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Literary Titan Silver Book Award
Celebrating the brilliance of outstanding authors who have captivated us with their skillful prose, engaging narratives, and compelling real and imagined characters. We recognize books that stand out for their innovative storytelling and insightful exploration of truth and fiction. Join us in honoring the dedication and skill of these remarkable authors as we celebrate the diverse and rich worlds they’ve brought to life, whether through the realm of imagination or the lens of reality.
Award Recipients
Walking Away by Richard Michael O’Meara
Pulsar: The Time Traveler by Alexander Heed
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Thank You For the Journey
A Maker of Magic follows an Enchanter whose inability to cast magic conventionally pushes him to think outside the box and discover a new way to build magic into weapons and armor. What first inspired Levi Richter and the idea of an Enchanter who struggles to cast magic conventionally?
The idea behind the book came to me during a difficult time. My father died on Christmas Eve in 2023. In the months that followed, I traveled between my home in Virginia and my family home in NJ to help with funeral planning, care for my mom, and handle other issues. Sitting in that empty house, my mind started to turn with grief and love. This story just flowed out of me. I wrote the entire book in those three months. I think Levi came from my own feelings of inadequacy. Since both my father and I served in the military, I created a similar connection between Levi and his father. The villains of the story, the undead horde of the Ebon Abyss, came from my childhood love of Universal movie monsters, like Dracula, the Wolfman, etc. I even had glow-in-the-dark models in my bedroom. I wrote it with family love in mind during a time of grief.
How does Levi’s identity change as he moves from student to inventor, soldier, nobleman, and leader?
Levi always knew he had to step up because of his unique ability. He was different from the others, who deemed him weak. He never thought of himself as a leader or even a true noble son, since he was the third-born. He only wanted to make an impression on Danielle, someone he’d loved since childhood, but soon his crazy ideas began to garner attention. I think that’s when Levi knew he needed to step it up even more. He wasn’t just experimenting for the fun of it. He was finally making an impression and an impact on the kingdom. He soon realized that he had to grow up rather quickly.
How do faith, prophecy, and personal choice interact throughout the story?
I like to think faith is at the heart of all my stories. I put my faith in God to carry me through my journey as an author, and that shows up in the pages of my books. The fact that they’re fighting against an undead horde of the Ebon Abyss brings their faith to the forefront. They’re fighting for the people in this life and the ones who fought and died before them. As a veteran, that’s part of my own history and heritage right there. The Richter family puts their faith in God and each other to get them through this. It’s Levi who has a moment of doubt. Some believe in him, his abilities, and the prophecy, but he isn’t sure. It takes life-and-death situations that threaten his family and friends to make him take it seriously finally.
Will this novel be the start of a series, or are you working on a different story?
Honestly, I wrote this as a standalone as a nod to my parents. My mother passed away eight months after my father, so I lost both within a year. This was my way of saying thank you for the journey. I might do more, but right now it is a standalone.
I am currently working on sequels to my other book series, Corsair and the Sky Pirates and Gwen Iver and Pendragon’s Puzzle. I hope to release the sequels next year. I am also getting ready to publish the fifth and final book in my Forever Avalon series. Forever Avalon was my first published book, so this is the final chapter in that series.
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In the kingdom of Engressia, every gifted child is tested and assigned a path in service to the crown. Levi Richter, youngest son of the Duke of Stormwind, is named an Enchanter at the Dawnstar Academy. Yet unlike the mages around him, Levi cannot cast spells through ordinary means. What others see as a limitation drives him toward a different kind of power: forging magic into devices, weapons, and armor.
Years later, Levi discovers Mysterium, a rare ore threaded with Violet Amerlyte and capable of transforming the way magic is made. His breakthrough could give Engressia a decisive advantage in its endless war against the undead legions of the Ebon Abyss. It also places Stormwind, Levi’s family, and everyone he loves in the path of enemies who will murder, manipulate, and betray to control it.
As an undead incursion threatens Fortress Drakmire and a conspiracy closes around his home, Levi must unite his talents as an Enchanter, swordsman, inventor, and reluctant heir. Alongside the formidable Blademancer Danielle Greyson, he faces vampires, dark mages, political rivals, and the devastating consequences of a feud generations in the making.
