Launching Battleborn: An Interview with Editor Sean C.W. Korsgaard
Deep in the underground tunnels of Black Gate’s vast Indiana Annex, I sat down with Sean C.W. Korsgaard and we embarked on a lively chat about his upcoming S&S magazine, Battleborn – what it is, where it’s headed, and how S&S fits into our contemporary literary landscape. The Indiegogo to jump-start Battleborn closes on September 30th, so read on to see if you’d like to join in on the action.
Why start a new Sword & Sorcery magazine in 2025? Are you worried about competition from other S&S magazines? And what sets Battleborn apart?
First, we are very fortunate that after decades of being in the doldrums, sword-and-sorcery is seeing a genuine renaissance. We have the biggest group of talented writers the genre has seen since the 1970s. There’s an entire market starved for heroic, action focused fantasy, and we are building Battleborn on that!
As for the extant sword-and-sorcery magazines, by and large, we see them as comrades in arms, and many have been very supportive of Battleborn every step of the way. Old Moon Quarterly gave us their list of interior artists they recommended; Cirsova helped us get contact information on a couple of reclusive indie authors we wanted; Goodman Games and Paradigm Concepts both helped us on setting up the GoFundMe and production, and I know I try to plug them and everyone from DMR Books to NESS while doing promotion.
I’m an Army veteran, and I am still a firm believer in an old soldier’s motto: “One team, one fight.” We all want sword-and-sorcery to thrive and grow, and for all of our magazines and small presses to thrive and grow with it.
It does help that everybody in the genre has their niche – sword-and-sorcery has a lot of flavors and styles to come in, and we have a magazine for almost all of them. Old Moon is very horror influenced, Cirsova has been part of the Pulp revival since the start, NESS is very much driven by weird and experimental fiction. Which is where Battleborn comes in, filling a major niche that hasn’t yet had a magazine cater to it specifically: action-heavy, character-driven fiction.
When Howard Andrew Jones first coined the term “New Edge”, he talked about treating it like polishing the rust off a cherished old blade, keeping what works about sword-and-sorcery, still honoring classics and traditions, while taking it in some new directions too. Now we’ve got plenty of new, but I worry we’ve neglected the edge––this is a sword we’re talking about, not a safety razor. There should be a bit of danger to it. I want that in every issue of Battleborn, fire and fury, chest-thumping bravado, that heroic tradition that has left audiences on the edges of their seats since we began gathering around the campfires to swap stories of valor, countless centuries ago.
Magazines in a digital age can take many forms. How did you settle on print as the way to go?
I would argue it’s critical for any publication to have both, and we will do both from Day One. I know that Howard Andrew Jones came to regret that Tales from the Magician’s Skull was physical and PDF only. Not being on Kindle cost the magazine entire markets and a ton of sales. I firmly believe that you need that digital sales option, not only for scores of American readers who might be light on shelf space, but legions of international ones, where shipping and distribution can prove catastrophically expensive for an indie press.
You can’t be entirely digital either though – one only needs to look at the Amazon listings for sword-and-sorcery to see that. One hundred books from Tolkien to Romantasy, and not an actual work of sword-and-sorcery among them. Fighting for notice online is hard work, there’s a reason successful indie authors have more exhaustive knowledge of marketing and algorithms than some entire publishers’ sales teams.
Meanwhile, physical sales still account for a large part of the market, and a not insignificant part of first time discovery by readers. That’s especially true in sword-and-sorcery, where used bookstores and splashy covers helped the subgenre to bring in new readers for decades. We want to be available in physical form, not just for the collector or the genre fan to place on shelves with pride, but to be on the store shelves and expand the genre and our bottom line along the way.
One other avenue we hope to dive feet-first into with Battleborn? Audio, a huge market and revenue stream so many short fiction outlets have not pursued, and maybe if we prove successful at it, some of our brothers-in-arms can follow.
What’s an early still-sets-your-pulse-racing memory of reading sword and sorcery?
Just like in fighting and romance, you don’t forget your first.
I was thirteen years old, living with my grandparents in Terre Haute, Indiana. There was a used bookstore exactly a mile from our house, and my grandmother, being an English professor who did a damn fine job making sure I loved to read from a young age, would send me off on my bike with a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket. So long as I spent half of it on books, I could spend the rest on old movies or video games. Once I’d read those books in a week or two, she’d send me back for more with a fresh twenty.
Those treks did so much to shape me into who I became today, from my love of old Hong Kong action movies to my taste for JRPGs, but as a reader? I burned through everything from Clive Cussler to Orson Scott Card, and yeah, tons of doorstopper fantasy like Jordan’s Wheel of Time or Goodkind’s Sword of Truth. I’d already read R.A. Salvatore’s Forgotten Realms novels, Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle, and The Lord of the Rings. But up until that point, I very much preferred sci-fi to fantasy.
That all changed the first time I saw a Conan paperback. It was The Hour of the Dragon, the version edited by Karl Edward Wagner with the Ken Kelly cover art. I had to have it, and after paying a princely sum of one dollar, I did – a contender for the best dollar I’ve ever spent. I read it at night, and if that cover lit a spark, Robert E. Howard’s prose turned it into a wildfire.
My next few treks to the store I must have tried to buy every last thing with Robert E. Howard or Conan’s name on it. Have you ever wondered how “Clonans” became an industry? Teenagers like me who didn’t know any better, and were happy to buy every last book that had a swordsman killing a monster on the cover. Thankfully, there were some real gems. I fell in love with Michael Moorcock’s Elric and Hawkmoon as readily as I had Conan. Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, and Karl Edward Wagner became dear favorites too, among others.
I wouldn’t even learn that that style of fantasy had a name until years later: sword-and-sorcery. I spent the next twenty years chasing that same feeling of reading Conan or Elric for the first time.
Years later, I would learn another Terre Haute resident frequented that same store around that time: Howard Andrew Jones. I like to think there’s a chance that one of those first sword-and-sorcery paperbacks I picked up could have once been one of his.
That store still has an incredible selection of fantasy paperbacks and pulp fiction, so for those of you trekking through the Midwest, the place is called Books DVD Games, and it’s on 3001 South 7th Street #61, Terre Haute, IN 47802. Tell ’em Sean C.W. Korsgaard sent ya’.
At this point in the interview, the resident kobolds started kicking up a fuss, so Sean and I strapped on our scale mail and got down to business, beating back the hordes, protecting humanity. No, don’t thank us; it’s all in a day’s work. But please do check back here at Black Gate for Part Two of the Battleborn interviews, coming shortly!
To explore Battleborn’s Indiegogo page, click HERE.
Mark Rigney is a writer and long-time Black Gate blogger. His work on this site includes original fiction and perennially popular posts like “Adventures in Spellcraft: Rope Trick.” About his new novel, Vinyl Wonderland, reviewer Rich Horton said, “I was brought to tears, tears I trusted. A lovely work.” His favorite review quote so far comes from Instagram: “Holy crap on a cracker, it’s so good.” A preview post can be found HERE, while his website lives over THERE. He is pleased to report that his story, “The Icehawk,” is slated to appear in an early issue of Battleborn.
