Assistant professor of English Anton Jones’ new novel, The March of the Blood Red King, was published on November 28, by Page + Plot Press. Enlisting the help of Concordia students and alumni for beta reading, cover art, and other aspects of the novel, the project was deeply rooted in the Concordia community.
The March of the Blood Red King is Jones’ first novel, following his 2024 lyric memoir, This is Not a Death Sentence.
The novel is the first book in what Jones anticipates will be a four-book series. The setting is a low medieval fantasy, and the story centers on a family of three siblings in the midst of a war.
“One of the things I’m dissatisfied with in contemporary fantasy is when it feels too easy for the main characters to just win everything,” Jones said. “So, I wanted to make something that is much more grounded in historical combat.”
The grounding of the novel’s combat was derived from Jones’ own experience in buhurt, a full-contact sport where opponents go head-to-head in armored melee combat. Competing for the Chicago Hydras, Jones says that the experience of wearing the armor and knowing how it feels to get hit informed the writing of the combat scenes.
Jones began writing the novel in the summer of 2025, and the manuscript was put in the hands of beta readers in August. Several students from the Concordia creatives group Jones runs on Monday nights were involved in the reading process.
“He was very clear and persistent on empowering his students who were beta reading his novel, saying to be hard with him and give him the straight-up truth,” said sophomore Isabella Gentile, a member of the creatives group. “That made it less daunting, and I knew he wasn’t showing us the novel to hype him up, but to be nitpicky. It was clear that he trusted his students to give him that feedback.”
Many students in the creatives group previously had Jones as a professor, either in English Composition or in a creative writing class.
“I was thinking this is almost payback. He’s very honest with his feedback, which is what I like,” said 2025 CUC graduate Abby Porter. “Because he gave feedback on my work, it was easier to know what he was looking for in his work because I knew his thought process already.”
Porter, who is now pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, is also Jones’ social media manager.
“We have had some good feedback, people saying they like what’s happening,” Porter said. “He’s gotten new followers, gotten people who have now started to buy the book so it’s been pretty good.”
Students were also involved in the artistic elements of the project. In spring 2025, Jones held a competition for cover art and maps. Caleb Egland, a 2024 CUC graduate, won both contests with his entries, and his work is featured on the cover of the novel and inside in the form of maps.
Egland is now a freelance graphic designer. Approaching the competition “like any old client interaction,” Egland worked with Jones throughout the process, beginning with preliminary sketches and adjusting those sketches as needed to be workable for a book cover.
“It gave me a structure with which to frame the process. There’s so much in graphic design that isn’t about the skills,” Egland said. “So much of it is the client and interaction portion of it and those soft skills rather than the actual design work itself. So I’d say graphic design gave me a framework to help position the creative work in.”
Egland, in addition to designing the cover and book trailer, was also a beta reader.
“I’d been with him in the writing club for a while so what I tried to do was go into it with that kind of critical feedback in mind,” said Egland. “I tried to give him that level of attention, and I think he was pleasantly surprised by the amount of feedback I gave him.”
The beta readers helped to make character interactions more grounded and earned, Jones said, helping him to recognize and fix what he dubbed the “tremendous amount of unearned angst in the beginning chapters.”
“I am learning a lot, mostly as I go, and seeing the comments from my own students who are commenting like I would is really, really interesting and helpful for me learning,” Jones said. “I know that the second book already has a lot of major improvements in the prose as well as the structure and has a lot more earned moments.”
With the second novel already in progress and plans for an audiobook casting theater students to voice act the four different perspectives, the project is still ongoing.
“There is a stereotype in academia and with professors that they may be too pretentious and too uptight to take criticism,” Gentile said. “At least with Concordia and with Professor Jones, that was not the case. I really admire the sort of integrity he has with students at Concordia. Instead of reaching out to AI artists or other people to partake in his novel writing, he reached out to Concordia’s students and created more opportunities for them.”
The March of the Blood Red King can be purchased at Bookshop.org, on Amazon in Kindle or paperback and anywhere books are sold.