To protect Stormwind and end the forever war, Levi must become more than the mage his teachers expected. He must fulfill an old prophecy and prove himself a true Maker of Magic.
A Maker of Magic
A Maker of Magic by Mark Piggott is an expansive military fantasy built around Levi Richter, a rare Enchanter who can create spells and magical weapons but struggles to cast magic conventionally. Alongside Danielle Nichols, the formidable Blademancer known as the Sword of the Lawgiver, Levi grows from a gifted student into an inventor, soldier, nobleman, and possible fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. The long war between Engressia and the undead Ebon Abyss gives the story its scale, while Levi’s loyalty to his family gives it a clear emotional center. At heart, it’s a heroic adventure about turning an unusual talent into a source of strength.
The book’s most enjoyable material involves magical engineering. Levi’s rune dial, Mysterium armor, repeating ballistae, specialized weapons, and Violet Amerlyte explosives make invention part of the action instead of background decoration. That approach recalls Brandon Sanderson, particularly Mistborn, in the way established magical properties become tools for solving tactical problems. Piggott’s version has the atmosphere of a forge and an armory, with considerable attention paid to how each weapon is constructed, tested, and used. Readers who enjoy watching a protagonist think through a problem before smashing through it will find plenty to appreciate.
The emotional side is equally earnest. Levi and Danielle’s lifelong romance anchors the story, while his relationships with his parents, siblings, Lapis, and the people of Stormwind reinforce its interest in family, service, faith, and inherited responsibility. The dialogue is direct and often playful, especially when Levi trades insults with his brothers or corrects Lapis’s mangled expressions. Characters regularly state their motives and feelings plainly, giving the novel a broad, accessible storytelling style. Its villains are vividly cruel, its heroes openly principled, and its battles carry the moral clarity of classic quest fantasy.
A Maker of Magic is a bighearted and action-heavy fantasy for readers who like detailed combat, magical craftsmanship, loyal companions, bold romance, and heroes willing to carry enormous responsibilities. Levi’s progression from underestimated Enchanter to genuine force of change is satisfying because his victories grow from curiosity, preparation, and devotion to others. The final revelation also casts the apparent triumph in a more complicated light and opens an intriguing path beyond this volume. It’s an energetic tale with the confident sweep of a saga that has more story left to tell.
Pages: 309 | ASIN : B0HC9TSPZ7
World Lines: From space-time to apocalypse
World Lines by EB Diamond is a science fiction adventure with the restless mind of a thought experiment and the voice of someone telling you an increasingly strange story across the kitchen table. At its center is Professor Nathan Sloan, a physicist whose fascination with space-time becomes a deeply personal quest to understand what happens when a human “world line” refuses to behave normally. His theory suggests that certain people, known as Alternates, can cross time, space, and dimensions along unusual paths, turning ideas like ghosts, prophecy, disappearance, and even immortality into problems that might be plotted on a graph. Around that premise, Diamond builds an adventure involving ancient Egypt, a neutrino mine in Newfoundland, a missing graduate student, an Air Force pilot in North Africa, a mysterious emerald ring, an eccentric businessman, a shape-shifting mathematician, and RCR23, a decidedly peculiar robot who becomes one of the story’s most important links between realities.
I think what gives the novel its personality is the way Diamond mixes serious scientific curiosity with absurdity, wordplay, literary references, and a narrator who’s perfectly willing to interrupt the proceedings. Physics and metaphysics bump into Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Moby-Dick, fairy tales, religion, archaeology, computer technology, and jokes about the habits of scientists. TD1 and TD2 can argue about invisible particles or a fisherman’s “magnetic pole” while the fate of civilization hangs somewhere in the background. Marco Spelling can worry about turning a profit from a disaster-prediction business while realizing that a successful prediction might leave nobody around to collect the money. That humor isn’t decoration. It’s part of the book’s way of thinking. Diamond repeatedly follows logic until it circles back on itself, becomes ridiculous, and then unexpectedly raises a question worth considering. The result is a novel that feels curious, playful, argumentative, and cheerfully unwilling to stay inside a single genre.
