A successful Kickstarter project, "The Undead Sorceress" is a multicultural fantasy novel which reached 135% of its campaign goal back in November 2013. During a promotional campaign via the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing program, The Undead Sorceress hit number one on May 24, 2014 in the categories of Asian Fantasy and Asian Fiction on the Amazon Kindle site.
The Undead Sorceress is Volume 1 of the International House of Vampires, a fantasy series featuring characters that are vampires, sorceresses, warlocks and robots with different ethnicities and gender. The tagline of the book series indicates its heavy Eastern philosophy influence: "East Meets West, vampires suck chi, magic follows the Tao."
"Within the Asian community, there is an idea of filial sacrifice in which younger generations are expected to fulfill the needs and wants of the older generation. This is especially true of parents whom gave up everything to immigrate to another country for their children," author JF Garrard states. "When my grandmother had a stroke, I asked the gods to take the years of my life in exchange for her health. After recovering from this incident, my grandmother told me I was stupid to pray for such things. This traumatic incident inspired me to write a story in which a grandmother does want to live forever and asks her descendants for the ultimate sacrifice."
She wrote The Undead Sorceress to fill a niche in the publishing industry due to a lack of diversity in the fantasy genre in regards to race and genders. The book cover features an Asian character, which is only seen in 1.4% of covers in published books today (results from fellow author Kate Hart's cover survey).
JF explains the purpose of her stories, "The world is a global place, yet, in many fantasy books, the basis of much mythology is still European and other stories from different cultures are not present. I am also interested in stories featuring first generation children of immigrants who view themselves as equals in the society in which they grew up in. This means not treating ethnic characters as exotic creatures as they would speak a common language and work with each other in harmony. Perhaps it is a utopia I dream of, but I believe over time as people immigrate to countries not of their ancestors, there will be acceptance among all."
"The Undead Sorceress" is distributed through Amazon Kindle and Amazon.com at the moment with future distribution partners on the horizon.
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