In Other Worlds
Every other week, your host Jess will be sitting down with the authors and audiobooks narrators that bring the litrpg, gamelit, and fantasy genre to life.
In Other Worlds
Crafting Cozy Fantasy with SL Rowland
Step into the magical worlds of SL Rowland as we explore the heartwarming charm of cozy fantasy and the exciting realms of LitRPG. From halfling vineyards to blood mages struggling with chronic pain, Rowland crafts stories that feel like coming home—even when dragons and adventure lurk around the corner.
Our conversation begins with "Halfling's Harvest," the third book in Rowland's Tales of Aedrea series, where we meet Marigold, proprietor of the Dew Drop Vineyard and Inn during the annual Harvest Festival. What makes this and all of Rowland's cozy fantasies special is the found family dynamic—characters that create a place of belonging for one another.
Perhaps most fascinating is how Rowland uses his own experiences as an inspiration for the blood mage protagonist in "Curse of Cocktails," who uses painful magic to protect the realm, at the cost of his own health. This personal connection adds profound authenticity to his fantasy world.
Rowland's approach to world-building is impressively ambitious. Aedrea spans nine realms with multiple races, governments, and a complex pantheon—created so he "could tell an endless amount of stories in dozens of locations." This expansive vision allows him to craft both cozy tales with future plans for grittier, more epic adventures in the same universe.
Before finding his cozy fantasy voice, Rowland established himself in the LitRPG genre with series like "Pangea Online" and "Sentence to Troll." Now, he's preparing to return to those roots with an expanded version of "Path to Villainy: An NPC Kobold's Tale," while also releasing his next cozy fantasy, "There Be Dragons Here," featuring a dwarven grandmother on one final adventure.
Whether you're already an avid cozy fantasy reader or new to the genre, SL Rowland's stories offer something special—worlds where magic feels real, characters feel like friends, and even the darkest challenges can be faced with warmth and humor.
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Jess: Welcome everyone to In Other Worlds, a LitRPG, GameLit, and Fantasy podcast. I'm your host, Jessica, and today we have SL, Rowland. SL, how are you doing? Do you prefer SL or Steven or Steve?
SL Rowland: Yeah, I go by Steven on the everyday, but I'll answer to whatever.
Jess: I don't know, I just kind of like the way SL sounds.
SL Rowland: It's got a nice ring to it.
Jess: Yeah, is that why you chose it? Is that why that's your pen name?
SL Rowland: Yeah, you know, a lot of fantasy authors use their initials. So you know, when I first started out I was like you know, it does have a nice little ring to it. Why not go with that?
Jess: Yeah, well, it does. It sounds good. So, you do a lot of cozy fantasy. Your most current book is Halflings Harvest.
SL Rowland: Yes, actually I have a copy right here.
Jess: Yeah, mine is over on my desk on the other side of my office. I'm almost done with it. I'm probably gonna finish it today. So, give us a quick rundown of Halfling's Harvest.
SL Rowland: So it basically centers around the Harvest Festival in the town of Willowbrook. It's kind of like a Shire-inspired Halfling town and the main character, Marigold, she owns the Dew Drop Vineyard and Inn. Her father started it and for the past 10 years she's been running it while they are out traveling the realm and enjoying their retirement. Her father was a very renowned winemaker. He won the annual wine contest numerous times, and in her 10 years the best she's been able to do is second place because of the rival vineyard Dark Root Cellers. They have a druid on staff that has kind of made everything go a lot smoother
Jess: Damn druids. Yeah, so the Harvest Festival is a huge deal in the book.
SL Rowland: Yes, so this for this year it's the 587th annual Harvest Festival, so it has a lot of history, a lot of tradition and you know people come from the surrounding areas, from different kingdoms. Even though Willowbrook is a small town, it's known for its Harvest Festival.
Jess: It's been pretty good. I like that you've got a very old, mostly blind cat that runs around
SL Rowland: yeah, Onyx.
Jess: And it's supposed to be chasing the unicorn bunnies, but does not.
SL Rowland: Yeah, I actually had a better idea of him before I even had a like a fully fleshed out version of the main character and I had the image of this inn and it's like surrounded by these little horned rabbits, bunny-corn type things, and I was like I want this giant cat to just be like sitting around. You know, he used to be very fearsome, but now he's super old and just kind of chills
Jess: I mean, yeah, that's what happens as cats get older. So you've got in the book, one of the things that I found really interesting that you don't see very often, there's a couple in the book, an elf and a dwarf. You don't see that pairing very often.
SL Rowland: Yeah, I thought that would be a lot of fun because, you know, I kind of swapped the gender roles as well. You have Locke, he's like the super gruff dwarf but he's also a big softy and the baker at the end. And then you have Alara the elf, you know foul-mouthed and like always trying to get people riled. And you know she's the vintner, who handles all the winemaking and everything.
Jess: Yeah, and she likes to cause trouble. The scene with Marigold and Poppy with the pumpkins.
SL Rowland: Yeah, she's a mischievous little elf.