Beneath all that intellectual play is a surprisingly human story about people trying to recover what they’ve lost. Sloan’s obsession reaches back to the death of his wife, Jean, and his discovery of an impossibly modern ring in an ancient setting. His daughter Darien, tough, impatient, resourceful, and fiercely loyal, takes up the search when Richard Watson disappears during Sloan’s experiment. Andrew McBarrister, the enigmatic Alternate who appears in different identities and different moments, gives the novel another emotional thread as protector, observer, mathematician, and Fisherman. The characters keep asking scientific questions, but many of the questions underneath them are painfully ordinary: Where did someone we love go? Can we reach them again? Does death represent an ending, a transition, or simply a point we can’t see beyond? That emotional current gives weight to a story filled with cosmic forces and multidimensional speculation. The apocalypse may provide the scale, but mortality provides the stakes.
By the end, World Lines brings its scientists, soldiers, Alternates, skeptics, believers, and competing explanations together at the Newfoundland mountain, where the abstract questions become immediate and physical. The conclusion is eerie, sad, strange, and fittingly circular. Diamond doesn’t turn the book into an answer key. The novel remains committed to uncertainty, leaving the reader to decide how much has been proved, how much has been imagined, and whether those categories were ever as separate as we thought. That openness feels entirely appropriate for a book so interested in the boundaries between science and faith, life and death, reality and story, and one moment in time and another. World Lines invites you to look at a straight line, wonder where else it might lead, and entertain the possibility that an ending is simply the point where our view runs out. World Lines turns the mysteries of time, death, and the universe into a funny, imaginative adventure that leaves you wondering whether the impossible is simply reality seen from the wrong dimension.
Pages: 244 | ASIN : B0D9TQNDQX
Ghost of Kotoama
J. Von Swan’s Ghost of Kotoama is a bruising science-fiction adventure built from political intrigue, mythic traditions, covert operations, and spectacular violence. Baldur, the genetically altered warrior known as the Wolf of Vanaheim, begins the novel guarding diplomats and ends up chasing a killer who looks impossibly like the woman whose death still governs his life. That mystery pulls him across prisons, palaces, hidden cities, and planetary battlefields while old enemies maneuver entire civilizations toward war. The scope is huge, but the story stays readable because every new crisis arrives through Baldur’s personal loyalties. Galactic politics matter because someone he loves will pay when he chooses badly.
Baldur is the book’s most compelling creation: funny, frightening, loyal, selfish, tender, and capable of appalling brutality. He’s constantly deciding which lives count, then living with the damage that arithmetic causes. His crew gives that struggle real emotional weight. Drat’s irreverence, Nastasya’s gentleness, Torvi and Eryu’s sibling shorthand, and Kyra’s weaponized charm create the warmth that keeps the novel’s darker material from becoming oppressive. Their banter feels lived-in, especially when jokes surface in the middle of disasters. The relationships also expose different versions of Baldur. He’s a commander, brother, lover, legend, and liability, sometimes within the same conversation.
The world has a vivid collision of aesthetics. Norse titles, funeral pyres, and warrior codes meet Kotoaman swordcraft, underground resistance culture, neural control systems, and silent android armies. Swan stages each location with sensory confidence, from the elegant menace of Alesian diplomacy to an underwater prison surrounded by tentacled sharks. The action is graphic and frequent, with set pieces that keep finding strange new pressure points, yet the most interesting violence is moral. Alliances are made with zealots, civilians become weapons, and liberation carries the temptation to seize the machinery of tyranny. The book’s sharpest question is how quickly a person fighting control can learn to enjoy controlling others.
There’s a pulpy fearlessness to the storytelling. Romance, espionage, horror, battlefield spectacle, dark comedy, and dynastic politics all compete for space, giving the novel an energetic, unpredictable personality. Its rapid escalations occasionally leave little room to absorb one loss before the next crisis arrives, though that velocity also reflects Baldur’s habit of outrunning grief through action. By the closing pages, the title has gathered several meanings: Syn’s memory, Jingu’s resemblance to her, the buried history of Kotoama, and every dead companion still directing Baldur’s choices. The ending resolves the immediate revolution while opening a wider conflict with real momentum. Ghost of Kotoama is a blood-soaked space opera with a wounded heart, where every victory leaves a scar, and every ghost still has a vote. I recommend Ghost of Kotoama to readers who enjoy expansive, fast-paced science fiction blending horror, brutal action, dark humor, and mythic worldbuilding.
