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Book Signing Jitters

Books, check. Reservations, Check. Nerves… Double check.

To those of you that don’t know, I’m going to be at SVScon this weekend.

And the bad thing about focusing on the ebook market is that this will be the first time meeting my potentiel readers face-to-face. And frankly, I’m scared to death.

Okay, okay, I know I’m being melodramatic, but it’s my blog. I’m allowed to be.

It’s so easy only dealing with people on the internet. You have plenty of time to think about your answers so you might actually sound intelligent(People don’t have to know that you used an hour thinking about the best way to answer if you like the color green…). And I can always choose not to read my reviews.

If people stop at my booth and pick up my book, I have nowhere to run to avoid hearing them say if they love or hate what they read. And I really like having the opportunity to run!

Don’t get me wrong, I love hearing from people who have read my books! But at the same time I fear it.

I think the anticipation is the worst… I have never had problems after hearing someone critisize my writing, but the waiting time before knowing if people are going to say something negative kills me!

I’m definitely in the wrong business. If I ever get successful enough to frequently have my books reviewed, I will die from the stress I put myself through every time I know I have a new review, but can’t bring myself to read it and get it over with.

But back to the book signing… I really can’t just avoid opening my email or block certain people to avoid hearing others’ opinions, can I?

This seemed like such a good idea when I agreed to it…

Well, you can look forward to hearing all about it if I survive the weekend! I will be sure to take pictures for those of you who can’t attend.

I will also be back to blogging about the business of indie publishing after the weekend, so feel free to send me relevant topic or news you would like to discuss in the following week!

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Indie Publishing vs Traditional Publishing

Heart Book

——-

Let me start out by saying that I have never sent a manuscript to a literary agent or a publisher. From the beginning, I knew that countless rejection letters would quickly kill my love of writing and I would rather have the dream of seeing my book on the shelves remain a dream, than go through that.

Which is why this isn’t the bitter talk of someone who was never able to publish the traditional way, but merely the view of someone who never tried. 

Self-publishing has a bad reputation and it has been that way for a long, long time. There’s still many people who refuse to call independent writers for “real” authors. They believe that all indies are people whose writing is just not good enough to be published.

That is far from the case for many indies.

Just because you never got accepted by a traditional publisher doesn’t mean that you don’t have a great piece of work in your book. After all, J.K Rowling was rejected many times when she sent the manuscripts for the Harry Potter books to different publishers. How many books have she sold now? 450 million copies was the last number I heard.

The fact is, agents and publishers only accept books that have worked before. After Twilight became a success, the market was stormed with supernatural YA fiction and vampire novels, both good and bad. They all had that in common that the publishers knew they had a market for those books.

Many, many, many books have been rejected because, though well-written, were too original or far-fetched. Publishers need to earn money like everyone else, and they are rarely willing to take a chance on something. Which is why so many great books never see the light of the book store.

Don’t get me wrong, some indie books are horrible. The both good and bad thing about indie publishing is that everyone can publish anything. That means that there is no quality control. Poorly edited books with grammar so bad that it makes your toes curl, and plots where nothing make sense at all, find their ways to the online retailers because there’s no one sorting through the trash.

It’s perfectly understandable that readers may hesitate before buying a self-published book, because there’s no guarantee it isn’t a piece of garbage. But on the other hand, indie books give you the opportunity to find books so mind-blowingly unique that you’re willing to swear off traditional books forever.

Exactly because there’s no one sorting through the books, the original ideas that agents won’t take a chance on are now within your reach. If you want an urban fantasy story, you can actually find books that aren’t rip-offs of Twilight, because indie authors doesn’t have  to write something that’s already been written. There has been no one to tell them that there isn’t a market for their kind of stories, so books are no longer restricted by trends. Now only the imagination of the writers set the limit.

Many writers also choose the way of indie publishing, not because they can’t get published by a traditional publisher, but because being an indie gives you all the freedom and control a publishing contract would take away from you.