Jess: She likes to cause some trouble.
SL Rowland: I think they all cause a little bit of trouble, you know, because I wanted to make that found family dynamic and you know, when you're around your friends you tease each other a lot. And I wanted to showcase that.
Jess: Yeah. So this is the third book in your Tales of Adria series and they've all been very strong on the found family aspect
SL Rowland: Yes, I think that’s kind of one of the key elements of cozy fantasy. People are searching for that found family, somewhere to belong, and that's what kind of gives you a comforting, cozy feel. Regardless of whatever else might happen, you know you have these people to fall back on and you kind of find your place in the world, even if it's not the family that you were born with.
Jess: Yeah, I mean, sometimes the family that we find along the way is better than some of the family that we have.
SL Rowland: Exactly yeah.
Jess: So the other two books in the series are Cursed Cocktails, and Sword and Thistle.
SL Rowland: Yes, I think I have them on hand as well. So Cursed Cocktails yes is about a blood mage who suffers from chronic pain and he ends up earning his retirement from defending the realm. So he moves south with a book of recipes that he inherited from his father and he ends up starting a tavern.
Jess: So for Cursed Cocktails, on your tiktok you talk about how one of the biggest inspirations for this character was your own personal struggles with an autoimmune disease. How did that help influence the character?
SL Rowland: I mean. So I've been kind of dealing with an autoimmune disease I don't know, probably like eight years now, and for four years it was undiagnosed, and so it took me a while to kind of understand what was going on. So I had to deal with the effects of it, you know, without treatment, for a long time. Mine is a form of inflammatory arthritis, so it's like a lot of soft tissue injuries, and not so much the bones, but like all that connective tissue that holds everything together gets inflamed and so they're like prone to tearing and more. You get a lot of burning sensation, a lot of just kind of achiness. And as this story was coming to me, I was like what kind of magic would most mirror that, and so then I was like thinking blood magic because the cost to to use blood magic often is from within, like there's no mana, there's nothing that you're pulling from. You're pulling from your own body or you're pulling from someone else's body. But I didn't want to go with that route.
Jess: That's a little dark for a cozy fantasy.
SL Rowland: Yeah, so I was like, how cool would it be? You know, a lot of blood mages are seen as evil or even on the anti-hero side. But like what if he's using that power for good and at the same time, you know, it's causing him pain? But there's no one else in the realm that can stop these monsters that live up in the frozen north, because they have these impenetrable hides that are magically resistant. And the only option is to have these blood mages go up there and keep them from coming down into civilization.
Jess: Yeah, and the main character was Roren, correct? So that actually mirrors a lot of what you wrote into his character with the joint pain and the muscle stiffness, because he experiences that a lot in the books.
SL Rowland: Yeah, I wanted it to be something there's no magic cure for. There are clerics all throughout my world. They can heal just about anything, that's a cut, scrape, bruise, broken bones, whatever. But there are certain things, like blood magic or cursed items or things like that, that clerics can't heal. And so I didn't want it to be like a hand wave and he's feeling better. The only way that the pain goes away is when he doesn't use his magic and, for people with autoimmune diseases, a lot of the time the only way that pain goes away is if they're not doing things that aggravate it.
Jess: Right, or they move somewhere warm.
SL Rowland: Yeah, yeah. I remember when I was in middle school or primary school, we'd read about these authors and poets from the 1780s and how they would all move from England to Italy because the climate would help them with a lot of respiratory diseases back then. So I think that's just kind of like stuck into in my head in some way
Jess: Yeah, yeah, I mean I probably would move to somewhere nice and warm. I can't fault him for it. So now Sword and Thistle.
SL Rowland: Yes, Sword and Thistle. So this one was more of a cozy fantasy adventure. I wanted to kind of push the boundaries of what cozy fantasy could be. That it doesn't necessarily have to be settling down in a new place. That there could be action involved, there could be exploration and danger, but still have that cozy vibe. For Dobbin, he's the main character. He's an adventurer, older main character and he's well-known throughout the realm for getting the job done. But he's kind of haunted by his own ghost of a friend that he lost in a quest a while back and ever since that happened he doesn't work in groups anymore, he stays to himself. He does his job but he doesn't want the responsibility of having to look out for anyone else to make sure that they're not hurt. So then he goes on this adventure and it's kind of his way of learning that you can open up again and, making peace with what happened in the past. And I thought it would be interesting if he's haunted by the ghost of his past. So why not send him into the haunted ruins where there are ghosts everywhere?
Jess: Right? I mean, why not? Did you have a hard time balancing the adventuring aspect of the book but keeping it as a cozy fantasy? Because in cozy fantasies you don't really get a whole lot of adventuring usually.
SL Rowland: It's a fine balance because you can still have the battles and the fights, but the way you depict it is different. You don't necessarily show the gruesome bits, you show the struggle and you show how he's able to overcome that. But a lot of the struggle is internal as opposed to external, in that regard,
Jess: You kind of just barely gloss over the fights.
