26 Year Old Author Believes His Series The Seckry Sequence Could Be The Next Harry Potter

Online, October 5, 2011 (Newswire.com) - City of the Falling Sky, the first book in The Seckry Sequence, follows fourteen year old Seckry Sevenstars as he joins a new school in a daunting new city, learns to play Friction (a massively multiplayer digital sport), gets butterflies on his first date, and uncovers a dark secret at the sinister Endrin Corporation.

Teenagers who have read the book have already been raving about it. "City of the Falling Sky is easily the best book I've ever read," says Jacob Foley, 13. "To me, even better than the Harry Potters. I loved every minute of it."

15 year old Ema Sava was just as enthusiastic. "Absolutely amazing!" she said. "I could not put it down for one second, and by the end of it I was left speechless."

Victoria Hutchings, a children's bookseller for the UK's leading book chain Waterstone's, had this to say about her experience reading it: "Captivating, intoxicating, engrossing. Never before have I wished a fictional world existed so much. I was gripped tightly until the very last word."

Joseph Evans spent a year sending City of the Falling Sky to agents and publishers, with only rejections in return. The most common response he had with his rejections was that they didn't want to represent something so involved in today's video game culture. "It seems nonsensical to me," says the author, "that the people in charge of what gets released for the teenage market want nothing to do with a story set in a slightly futuristic version of today's teenage society. Teenagers are fanatical about technology, gaming, and digital entertainment, just like I was (and still am!) and choosing to ignore this, I think, is doing a disservice to the generation they are trying to attract."

Luckily, thanks to eBook reading devices like the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes and Noble Nook, and the Apple iPad, City of the Falling Sky is now being read in countries all over the world. With the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing platform, authors can upload their books to the site and have them for sale within 24 hours. "The freedom you get with independent eBook publishing is amazing," Joseph says. "I've had five star reviews from places like Holland and South America, places it may have taken me years to reach with traditional print copies. The immediacy of the worldwide availability of the book has been mind blowing."

The comparisons to Harry Potter are no surprise to Joseph Evans. "JK Rowling is one of my biggest inspirations," he says. "Even though my books are set in a more contemporary urban environment, they follow a similar structure. Each one covers a whole school year of Seckry's life. I took a lot of inspiration from the way she develops her characters too. I like to make my readers feel like the characters in the book are their best friends, so real that they almost jump out of the pages."

Joseph is busy writing the second book in The Seckry Sequence, and hopes to release it soon. He hopes that one day and agent or publisher will see how well it is selling as an eBook, and offer him a publication deal. As much as he loves the digital format, there are people out there who prefer paper copies, and it would be a great way to expand his readership even more.