A publisher decide your cover, they can make you cut or rewrite entire chapters of your book if they doesn’t think it should be there. It could be the most important scene in the book in your mind, but it would have to go.

You wouldn’t have full control of how and where your book was sold either, because the rights would now be with the publisher.

And even if you get accepted by an agent, would you really want to wait years before your book hit the stores? Just because someone believe your work is suited for publishing, there’s so much that needs to be done before your book gets into print. Choose a Print-on-Demand service and have your book in your hands within a month.

The only thing traditional publishing really gives you is the backing of their name and easier access to a proper editor. For that they take most of whatever income the book will gain and at the same time depends rights to do what they like with the book.

I’m sure there’s a lot of authors who will disagree with me, and they are welcome to! But looking from where I stand, being an indie seems to be a better deal these days.

The war between traditional publishers and indies still rages, and I think I will just sit back and watch what the outcome will be.

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Fantasy the Indie Way

The world of Indie books has broadened the fantasy genre in a way that hasn’t been seen since Harry Potter and I have been looking around to create a small list of promising Indie fantasy books!

I will select some of them to read and review here on the site, but for now I would love to hear your opinions of the books you have read:

Dark Waters

Egan Wey is a pirate, a scoundrel and the luckiest son of a… female canine that ever braved the ocean. A scarred past forces his mouth to thebottle and he is drawn to trouble like… well like he is drawn to thebottle. He does bad things for men who would rather not get their hands dirty, but one fateful night, in the corner of a lowlife’s tavern he is offered a job by Finn Fernwick, a young priest, that will not only challenge his skills but stretch his sanity to breaking point.

What begins as a fairytale rescue quickly decays into a nightmare of epic proportion as Wey and Finn combat zombies, privateers and a psychotic, despot prince. Can two men really save the world from drowning around them? Or will they drag every sorry excuse for a scallywag into the depths with them?

Check out Dark Waters

Innocent Hearts

When Bronwen’s parents die she has to leave her home in the wilderness and try to find the elf city her mother told her about, but with little food and no experience in the wild she risks her life just trying.

Liza doesn’t fit into the Nepharil society, she can’t fly, something her father reminds her of daily. She hasn’t given up trying but her time is running out and her father is impatient to have her married and out of his hands.

This ebook has two short stories set in the same fantasy world.

Check out Innocent Hearts

ALTOR: The Shadow Rebellion

What does a Sorcerer-Guardian do when his perfect world begins to crumble around him?

As appealing as the thought of being a Sorcerer-Guardian is to Ajay Samuels, the harmonious existence between all Ageronians and Earthlies leaves little reason for him to put his abilities into practice. Abilities that should set him apart from the rest of his kind due to his status as an Altor; the elite and powerful body of seven succeeding families of the original seven Sorcerers elected to oversee and govern Ageron.

His monotonous life begins to change soon after experiencing a strange dream, and following his most vivid of premonitions, he senses a danger he knows too little of to do anything about. The world as he knows it all but vanishes following the most unexpected of confrontations with a new and powerful enemy he has never before had much to do with.

On his quest for further information, Ajay is confronted with more than he could ever have envisioned, and he knows everything about his life is about to change; for the worse.

Check out ALTOR: The Shadow Rebellion (The Chronicles of Ageron)


Origin(Legends of the Known Lands)

A young heroine’s journey, initiated by a violent attack upon her only family, thrusts her into a world filled with death, deception, desperation and ultimately, a new beginning.

After a savage attack upon her only known relative Elwyn, a sheltered village maiden of sixteen is forced to embark upon a journey to the city of Findara in the land of Silvendil, to seek protection from the father she only recently learned existed. She is catapulted from the safety and security of her small village into a world full of assassins, dangerous creatures, and political intrigue. She discovers allies in the morden, the drakenhawks, the werecats, and her newly discovered uncle. Elwyn and her companions quickly realize that, unless they can find the answers to some key questions regarding her mother’s death, reaching Findara may place her in even greater danger. Some of the answers they seek are found in an old diary left to her by her mother, some are pieced together by her allies, but others still seem to elude them. As the journey nears its end, Elwyn recognizes she is being called to a destiny that is only just beginning.