SL Rowland: Yeah well, you want it to feel dangerous, but you don't want it to feel hopeless. Whereas in traditional fantasy, you just want to keep pummeling them with obstacle after obstacle and if there's a struggle, you want to follow that with something that is more calm and comforting. So, it's more like a roller coaster instead of just a free fall.
Jess: Right, you gotta balance it out. Personally, a female dwarf with a beard is amazing. To me they're all supposed to have beards and you just don't see that a lot.
SL Rowland: There’s a lot of contention over that. Yeah, I like female dwarves with beards. I think I got that from Terry Pratchett, and I think Tolkien mentions it as well. I think it's fitting to have them with their beards, and the project I'm working on now is another bearded female dwarf, but she'll be the main character this time.
Jess: Yeah, I think at one point in the Lord of the Rings, it was either the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit series, I can't remember. I think it's Gimli, he's got a picture of his wife and yeah,
SL Rowland: They're on horseback and he's talking about how you can't tell the difference between a male and a female.
Jess: Yeah, I love it. That's the way it's supposed to be. So, your world of Aedrea that you've built is massive. It's a very large world. Even the map is really really big. Did you struggle at all with creating this whole huge world? Do you have a plan for all of it?
SL Rowland: I have a lot of plans, a lot of notes, but it’s something that I build up as I go along and with each new story the world deepens. I started out I knew I wanted it to be a sprawling epic world so that I could tell an endless amount of stories in dozens of locations and if I never wanted to revisit the same location twice I wouldn't have to. So there's nine realms. There's like five or six different races. Each kingdom has its own government. There's a sprawling pantheon of gods and some of those have been developed. Some of them, I find them as I need them for whatever the story might tell. But each piece is a piece of the puzzle that just keeps getting put together and it keeps building and growing. I have numerous folders of just details and cities and towns and all these little historical sites that I may never use, but I have them if I need them.
Jess: I mean, it's good to have stuff squirreled away for whatever you might need it for. So how many books do you think that you might end up writing in just this kind of world in general?
SL Rowland: I don't really see a limit because I'm working on the fourth in the Tales of Aedrea now. I have ideas for a more epic, grimdark storyline set in the same world. I have ideas for a more action adventure series set in the same world. I think one thing that appealed to me by making it so large is that I could have multiple series that tell completely different types of stories, but they're all grounded in the world building. I could even tell a story of Roren, the blood mage from when he was working in the guard, and it's much more of a bloody, sad type story. You can see a character from two different points of views. Both of them are right, but it's the lens of the viewer.
Jess: Yeah, so book four is actually up for pre-order right now on Amazon.
SL Rowland: Oh yes, up for pre-order.
Jess: There Be Dragons Here.
SL Rowland: I think this one is going to be a lot of fun. It'll be a little more similar to Sword and Thistle with some adventuring aspects. Basically the premise is you have this old dwarven grandmother who used to be an adventurer. Once she gave that behind. She's like 182 years old now and so for the past 70 years she's just been chilling in the mountains. You know raising a family, being the typical dwarf. But she spent almost 100 years going around doing adventures and she likes to collect monster teeth. She writes down all her old little stories. Nobody quite believes it's true.
Jess: Pretty cool thing to collect monster teeth.
SL Rowland: I thought it would be fun to start a cozy fantasy with a funeral, and so it starts out with one of her old adventuring buddies, he passed away, and so she makes the travel to go to the funeral and not long after she gets a package that has his ashes in it and it also has a note and a map that says that he wants her to go scatter his ashes at this mountain range that's on the map. When she opens it up and scrawled in letters across the map is there be dragons here
Jess: Boy, she's gonna run into some dragons, nice. I know in Cursed Cocktails, one of the characters from Sword and Thistle was briefly mentioned. Do you see there being very much crossover between any of the books?
SL Rowland: It's usually at least one character that pops up across them. I have an idea for who it's going to be in this one, I'm not gonna spoil it yet but yeah. So between Cursed Cocktails and Sword and Thistle, those two had the most direct crossover, because there's one chapter that's like you see the point of view from the bartender in Cursed Cocktails and then you see the point of view of the adventurer who goes into the bar. It's the exact same scene from two different points of view.
Jess: Right.
SL Rowland: But then in the Halfling's Harvest there's one character that Dobbin meets during Sword and Thistle that goes to the inn for a little bit. So it's always fun connecting those dots, but not in a way that you have to have read one to understand the other.
Jess: Yeah, so it's just kind of little cameos.
SL Rowland: Yeah, it's kind of like in the Marvel movies, where somebody shows up for a little bit. Yeah.
Jess: Yeah, how they all had Stan Lee in them.
SL Rowland: Yeah.
Jess: Every single one. So, Cursed Cocktails has an entire recipe book of drinks in it that can actually be made with liquors that we have.
SL Rowland: Yes.
Jess: How did you decide on what drinks were going to be in there and what the recipes were going to be? Are you like, a secret connoisseur bartender?
