The day you’ve been waiting for is here. I just launched the kickstarter for the last three books in the Riders of the Apocalypse Series! Pick your tier new and reserve your books!

If you already have book 1, please read the rest of this newsletter before running over to back so I can explain how you can select what you want.

Sorry for the short notice. Last week, I was still jumping through hoops on the platform, and I didn’t know if I’d clear all the obstacles in time to launch today. So that was why I wouldn’t let Ran promise we’d launch today in our last newsletter.

Yes, he’s still mad at me for that. But I did jump through all the hoops successfully in time!

Who am I? Hi! I’m Melinda Kucsera, the author of the books Ran stars in and I also type the newsletter for Ran every week.

Who is Ran? He’s Sarn son from the Curse Breaker Series, and he’s getting lots of page time right now since I am writing book 13 in the Curse Breaker Series (Curse Breaker Unleashed).

Don’t believe him if he says he’s not getting enough page time. He’s getting plenty since his origins have become important to the plot in ways I did think would be in this book. But the characters never do what I think they will do, so I’m not surprised. But I have digressed. Back to the Kickstarter! Back it now!

What were those obstacles I had to clear for launch?

Stripe. They approved the campaign months ago, but they unapproved it when their process changed. They now require ID verification. They didn’t before, so I had to resubmit the campaign to them. But then there was an issue, and I had to submit a support ticket to Kickstarter, so they could clear everything, and I could start over with verification.

That triggered the ID verification piece that Stripe needed. But I didn’t know I needed that. I couldn’t see that on the verification page before. There was no option to upload a picture of my ID. But that was all fixed by end of day on Friday, so I could launch today!

The Kickstarter

The Kickstarter launched today and will end on November 12, 2026 hopefully at 11:59 PM. I set it to that, but I did that last time too and the end time changed at launch. So I’ll confirm that in the next newsletter since I sent this as soon as I saw the campaign was live.

I hope you’ve been waiting for this. I started working on Curse Breaker Jousts a few days before Christmas last year at the same time I lost my Amazon Publisher (KDP) account.

Still no word on that issue. I don’t think I’ll ever get my account back or access to publish ebooks on Amazon since I have no industry contacts and no one to go to bat for me. But I hope to be surprised.

So what’s on offer?

All 4 books in the Riders of the Apocalypse Series. The series is complete at 4 books.

What formats are offered?

There are tiers ebooks, paperbacks, and special edition hardcover books.

Every tier includes Curse Breaker Universe: Reading Guide & World Manual. It’s 100 pages right now with the reading order, 2 timelines, all 6 maps from the special editions, character pages, 4 family trees, written interviews about Curse Breaker Jousts and the Riders of the Apocalypse series, articles about the magic system, character art and a reading log. It will be delivered as a fully-formatted, print ready PDF.

If you already have Chaos Rises (Book 1)

I set up tiers for you, but I asked some friends to look at the campaign, and they were confused. So I took them out and replaced them with a tier for the just Curse Breaker Universe: Reading Guide & World Manual.

Pick this tier:

Or you can pick the All eBooks Tier if you want.

Then in the add-ons, you can add on just the ebooks for books 2-4 and just the paperbacks for books 2-4 and/or just the SE hardcover books for books 2-4.

You may have to scroll to find them. I’m sorry it’s a multistep process. Everyone who previewed the campaign was totally confused when I had tiers with and without book 1 and the shipping is more reasonable on book bundles.

So I bundled everything I can possibly bundle in the add-ons.

The add-on bundles are the same books that will be delivered in the tiers. This just lets you add just the last 3 books if you already have the first one and makes sure you get Curse Breaker Universe: Reading Guide & World Manual because I want everyone to have that.

If there’s a better way to do this, please let me know! This was the best I could come up with. It gives you flexibility, but it requires some scrolling.

If you don’t have book 1

Then you’re good! Pick the other tiers and get all 4 books! You can also add on any of my other books in ebook or paperback. Ran made me list them all. I listed them as bundles since the shipping is better that way except where where that didn’t make sense.

I found a good printer in the US with reasonable printing and shipping costs, so all paperbacks in the add-ons are coming from there. I didn’t offer them in past campaigns because the shipping from the UK is a lot.

But now I don’t have to worry about that. All paperbacks will ship through UPS Ground, so you’ll have the books pretty quickly after they print. Special Editions will ship through the US Postal Service once they cross the ocean.

I refuse to use Fedex for that since Fedex is illegally charging fees even though books are listed as exempt from the tariffs. So the special editions will take a little longer to reach you but you won’t get charged any extra fees and neither will I. That’s a win in my book!

As always, I will provide tracking links as soon as the printer provides them.

That’s it for today. Two guests cancelled on me so I didn’t record any episodes this week. One had a change of employment and couldn’t make their timeslot and another is traveling and somehow they booked a day and time when they will be actively doing that traveling.

But I have more folks signed up for next week, so there are more to come! I’m glad they cancelled since I had three episodes go live last week. This gives you more time to listen to those three episodes. They were a lot of fun, and I was worried they might get lost in the shuffle.

You can actually back now! It’s live!

That’s it for this week! See you in the next newsletter. Ran will return soon. Maybe next week. We’ll see how the newsletter goes.

Have a great week!

—Melinda Kucsera, your scribe, writing as herself