Check out Origin (Legends of the Known Lands)

The Firestone Crystal

Agathea Fulstropp is a lonely 11-year-old girl, a bit on the moody side, and more than a little spoilt.

She is looking forward to a luxury break in the Caribbean with her parents, but is livid when they announce
that the trip has to be cancelled due to work commitments! So instead of spending six weeks sunning herself on a tropical beach, Thea – as she insists on being called – finds herself unceremoniously packed up, and sent off to stay with a grandfather she barely knows for the entire summer!

But it turns out to be the best summer of her life when her grandfather has a strange reunion with a mysterious childhood friend, and she is given the opportunity of a lifetime.

To visit a world beyond the stars, and become Earth’s first student to be enrolled in an experimental Inter-Planetary Education Programme at the Firestone Academy, where lessons in telepathy, mind-reading and astral projection are the norm.

Things, however, are not as straightforward as they seem. One of her fellow students makes no secret of the fact that he despises her, and will stop at nothing to make her leave…she is having increasingly disturbingly vivid dreams…and just who is that hideously deformed cave creature, and more to the point, what does it want with her?

Check out The Firestone Crystal

Hearth: Exile

A man awakens to find himself half-in, half-out of a trashcan in a back alley behind the Boathouse Restaurant in Central Park, New York City. He has no idea who he is, where he is, or how he got there. He doesn’t even know his own name, except that it begins with a ‘Br’ sound. In Book One of the Hearth trilogy, this man wanders the streets of New York in search of his identity, his memories, and his name. He is joined along the way by two companions, an orphan
girl named Page, and a similarly memory-challenged woman named Lauren. Together they seek answers to an unfolding and ever-growing mystery, watched over by Sister Regina, the head of the Convent where they are staying . . . and as they
begin to find answers, as they begin to discover more and more clues to Lauren and Brinn’s predicament, something stalks them – an ancient and deadly Evil from before the dawn of recorded history. A clock is ticking now, and they better solve the mystery of their origins and who they are soon. For it is not just they and everyone around them who are threatened; the entire fate of humanity and of two worlds depends upon them.

Check out Hearth: Exile

Breath of Air

Her name was Capri, and she was Air. She was born with a gift she didn’t understand. A gift so strange, so remarkable that she had kept it secret for as long as she could remember, despising that it made her different when all she wanted was to be normal, to belong. As an orphan, belonging to someone, anyone, would have been an incredible blessing, one she would have given up all that she had just to get a taste of. But the truth was that she didn’t belong in the orphanage in Virginia, or even in the United States. In fact, she didn’t belong with human beings at all. Because she wasn’t one of them, not really. She was something much more extraordinary. She could shift the direction of the wind, create billowing clouds out of nothing, and charm birds into dancing on her open palm. She belonged to an elite group of beings, responsible for preserving the balance of nature and the safety of Earth from an underworld that deserved to be feared, and needed to be controlled. And after years of being lost, she had at last been found, and now the truth of how she had ended up so far from home was becoming horribly clear to her. But there’s someone who doesn’t want her to return; someone who knows Capri was the only witness to an act of heinous treason and violent murder. And when she begins to search her memories for details of the night she was taken from her home, details that will implicate a killer, she finds herself the unwary target of an otherworldly dark force intent on silencing her by any means possible.

Check out Breath of Air

If you want your fantasy book added to the list, throw me a comment with a link to your Amazon page! 

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28 Inspirational or Humorous Quotes by Writers

A small collection of fantastic quotes about writing that always put a smile on my face!

1.”A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.”

– Sidney Sheldon

2. “A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run.”

– Channing Pollock

3. “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

– E.L. Doctorow

4. “What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.”