SL Rowland: Before I became a full-time author, I waited tables for 10 years at various upscale and fine dining restaurants. So, I kind of developed a bit of knowledge around different wines and spirits and things like that. So, when I started writing Cursed Cocktails, I was like it would be cool if all the drinks that are in here have a real world equivalent. So basically, I reached out to one of my friends, Sean, and he's a bartender and much more knowledgeable than me, and so I told him kind of the vibe I was looking to catch with each of the drinks and the location and where, because each drink has a story of why it's included in their drink menu. So, he gave me a list to choose from. I went through and picked out the ones that I liked and then I took the different elements of them, gave them a fantasy twist, but still kept the base of it the same, and so on my website I offer a download for a free PDF that has all the drink recipes in the book, but then also their real world equivalent that they're based on.
Jess: And does that PDF also have the little stories behind the drink?
SL Rowland: No, that would be fun, but that's a lot of work. That'd be a lot. But they have pictures and they have everything you need, the instructions on how to make it and whatnot. But maybe one day I'll go back in and expand it.
Jess: Have you tried them all?
SL Rowland: In some form or another, yeah. Some of them I had tried previously, some of them I made to try, but yeah, they're all pretty delicious.
Jess: What's your favorite one?
SL Rowland: I mean, I like a good Moscow Mule, so there's the cocktail, it's called the Netherland Mule because that's the city in there. So, it's basically just kind of the same thing. But then sometimes you know what part of the realm are they getting limes from? You know, where are they getting soda water? Because they can't actually carbonate it.
Jess: Right.
SL Rowland: So then I had the idea for a natural mineral spring that produced soda water, and some industrious soul decided to bottle it and start selling it.
Jess: I mean, it's genius. So, you did a Kickstarter for Cursed Cocktails and Sword and Thistle. Do you see yourself doing a Kickstarter for the rest of the books in the world?
SL Rowland: I do, but I'm also changing up the way that I do things. So, with the first two it was kind of like me just figuring out the Kickstarter platform, and how everything worked. So I basically made these special edition book boxes where I hired an artist to make new cover art. I got stickers and vellum inserts and a fancy little box. But it was a lot of work, because I had to go through and I had to put each dust jacket on each book, I had to put the inserts inside of it. Every single element I had to do myself. But now I'm looking at doing a more premium, deluxe edition that has the faux leather cover, the foil, the colored end paper, sprayed edges, things like that, where I can have someone else do all that and then all I have to do is sign it. I think for one it will feel like a much nicer product and part of my reason was because I wanted to offer something nicer. But also as more books come out in this world, the idea of putting together hundreds of books by hand each time,
Jess: That's a lot of work.
SL Rowland: Because when I offered book two, I still had to offer book one and then you'd have people buying both, so it was double the work.
Jess: I think I'm one of the people who got both, yeah.
SL Rowland: I mean I'm grateful, you know it was a good experience. But, doing that, I basically have to take a week off from everything else just to put together boxes and ship them out, and with each new book it'll just be more and more and more.
Jess: Yeah, because you'll get people who didn't do the previous ones who will be like, oh, I want the other two now, and so then it's triple the number of books. That's a lot. I didn't even think about that, that you did that all yourself yeah.
SL Rowland: So I mean, it was cool. It was a cool experience, it was some work.
Jess: So if you're doing a more premium one, possibly for the next book, will you be offering the first two books in the same style as the new one?
SL Rowland: Yeah, I'll be redoing the first two as well, so basically people will have the option to get all three, and I'm thinking about possibly doing a slip case that they can all fit into
Jess: Man, that's where you guys get me, because I'm gonna have to have all of them in the same style
SL Rowland: Yeah, but it's been like a year and a half to two years since the last one, so I think people put out special editions more often than that sometimes
Jess: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you've got some people who own, you know, six copies of one book.
SL Rowland: That’s me. Like legends and lattes and Dungeon Crawler Carl. I have multiple editions of both of those.
Jess: I'm not giving Matt Dinniman that much of my money. So before tales of Aedrea, before you were doing the cozy fantasy, you were in the LitRPG realm. Your first novel was not Pangea Online, but was Land of the Dogs, which wasn't LitRPG. That was a zombie apocalypse.
SL Rowland: So I wrote that one. That was my first attempt at a novel, so probably,
Jess: I think 2017. I do a lot of research.
SL Rowland: Yeah it's probably like 10 or 12 years ago, that one’s not even available anymore. I think there may be like 20 copies of it in existence.
Jess: Yeah, I mean it's got an ISBN, so at some point it was available.
SL Rowland: Yeah, when I first started writing, I was really into post apocalyptic fiction. I wrote short stories and things like that in college. But it wasn't until I was 27 that I was like I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna write a novel and I was super into Walking Dead at the time and so basically took a lot of inspiration from that but I was not a very good writer at the time, so that's why you can't find it anymore.
Jess: So, do you ever see yourself going back and rewriting it? Was it a story that you just loved?
SL Rowland: I went back and rewrote it one time, but there's a lot of problems with it. It's not worth putting it out there. But it was a fun story, it's just not good for people.