Pages: 380 | ASIN : B0H2QVYWB7
The Demon’s Spawn
Christine Triner’s The Demon’s Spawn is a sprawling supernatural horror novel built around an irresistible idea: twin sisters separated at birth remain psychically connected, even as one is drawn toward goodness and the other becomes an instrument of demonic violence. The story begins amid the terror of seventeenth-century Salem, where the demon Baleth sets a generational plan in motion, then follows that evil into the modern lives of Eliza and Eloise. One grows up surrounded by affection in England, while the other is raised in neglect near Salem. Their eventual collision gives the novel its emotional center and its gathering sense of dread.
Triner tells the story through short, rapidly shifting chapters that move among the sisters, their families, Baleth, and the people caught in their path. That structure makes the book highly readable despite its substantial length. The parallel lives of Eliza and Eloise create a steady rhythm of contrast, and their mysterious connection pulls the reader forward long before either young woman understands it. Baleth’s presence adds another layer of suspense because the reader can see the larger design taking shape while the characters are still struggling to name what’s happening to them.
This is graphic, full-blooded horror, and Triner commits to its brutality. The violence is visceral, the demonic menace is openly malevolent, and Eloise’s growing appetite for revenge makes her both frightening and strangely compelling. Beneath the bloodshed, though, the book is interested in the forces that shape a person: family, abandonment, privilege, resentment, and choice. Eloise’s cruelty is never softened, but her damaged childhood gives the story a human ache. Eliza’s warmth and Tilly’s fierce loyalty provide the counterweight, making the novel as much about devotion and loss as corruption.
As the action travels from Salem to England, the supernatural horror and crime-thriller elements lock together in a tense final act. The ending closes the sisters’ story with real consequences while opening the door to something even more dangerous, giving this first volume a satisfying shape and the trilogy a potent future. Triner has created a dark family saga in which evil travels through blood, trauma echoes across generations, and love must fight for every inch of ground. Christine Triner turns the bond between twins into a live wire stretched between love and damnation.
Pages: 449 | ASIN : B0H5TMNTZG
Smiling Faceless Woman
Smiling Faceless Woman, by Thomas J. Gebhardt III, is an expansive supernatural horror novel that mixes paranormal investigation, romance, coming-of-age anxiety, and a heavy dose of late-2000s pop culture. The story centers on Alexander Jacobsen, an ambitious linguistics student whose carefully mapped-out future starts coming apart when disturbing events invade his sleep and then his waking life. What begins with sounds, misplaced objects, sleep paralysis, and an oppressive presence eventually leads Alex into SPIRAL, a paranormal investigation group that treats hauntings as equal parts fieldwork, folklore, psychology, and spirituality. That blend gives the novel its identity. It’s paranormal horror with a personal center, where ghosts matter because of what they reveal about the people living around them.
Alex is a fitting lead because he’s skeptical enough to question nearly everything he experiences, but curious enough to keep following the evidence. His gradual acceptance of his family’s paranormal sensitivity works particularly well because it develops alongside a much more ordinary identity crisis involving school, work, ambition, family, and adulthood. The book repeatedly returns to his idea of “LIFE101L,” the informal education he gets when his meticulously planned life refuses to follow the syllabus. His relationship with April Wen becomes a major part of that education. Their connection moves through friendship, unrequited affection, sex, domestic life, grief, and eventual separation, giving the supernatural horror romance side of the book considerable space. When the novel jumps ahead and shows them officially together, that relationship feels authentic because readers have already spent so much time watching it form.
One of the book’s most distinctive qualities is how thoroughly it inhabits its era. MySpace, Nintendo DS systems, Motorola Razrs, mall jobs, MP3 players, memes, movies, bands, clothes, food, and internet culture aren’t occasional decorations. They’re part of the characters’ everyday vocabulary. The result is a remarkably specific time-capsule texture, especially in Alex and April’s scenes together. The prose likes to linger on conversations, meals, music choices, shopping trips, jokes, and small physical gestures, so the pacing has a roomy, episodic feel. That approach also changes the rhythm of the ghost story material. A frightening encounter can sit beside goofy banter or an ordinary afternoon, which makes the paranormal feel as though it’s intruding on an actual routine.