– Burton Rascoe

5. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

– Stephen King

6. “It’s not plagiarism – I’m recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do.”

– Uniek Swain

7. “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”

– Gustave Flaubert

8. “If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don’t remove it – I might be writing in my dreams.”

– Terri Guillemets

9. “Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.”

– Robert Benchley

10. “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”

– Truman Capote

11. “I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.”

– Stephen King

‎12. “I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.”

 – G. K. Chesterton

13. “Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.”

– Robert Benchley

14. “The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”

– André Gide

15. “Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear – and devils, too.”

– Terri Guillemets

16. “Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”

– Jules Renard

17. “I write because I’m afraid to say some things out loud.”

– Gordon Atkinson

18. “If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don’t remove it – I might be writing in my dreams.”

– Terri Guillemets

19. “It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.”

– Sinclair Lewis

20. “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”

– Saul Bellow

 21. “Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.”

– Samuel Johnson

22. “Most editors are failed writers – but so are most writers.”

– T.S. Eliot

23. “Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.”

– Don Marquis

24. “A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.”

– Baltasar Gracián

25.  “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”

– James Michener

26. “Asking a writer what they think about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it thinks about dogs.”

– Christopher Hampton

27. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club”

– Jack London

28. “It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”

– Robert Benchley

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9 Ways To Write a Successful YA Fantasy

After the success of Twilight that had every teenage girl sigh longingly over pale guys with serious mental problems, every popular YA book started to include certain elements.

Here’s a list of things your book MUST have if you want to have squealy girls crucify anyone who dares criticize it!

WARNING: This list might contain bashing of highly popular books, Twilight fan girls, shiny vampires and garden gnomes. If you don’t have a healthy amount of self-irony, please avert your eyes. If you own a garden gnome, give me an axe.

  1. Create a Female Main Character With the Personality of a Doorknob If you look at the current books that are declared masterpieces by every Twilight fan girl out there, you’ll see that an acceptable protagonist doesn’t have to have much more depth than roadkill.
  2. Make the Setting a Small Town High School Vampires and other supernatural creatures seem to have abandoned the castles and dungeons and are rushing to get an High School education or 5. Some would think being immortal would teach you enough, but I see that it might be very useful to read about Jane Austen if it has been a few decades since you met her last.
  3. Enter Mysterious Angsty, But Oh-So-Dreamy Guy Have him being a vampire is the obvious choice, but another kind of supernatural creature works as well. Describe him as charming and nice, even though he actually acts like a jerk and have him angst about how dangerous and horrible he is at least once every other page.
  4. Have Doorknob Female Fall Irrevokely In Love With Mysterious Guy At First Glance ‘Cause the fact that he’s an a-hole who wants to kill you hardly matters as long as he’s good-looking. And that he glares at you and avoid you at all times just show how absolutely crazy he is about you!
  5. Have Mysterious Guy Mysteriously Disappear at Seemingly Random Times ‘Cause we will never figure out why he runs off when you start bleeding. Hmm, what could that be about?
  6. Enter Hunky Not-as-Angsty Guy Be sure to have him be the exact opposite of Mysterious Guy. If Mysterious Guy is a vampire, have Hunky Guy be a Werewolf. If Mysterious Guy is a demon, Hunky is an angel! And he should be completely crazy about Doorknob Female even though she treats him as dirt and only have eyes for the Angst Fest.
  7. Have Everyone and Their Mother Try to Kill Doorknob Female If you want to date a vampire, his family will try to eat you. But everyone have trouble with the in-laws, right?
  8. Always Have Guy Save Girl It’s extremely important that the girl can’r do anything by herself and need the guy to save her every time she breaks a nail or gets maimed by various bad guys.
  9. Be Sure to Use the Exact Same Plot as Twilight Works every time! If necessary, switch out the vampire with some other immortal dude and have the guy be the newcomer to the girl’s High School instead. Wouldn’t want copyright problems with Stephanie Meyer, now would we?