Jess: I mean, I think the whole premise is that a guy like falls into a lake and when he wakes up there's zombies.
SL Rowland: You know, this kid was at his family's lake house for the summer and he dives off the lake and when he comes up, everything's different. So, did he pass into some new dimension? Did he hit his head and this is all a dream? What exactly is happening, but then it’s his way of finding out what's going on in this post-apocalyptic world.
Jess: It's a good premise for a story. There was a trilogy of books called The Beyonders, where a guy is at a zoo and he falls into the hippo enclosure and gets swallowed whole by a hippo. But inside of the hippo is a portal to another world and so when he surfaces he's in this other world and when he makes it back to our universe, he needs to get back. And so he jumps back into the hippo enclosure to try to get the hippo to swallow him again. It's a kooky book, and it's a really fun series.
SL Rowland: It sounds like it.
Jess: It was interesting. So Pangea Online was, I guess then, the first real series that you've written.
SL Rowland: Yeah, it was. So, when I wrote Land of the Dogs, I hadn't done a whole lot of research on publishing or anything like that, I just wanted to write a novel. And when I started working on Pangea Online, I knew I wanted to go down the indie publishing route, so I had had much more of a trajectory that I wanted to follow. I wrote the early chapters, put them on Royal road, got a lot of feedback. You know I still kind of cringe when I read some of that book, just cause I was a new author and hadn't learned a whole lot. But I got lucky, you know, I had a following and it did really well and kind of convinced me that I could make a go at this if I put in the work.
Jess: I know the first series that I read of yours was Pangea Online. I mean obviously I liked it because I read more of your books.
SL Rowland: It's a typical 2017, 2018 virtual reality LitRPG. Kind of Ready Player One-esque, without the pop culture references. There's multiple game worlds and a tournament. When I first started that, I was like I'm just going to write so many books in this world because there were LitRPG series where they’re six, seven, eight books and still going. But then after book two I was like I've kind of become a better writer and why am I showing off my worst writing as how I want to hook people into me? So I ended up finishing it with three books. So, it's kind of a disjointed trilogy, but it has some fans and Justin and Lori from SoundBooth Theater definitely took it up a notch with the audiobook.
Jess: Yeah, Justin Thomas James is a phenomenal narrator. I haven't listened to the audio version of Pangea Online, but he's really good.
SL Rowland: It was the first uh book he did with SoundBooth theater.
Jess: Oh, nice, nice, that's good. It was very ready player one-esque, you know, kind of like that underdog that you really want to root for that just ends up getting that break.
SL Rowland: and being the poor little orphan kid,
Jess: And like working in mines.
SL Rowland: Yeah, the data mines.
Jess: Yeah, which was hilarious, I think.
SL Rowland: Sometimes when I'm starting a book, I have this scene or this image that I want to capture at some point in the book and I thought it was so interesting to have someone working in a data mine and they're swinging the pickaxe. These little green numbers are just flying down past them.
Jess: It's an actual mine. It was hilarious, and so after that you did Sentenced to Troll, which was six books long. Also very good, very good LitRPG series, yes.
SL Rowland: Sentence to Troll. That was the one that allowed me to go full time as an author. I still look back at that one and there there's some things that I would have done differently. I was really into the first person in present tense at the time, it's pretty common in certain romance, certain dystopian and young adult things. But it's definitely a barrier between the author and the reader. As you know, some people will complain about it. You know, writing in past tense, it doesn't matter, people are used to that, so they don't complain about it, but it can be jarring to some.
Jess: So what was your inspiration for that particular series?
SL Rowland: I wanted to write a monster main character but instead of just going full in on a monster, I had to be weird with it. I was like what if it was a troll, an online troll who became a troll as his punishment for being a little jerk? So that's what I did. The main character, he's not a professional gamer, but he's a streamer and he has a little following because, he talks a lot of trash, and he ends up he's in this celebrity match or whatever, and he ends up just berating this person. You know said a lot of bad things. So he is the first person to face the consequences of this new cyber bullying law that has just came into effect in his city and as the punishment, the judge decides to let him try out this new form of virtual rehabilitation where he'll have to be a troll in this game world where they are despised and hated, so that he can kind of learn to experience what it's like to be on the other side of that.
Jess: I can't imagine very many gamers who would think that that's a punishment honestly.
SL Rowland: yeah, exactly
Jess: I'm gonna have to serve my sentence playing a video game, oh no.
SL Rowland: Yeah, so that ends up being the company that is running the virtual reality game is this big gaming company and they're using the prisoners to test out their new tech and so that's why they want him in there. But then there's some readers that are like you know this would never happen in real life.
Jess: I mean, you never know it might.
SL Rowland: There's so much shady things that go on that you know people sweep under the rug. I think it's all pretty plausible.
Jess: Yeah. I absolutely loved Limery in that series.
SL Rowland: You love him or hate him, I guess
Jess: I can't imagine anyone not liking him as a character. .
SL Rowland: There's a couple, you know. Every now and then I get a comment, like I hate this little golem wannabe.
