GUILDIFI CON GUESTS!
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J.J. Ackerknecht
I'm Justin Josiah Ackerknecht, aka JJ, aka JayAck. I love Fantasy, SciFi, Horror, and the intersections where those genres meet, as well as almost all of their little subgenre children. I've been writing for about 20 years, whether that be comics, short stories, webserials, and now, publishing to Amazon.
I've lived in America (where I'm from) as well as Asia and Europe (where I am currently). My wonderful wife works as a librarian, and we both adore books and stories of all sorts. We also have a very stinky and absurd dog that we love very much.
If you'd like to keep up with whatever I've got going on, you can check me out on Twitter @jjackerknecht or my personal website at www.jjackerknecht.com
Aqib Ali
Aqib Ali is an author from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. He enjoys writing short stories, novellas, novels and creating audiobooks. He is currently working on the third episode of his Supernatural Dark Fantasy series The Dark Ranger and the Rekindle Project LitRPG series.
Nathan Ameye
Nathan Ameye grew up fishing, canoeing, hunting, and trekking through the Ozark Mountains. In his backpack, you could always find a bag of polyhedrons and a fantasy or science fiction novel with its tattered cover being desperately held together by yellowed bits of tape. Eventually, he headed for steeper terrain and spent years living in the Colorado Rockies where he took up rock climbing, fly fishing, and Jeeping. He has far too many hobbies to be really good at any of them, including photography, billiards, wood carving, guitar playing, blacksmithing, and martial arts. Nathan’s video game addiction started with Atari consoles and progressed to text-based multiplayer games (MUDs) and then more modern MMORPGs. He eventually discovered LitRPG, and, fascinated by the interweaving of game elements into fiction, wrote his debut novel, Black Dawn, a post-apocalyptic LitRPG.
J.S. Arquin
When J.S. Arquin was three, he would take as many books as he could carry to the nearest adult, and demand they read them all to him. When they finished, he’d fetch another stack. As he grew older, he cut his teeth on comic books, classic fantasy and science fiction, and role playing games.
J.S. is now a classically trained actor who has lived and performed around the world. But his love affair with books and the spoken word continues.
As a narrator, he has breathed life into over 150 audiobooks, and been a finalist for several prominent awards. He loves Fantasy, Science Fiction, and LitRPG and has become known for his work on the wildly popular Path of Ascension series. J.S. is always busy recording, and has a slate of titles forthcoming from Aethon Books, Podium Audio, Tantor, Dreamscape Lore, and many others.
Travis Baldree
Travis is a New York Times Bestselling author, and a full-time audiobook narrator who has lent his voice to hundreds of stories. Before that, he spent decades designing and building video games like Torchlight, Rebel Galaxy, and Fate. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his very patient family and their small, nervous dog.
Austin Beck
I am Austin Beck and I love Monster Girls! Action! Harem! Gamelit! Litrpg! Isekai! Slice of Life! I'm an Amazon bestselling fantasy harem light novel author and you should check my books out if you like having a good time!
Jay Boyce
Jay Boyce, daughter of a librarian and wielder of words, is primarily an editor turned LitRPG writer. A crazy dreamer, she creates stories in her head all the time, and finally decided to start writing them down and sharing the love. A perpetual learner, she also works at her local university attending classes with deaf students and gleaning knowledge on any random subject she can get her hands on. She started writing again after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2018. She strives to make the world better through kindness, and showing that you can overcome whatever obstacles stand in your way.
Jay is currently writing two series: A Touch of Power and Rise of the Mystic Mage. Winner of the 2019 Warriors and Wizards award for best new LitRPG author, she was also nominated as a finalist for the Independent Audiobook Awards in 2020.
Jay is well known for collecting the rainbow in the form of dice, wigs, and mugs. Her hobbies, aside from reading/writing, include playing board and video games, ultimate frisbee and volleyball, and traveling the world to experience new cultures.
Xander Boyce
Xander is a USCG veteran and lifelong scifi/fantasy reader. Having begun creating worlds for his pen and paper roleplaying games more than a decade ago, he has always been fascinated by what can be done when people are pushed beyond normal boundaries. He was drawn to Science Fiction as a way to explore the human condition, and his debut book, Advent, is an extension of that desire.
Jonathan Brooks
Jonathan Brooks is the author of over 40 books in the Dungeon Core and LitRPG genres, including Dungeon World, Dungeon Crafting, The Dungeon Fairy, and Station Cores, to name a few. He prefers his LitRPG to be on the crunchier side of the genre, both as a reader and author, so the more stats the better! He currently lives in Colorado with his wife and daughter, writing more books to release every month.