The occult horror and paranormal-investigation sections broaden the novel considerably. SPIRAL’s cases range from a dead child haunting a cottage to a violently malevolent presence on a ranch, and the team approaches each location with cameras, EVP recorders, EMF meters, historical research, prayer, intuition, and competing theories. The novel is especially interested in the argument between scientific explanations and supernatural ones. It discusses sleep paralysis, environmental causes, psychokinesis, folklore, Christian theology, indigenous spiritual practices, and the idea of Sheol as an overlapping realm of the dead. That investigative framework eventually grows into much darker territory involving curses, witchcraft, sacrifice, possession, and the literal smiling faceless woman. By the climax, the restrained unease of Alex’s early haunting has expanded into full-scale demonic horror, with the members of SPIRAL forced into a confrontation that makes their earlier investigations look almost gentle by comparison.
I liked that Smiling Faceless Woman is interested in connection. Alex begins as someone obsessed with controlling the trajectory of his future, and the novel keeps putting him in situations where knowledge, plans, and certainty only take him so far. Friendship, family, romance, faith, grief, and intuition gradually become just as important to him. Even after the violent paranormal climax, the story ends on quieter emotional ground, with Alex and April looking back on what they shared and acknowledging that life has carried them somewhere neither expected. That gives this ghost-hunting horror novel a surprisingly reflective finish. Its ghosts are memorable, its occult mythology is ambitious, and its real subject is the messy process of learning how to live when the world, both the visible part and the part hiding behind it, turns out to be much bigger than you planned for.
Pages: 440 | ASIN : B0FHF3MH7H
Medieval Warfare
The Knight’s Squire follows a twelve-year-old squire who dreams of becoming a legendary knight like his father and learns the meaning of courage, loyalty, and honor. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I thought a lot about what it is like to be growing up and deciding what you want to be. As kids, we often glamorize the professions we want to be in, and then the harsh reality of life hits us as we get older. I also had the idea from listening to a boy who loved Professional Wrestling and then found out that the matches are predetermined, and I thought of applying that idea to jousting in tournaments.
What influences helped shape the kingdom, cultures, politics, and traditions of the world?
Many of my ideas about the kingdom come from JRR Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. One of the things I always wondered about while reading his works was: what if the elves leave Middle Earth for the West, and when they arrive at their promised land, it is already inhabited? I have a degree in History and have taught Government and Economics for over 30 years. One of the main forces of history is the movement of people. How do people adapt to their environment or modify it? I look at the Viking raids on the British Isles and the conflicts between the Church and the ideas of the Enlightenment for inspiration.
The novel repeatedly challenges romantic ideas about knights and warfare. What did you want younger characters to discover about the difference between tournament glory and actual battle?
I want them to see that being a knight is not all chivalry and proper etiquette. Medieval warfare was brutal and violent, especially for the common soldiers. Jousting tournaments had danger, but not at the level of actual battle, where it was kill or be killed. Also, the lesson Jory learns is that during tournaments, knights had freedom to come and go and make decisions for themselves. In battle, a knight is under the command of his lord and must follow his orders even if he might not agree with them.
Several revelations near the end dramatically change what readers understand about characters and loyalties. How do those discoveries set up the larger story?
In the next book, the readers will discover the motivations for one of the characters who switched their loyalty and get to follow his character arc. Also, we will find out what the costs of having power or reaching for power can be. Emily will have to make a choice between her magical abilities and her love for Theo. And Jory’s journey will become a little darker as he tries to survive in this world. He must decide if he can trust others again and if it is worth having friends.
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As the kingdom moves toward civil war, Jory and his knight are sent on a mission where Jory finds friends and enemies, and discovers that magic, long believed to be extinct, is far from dead. But will magic and friendship be enough to save the kingdom?
The Knight’s Squire is an epic fantasy that follows Jory, his knight, Sir Cley Woods, the apprentice girl, Emily, and the heir to the throne, Prince James, in a medieval world where kings and lords rule, and knights and squires serve.
