually moving numbers. The 2025 results, drawn from 1,346 responses, are worth reading carefully and without a marketing filter applied to them.
The headline figure: 44 percent of respondents earn $100 or less per month from their writing. That is not an anomaly or a failure rate. That is the landscape. The authors earning $10,000 or more monthly account for roughly 8 percent of respondents, and nearly all of them have catalogs of 25 or more books and functional email lists.
Two data points from this survey that deserve more attention than they get: authors without an email list earn a median of about $15 per month. Authors with one earn around $300. And catalog size is a stronger predictor of income than almost any other variable, which raises a structural question about an industry that frequently treats debut authors as fully formed products.
The survey is free to read at writtenwordmedia.com, and it is one of the more honest documents available about what independent publishing actually looks like in practice.
Map's Edge Media operates inside this same landscape, which is part of why the numbers matter to us.