Jess: He's just so cute and childlike
SL Rowland: yeah, he's very, he's very enduring.
Jess: And so loyal. So, it's six books and a lot of times you'll read a series of books or just a run of a story and you get to the point at the end and you're just like man, I really wish there was more or I wish that it had ended differently, but with Sentenced to Troll, I think it was really wrapped up very nicely. I couldn't have imagined it ending any other way, and I just had that moment at the end where I was like, oh, that's so cute.
SL Rowland: Yeah, I wanted to give it a fitting conclusion. You know, when I first started writing I didn't know how long it would be, but I had an end game in mind and it was basically, how many books between book one and the final book, how many subplots, quests, whatever will he go on to get him ready for this. And there came a point where I was like you know, it's time to wrap it up. I was in the car on vacation driving down to Hot Springs, Arkansas and I knew it was time to end it but I didn't know how to pivot from the end of book five to book six. It just kind of came to me while I was driving and so I was like, okay, this is it, we can wrap it up with six books and hopefully people will enjoy the ride.
Jess: Yeah, it was a very satisfying ending to a series, probably one of my favorites.
SL Rowland: I think I published the first one in 2018, and the last one came out in 2024. So it was six years where this series was kind of looming over me and I was ready to start something new. But also I didn't want to leave readers hanging and just waiting on a book forever.
Jess: I don't think that one book a year, roughly, is all that bad. You get a lot of authors who do a series will release one a year, or less.
SL Rowland: It's not bad. Not bad for traditionally published authors, but in the indie space and LitRPG specifically,
Jess: Yeah.
SL Rowland: You know so many authors are putting out you know three, four books a year. You've got people like Sean Oswald putting out almost a book a month.
Jess: Which is insane.
SL Rowland: And so, readers get used to that fast relief and part of the reason, I think that you know I took breaks. I took a break between book two and three, I took a break between books five and six to do other projects and so that really slows the momentum, and not everyone who has been following along is going to come back to it when you take that long, especially in a genre where there's just so much coming out all the time. It got to a point where, I'm a very slow writer, so the time that it would take me to write another book was just not lining up with what I needed to make to survive. So that was also part of the reason why I wrapped it up in six books instead of eight or ten.
Jess: Do you think that you'll ever go back to writing in the LitRPG genre?
SL Rowland: Yeah, I'm actually going back. My next project is going to be Path to Villainy: an NPC Kobold's Tale. It's about an NPC Kobold who becomes self-aware and then he remembers what all of the player characters, the heroes.. all the bad things they've done to him over the years, and so, once he gets all those memories, he wants wants revenge. In 2020, when the pandemic was happening, this was one of the breaks that I took between Sentenced to Troll. I just needed an escape to work on something that had no pressure with it, and so I wrote this little novella. It was like 40,000 words and it did okay for being the length that it was. And then, you know, for four or five years I just never even really thought about it much, because it's hard to promote a short little book or run ads on something when it's not going to lead into the next book, and then you're just kind of burning money at that point. But then last year I put it up on tiktok and it started selling like crazy and people kept asking, is there going to be a sequel? I want more of this, so I was like, okay. I get my audio rights to it back at the end of 2025, and so it was like this is the perfect time. Once I finish this next project, I'm going to go back through and rewrite what's already there so it's in my current voice and style. Then expand it into at least a full-length novel and possibly a series. So it'll probably end up being three or four times the length that the novella was, and I think I'm excited it should be a lot of fun.
Jess: That's really cool. Is that going to take place in the Sentenced to Troll universe.
SL Rowland: No, it's in it’s own little world. I'm going to sit down and I'm gonna do some really heavy world building with it and just make sure that I have everything in place to where, if I want it to be a series or if I want to tell a lot of standalone novels set in in the same world kind of like I do with my cozy fantasy books I want to set it up strong.
Jess: You are super big on the world building.
SL Rowland: Yeah, it's my favorite part.
Jess: Why is the world building your favorite part, do you think?
SL Rowland: It's what I enjoy reading about. When I'm reading a fantasy novel, I really like the flavor that's put in there of, you're seeing the world through the main character's eyes, but you're also aware that there's so much more out there and sometimes a one-off sentence is just a one-off sentence. But if it sparks something in the back of your mind that has you wondering like okay, if this is happening, then what else might be happening, I think that's really fun.
Jess: That is kind of cool. So, you've got plans to return to LitRPG, and then more stories in your cozy fantasy world. But you do think that you're going to at some point venture outside of the LitRPG and cozy fantasy and do like a grimdark story.
SL Rowland: Yeah, grimdark, epic fantasy, just something in the world that I've already built that you know a more epic storyline.
Jess: You're not going to go build an entire new world?
SL Rowland: Yeah, I'm going to recycle all these ideas that I already have.
Jess: So, were you a big reader when you were growing up?
SL Rowland: Oh yeah, definitely. It's what I probably did the most. I lived out in the country of a small town. You know, there weren't a lot of neighborhood kids to play with. I had my brothers, but I would always be reading something.