Rhett C. Bruno
Rhett is a USA Today bestselling and Nebula-nominated hybrid author who has been writing Sci-Fi & Fantasy since before he can remember. On the editing side, he has collected works for numerous anthologies through Sci-Fi & Fantasy Bridge, and served as the lead editor of the bestselling Bridge Across the Stars Anthology. He also served for a period as a consulting editor for ASIM magazine and as a 34freelance editor on Upwork, and has earned a Certificate in Screenwriting / Storytelling from the New School in NYC.
Rhett is passionate about science fiction and its role in our fast-moving society. He wants stories that focus on characters but also present the kind of concepts that keep readers up at night, dreaming of potential futures.
Jez Cajiao
Jez Cajiao was born a regular human, but over many years of trials and tribulations, he managed to survive to become...an older, uglier, and larger regular human! At a young age, Jez found that he truly disliked school, and due to that, decided to start work at the age of 11 in the family catering business.
After many years catering, Jez then traveled and worked at bars in Greece, where he, well, what happens in Greece stays in Greece.
He made a career change to welding, which he loved, but only for a short time, as he had developed welder's lung.
The pandemic of 2020 caused Jez to be furloughed, as his lung condition put him at a greater risk. During this time, he wrote every single day. With the support of his readers, he is now happily writing away in his home office full time, with the company of his wife, two children, two dogs, two cats, and the Sanddancers in South Shields.
You can find Jez on Facebook, Discord, Instagram, and TikTok, where he is always happy to chat with readers!
Steve Campbell
Steve Campbell is a Canadian Narrator who has recorded over 135 titles, totaling over a thousand finished hours of audiobooks, equal to 10,000,000 words. He won the Independent Audiobook Award in 2019 for YA (Watcher by AJ Eversley - co-narrated with Chelsea Stephens). Steve has also been interviewed for an article in the Wall Street Journal and has been on multiple podcasts and is a member of SAG-AFTRA.
Steve didn’t start out in the narration business, he previously worked at restaurants entertaining patrons and at an apiary before turning to construction, where he worked for almost 20 years, eventually founding and owning an incorporated company for 10 of those years. Once he discovered his love for narrating he was able to go full-time with audiobook narration after only 1.5 years.
Severe ADHD did not slow Steve down, he was not only an athlete in school, with achievements of being the captain of his high school basketball and volleyball teams, he was also involved in Fine Arts as the lead in many plays, including a community performance of Romeo and Juliet. He was also the high school class president and Valedictorian.
Steve was also a lead singer in a church and youth band to crowds up to 300 strong and toured eastern Canada and northeastern US for a year doing multimedia dramas and music to crowds up to 1,500 in schools, churches, community centres, and minimum and maximum prisons.
Steve is happily married to his high school sweetheart and they have two sons together. He’s a huge fan of movies and comics, and didn’t discover his love for reading until he was 20 and hasn’t looked back.
C.M. Carney
My journey to becoming the Bestselling author of ‘dorky books’ - as my sister is fond of calling them - began in the dark ages long before the internet was a thing with the original Dungeons and Dragons boxed set.
My mother bought that shiny red box for me after reading an ‘editorial’ in the local paper claiming that role playing games drove kids to worship dark forces in the sewers. I was ten, and it's probably a good thing there were no sewers on my street, otherwise, I would have delved down with my hand-crafted wooden sword and my trash can shield, ready to smite evildoers of all stripes, likely to never be heard from again.
Thankfully, my forays into the underworld never materialized, and I faced neither dragon nor goblin nor gelatinous cube. Instead, I turned my eye and my quill to writing fantastical tales.
Today, thanks to my two Bestselling LitRPG series, The Quintessence, which incorporates cultivation elements and measured progression, and The Realms, which burst onto the LitRPG scene with Barrow King in February 2018, I get to put the profession author on my tax return.
In addition to my two current series, I am just finishing up work on the first book in Knightman & Page, a middle grade superhero, action-adventure Arhturian series with LitRPG elements.
Jaime Castle
Jaime is an IPPY award winning author, editor, and producer. Before founding Aethon Books, he worked as a pastor and graphic artist. His work with numerous businesses and corporations serving as both a designer and creative director gives him an experienced eye at ensuring our covers and the books within are the best they can be.