Jess: What were some of your favorites?
SL Rowland: Yeah, I read a lot of the Goosebumps books when I was in middle school. When I was in high school, I got more into epic fantasy. I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. I think I was in ninth grade or something when The Fellowship of the Ring was first coming out, so it was very cool to be able to read those and then also go watch them, and see the differences and the similarities between them.
Jess: Yeah, I loved the Goosebumps books growing up. Those, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
SL Rowland: Okay, yeah.
Jess: That was another series that I really loved. And then Shel Silverstein. I never got into the Lord of the Rings though, that was not something that I ever read growing up.
SL Rowland: What a shame.
Jess: I know I know, I should have. I'm surprised I never did, with how much I read.
SL Rowland: Well, I had a neighbor, he was kind of like my Gandalf growing up. You know, his old man gray hair. But he loved fantasy and he loved gardening. He had this amazing rose garden in his backyard and I would always scurry over there and help him water the plants and put down the mulch and everything. But he would always talk to me about fantasy books and things like that. And actually, he let me borrow his Lord of the Rings, which was one of those leather-bound huge ones, all three books in one. It's probably worth a small fortune today, but that was my first experience with it.
Jess: That would have been very intimidating for me when I was younger.
SL Rowland: Yeah.
Jess: Because Goosebumps books, you know, they weren't super big books.
SL Rowland: Yeah, I could read a Goosebumps book in a day, you know, after school. Yeah, Lord of the Rings, I think I first read when I was in ninth grade, so probably 13, 14 years old.
Jess: That's impressive.
SL Rowland: Didn't fully understand it all.
Jess: Yeah, I like to go to my local Goodwills and scour the book sections, because sometimes you'll find real gems in there, and I'm always keeping my eye out for Goosebumps books and I never find them. No one ever donates Goosebumps books.
SL Rowland: I saw a few not too long ago, so
Jess: Yeah, I want to start my little Goosebumps collection. I think that'd be fun
SL Rowland: Yeah, it's like hundreds of them, I think.
Jess: There's a lot, yeah, there's a lot. So, other than reading and writing, what do you like to do?
SL Rowland: You know I help my dog a lot. He's actually right here at my feet, let's see sleeping.
Jess: The cutest dog ever.
SL Rowland: Yeah, he's the reason why there are so many animal companions in my books. I've had him for almost 12 years now. I enjoy weightlifting. That's one of my favorite ways to just kind of decompress and get away from everything. It has been a struggle at times with an autoimmune disease, but every six weeks I do an infusion. I have way fewer setbacks than I did before. I enjoy hiking. I watch all the sports. I'm a gaming nerd and also a sports nerd because I play fantasy football and things like that.
Jess: That's intense, Fantasy football. You really like football yeah.
SL Rowland: I'm in several leagues. I'm in one league with a bunch of authors, and so our buy-in each year is we'll send the winner signed books.
Jess: That's awesome.
SL Rowland: Yeah, I think I've won four out of seven years, I think.
Jess: Holy cow.
SL Rowland: And we have a little trophy that used to have a little D20 on it.
Jess: That's cute. What are some of the best books you've read recently?
SL Rowland: I recently read a couple of books because I'm going to be on a panel with some other cozy fantasy authors. The Spell Shop by Sarah Beth Dirt, that one was really good. It's a very cozy fantasy about a librarian who's escaping a revolution. They oppose the king and they're setting fire to the city and the library's about to burn. So, she loads up as many spell books as she can carry in her little sailboat with her talking spider plant and they sail away to her childhood home on this island at the edge of the kingdom. It was a very cozy, kind of quaint story. A little more romance than I normally read, but it was really good, and very whimsical. When I first started reading it I didn't know how much the fantasy aspect would play into it, but there were some moments where I was like, okay, this is just some cool world building.
Jess: Nice.
SL Rowland: And right now I'm reading a book called Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife, by Destin Munden, that one releases, I want to say August or September. So, I got an ARC of it. It's about this former Death Knight who earns his retirement and he opens a restaurant. It's such a warm and wholesome book that is also juxtaposed with all of his memories of being a Death Knight. So, it's a lot of darkness but it's also a lot of light and they play together really well. It’s something I haven't seen done in cozy fantasy before. So it's pretty cool.
Jess: Yeah, I'm gonna have to check that out. Many, many, many years ago I played Everquest 2. I don't know if you're familiar with that. It was an mmo that came out a long time ago.
SL Rowland: I'm familiar with it. I never played it. We didn't get a good internet out in the country so I could never play any of those online games .
Jess: And I played a gnome that I had made because you could kind of adjust the height a little bit. I made her as short as I possibly could and I think that the class was called Death Knight or it was something very similar to that. But she used to run around in this full crazy plate mail and it was so much fun. She was so tiny, I named her Riece Fizzlesticks. That was fun. So, you are all over tiktok. You're very active.
SL Rowland: So I hear.
Jess: How do you think that has helped you reach new readers or find a new audience?
SL Rowland: I think tiktok has hands down one of the best algorithms of any social media for showing people more of what they are already engaging with. So that can be both a blessing and a curse. Like my TikTok, I only follow bookish creators, I only engage with book related things. So then that's all I see, and readers are the same way. If they like the booktok side of things, it's just going to keep showing them more and more books and creators that are similar to the ones that they already like. And yeah, it's been great for me. I've kind of built a pretty decent following on there. I've sold a lot of signed copies through TikTok. It's pretty awesome.
Jess: Yeah, I mean that's a great way to get signed copies of books from an author. Just in general, that and their websites. I think usually it's either you can order it directly from their website or from the TikTok shop, and most of the time they come signed.
SL Rowland: I need to get some set up on my website. I mean, tiktok shop is region specific, so I can do to the people in the US. But my website just got the capability that I can start listing my stuff on there. I just have to go through and set it all up.
Jess: Just get it done.
SL Rowland: Yeah.
Jess: So I know you're going gonna be at a convention here soon.
SL Rowland: Oh yeah, so I guess, depending on when this goes out, at the end of May I will be at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books. On may 31st. I'm doing a cozy fantasy panel at 10 am on Saturday, and then I'll be doing a signing after. And then in July I'll be at LitRPGCon in Denver. That'll be fun. August I have EnchantiCon in St Louis and then in September I'll be doing DragonCon. So, from July it's going to be pretty busy for me.
Jess: Do you have anything in your TBR that you're most looking forward to reading?
SL Rowland: Let's see. I just picked up this book, House of Frank by Kay Sinclair. I've heard a lot of good things. It was going around TikTok for a while. I can't remember the premise but I remember I was excited for it.
Jess: Nice.
SL Rowland: And then I just ordered all of the signed hardcovers of The Bound and The Broken by Ryan Cahill. I've read the first one, I've read the first novella, but there's still three others and those are really chonky epic fantasies. I've heard a lot of good things about The Devils by Joe Abercrombie, so that's a new series that he's putting out, so you don't need to know all of his other stuff. So I'm excited to check that out. I have hundreds of books on my kindle that I need to get through. I just keep buying them and they just keep stacking up.
Jess: Yeah, I'll need to live to, I don't know 160 years old in order to catch up if I stopped buying books now.
SL Rowland: Yeah, there's always these Humble Bundles that show up. So then I'm like I need the complete collection of Terry Pratchett.
Jess: Wheel of Time series was one that they just did recently. I love Humble bundle.
SL Rowland: Yep, I bought it and I'm like it'll probably take me a year to read through all those.
Jess: I thought about it, but I hate my Kindle.
SL Rowland: I love the Kindle.
Jess: I just can't. I can't do it. I have to have the physical books.
SL Rowland: The physicals for me are only for special editions and signed books. They go on my shelf and I'm still running out of room.
Jess: Nice. So where can everyone find you? Where can they buy your books?
SL Rowland: So all of my e-books are on Amazon. Most of those are exclusive with Amazon right now, so you can read them in Kindle Unlimited. All of my physical books are available everywhere, pretty much anywhere books are sold. You can request them to your local bookstores, your local libraries. You can get those wherever you want. Right now about half of my audio books are available everywhere. The other half is Audible exclusive, but by the end of the summer I'll have everything out there wide as well. I'm slowly transitioning from that Amazon ecosystem into like the broader world. Just because I really like libraries. They were great for me growing up, so I always enjoy putting my books there for the people who need them.
Jess: Yeah, and so then, if they want signed copies, they can get them off your TikTok shop?
SL Rowland: Oh yeah, signed copies are on TikTok and then also hopefully they'll be on my website.
Jess: Fingers crossed.
SL Rowland: In a month or two maybe.
Jess: How can people find you on TikTok?
SL Rowland: So pretty much everywhere I am at SLRowlandAuthor. That's my Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. My website is SLRowland.com, where you can find pretty much links to everything over there.
Jess: Including your Discord and Patreon.
SL Rowland: Yeah, I've had like 150 people sign up in the past week or two, so it's been pretty good.
Jess: Yeah, I've seen the Discord kind of get a little bit busy.
SL Rowland: Yeah, they're flocking over.
Jess: I took a couple days away from Discord to go to a wedding and I come back and I'm like man, there's so many notifications.
SL Rowland: Yeah, most of them are just people who have their Patreon link to Discord, so they never stop by, but they're always there.
Jess: Yeah, it's Matt Dinniman’s too. His Discord is excessively busy. I can't keep up with it.
SL Rowland: His is chaos.
Jess: Yeah, I don't even really try anymore.
SL Rowland: Everything with him is chaos.
Jess: Yeah, it is Well. Thank you so much for coming on. It was fun. I appreciate it.
SL Rowland: Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be one of your first few guests.
Jess: Everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in. I will have the links for SL Rowland's books and socials in the description of the video, so they'll be easy to find. And don't forget to like and subscribe. You can find me on YouTube and all major podcasting platforms. Until next time, keep leveling up.