Jaime’s love has always been Fantasy. There isn’t an R.A. Salvatore book out there he hasn’t read or listened to, and his obsession with audiobooks gives us a leg up at pairing our authors with the best narrators in the business.
He’s an avid Dungeons and Dragons player, lover of all things superhero, father of two, and husband of one. Jaime was also the lead singer/songwriter for the band Stonehigh for many years.
Dawn Chapman
Dawn Chapman has been creating sci-fi and fantasy stories for thirty years. Until 2005 when her life and attention turned to scripts, and she started work on The Secret King, a 13-episode Sci-Fi TV series, with a great passion for this medium.
In 2015, Dawn returned to her first love of prose where she revelled in the world of The Secret King, Letháo and First Contact, as an epic prose space journey over three generations.
This year her experience of working with others expanded. From Drama, Sci-Fi, Action, to LitRPG/Gamelit. Dawn’s built a portfolio of writing, consulting, publishing and audio proofing.
Michael Chatfield
A Canadian army veteran who enjoys long walks in foreign countries and some good beer with videos games at night! He writes character driven books for the simple joy of it.
He's written a Space Opera series called the Free Fleet as well as a Hard Military Science Fiction Series, Builder's Legacy and the Harmony War series continued in the Maraukian War Series.
He has written possibly the first complete LitRPG series Emerilia and followed it up with the LitRPG, portal and cultivation fantasy Ten Realms.
He also has the comedic epic fantasy Death Knight series.
Right now he's working on the Four Horsemen Series.
J.M. Clarke
J.M. Clarke is an author of novels, short stories and web fiction, known for Mark of the Fool, originally a web serial and now a best-selling series narrated by Travis Baldree. He also has short stories published in the anthology Book of Blades and the magazine New Edge of Sword and Sorcery.
Harmon Cooper
Writer of over seventy-five fantasy books, Harmon Cooper lives with his wife in New England. His series include, but are not limited to, Arcane Cultivator, Pilgrim, War Priest, Cowboy Necromancer, The Feedback Loop, Proxima Legends, Monster Hunt NYC, and The World According to Dragons.
Harmon has traveled through Asia extensively, from the Gobi Desert to the outskirts of Japan, which is where he draws the core of his inspiration. He was once a Fulbright Fellow, and in 2021 he won the LitRPG/GameLit audiobook of the year award for the Sacred Cat Island, narrated by Travis Baldree.
In December, he'll start publishing a new webserial on Royal Road under the moniker GoblinWrangler.
R.A. Cooper
R. A. Cooper is a Texan who loves fast-paced adventures. After a long journey to a career as a clinical neuropsychologist, she finally has time to take on her next endeavor in writing fantasy. She enjoys her growing family of five plus two lovable dogs. If there's any free time left, she enjoys traveling, experimenting with new recipes, and soaking up the opportunity for outdoor activities.
Luke Daniels
Luke Daniels was born into a family of actors. Both his father and mother have been performing and teaching in the Theatre for almost five decades. It is because of their influence that, from a very young age, Luke and his two brothers often found themselves spending countless hours in rehearsal halls across the country.
This early exposure and “backstage pass” into the creation of innumerable productions fostered a deep love of storytelling in Luke that can be heard in his wide ranging audiobook work today. Luke Daniels has narrated over 450 audiobooks. A listener favorite, he has been the grateful recipient of 13 Audiofile Earphones Awards, 4 Audie nominations, as well as Audible’s 2012 Narrator of the Year Award.
Luke is well known for his imaginative storytelling and dynamic characterizations, which create an immersive listening experience for his audience. Luke’s vast repertoire of work ranges from Kerouac to Updike, Nora Roberts to Stephen King, Michael Crichton to Phillip K. Dick. His background is in classical theatre and film. He has performed at repertory theaters around the country, but now produces from his home studio in the Midwest, where he resides with his pack.
Travis Deverell
Travis Deverell is the unepententently Australian author of the suspiciously bestselling series He Who Fights With Monsters. Also known as Shirtlaoon, a moniker with a disappointingly banal origin, he has gone from a student of literature to a writer of litRPG, which is both more fun and more lucrative. The unfortunate lack of kung fu wizards in the English literary canon turned out to be a dealbreaker.
Matt Dinniman
Matt Dinniman is a writer and artist from Gig Harbor, Washington. He is the author of the best-selling Dungeon Crawler Carl series along with several other books about the end of the world. He doesn't really hate Cocker Spaniels, and he plays bass in two bands.