Wednesday 29 June 2016

Got ink?

Here are a selection of photos people have sent me of tattoos inspired by the Broken Empire, Red Queen's War, and Book of the Ancestor trilogies.

For the record, I have no tattoos. Nothing against them, I just prefer my tattoos on other people!






















From Morty's Tattoo & Piercing on Instagram (where there is a video of it!)










Nathan Soares

A work in progress from Robert



And this one from Matt Rosa is inspired by Keot from Grey Sister!

And a Jorg from Morty


Bruno has a Jorg from the Road Brothers paperback cover.



Here's a Yaz (from the UK cover of The Girl And The Stars, With a Jorg from the King of Thorns cover, and a Nona from the Polish edition of Red Sister!


Jack's tattoo is inspired by the Book of the Ancestor - Nona's easy to spot

Jai S - slightly modified text



And this beauty is on Logan Schaeper's arm, based on the special edition art from Jason Chan.


Tuesday 28 June 2016

Stuff I've read...

This list is the reddit r/fantasy list of favourite fantasy books/series (votes on the left).

I've highlighted the ones that I've read at least one book from (most often it's just the one book I've read). So now you know!




Saturday 25 June 2016

Shameless Self-Promotion

It's right there in that phrase:

Shameless self-promotion.

It's not hidden, it's not subtle:  You should be ashamed of yourself.

The 'shameless' isn't even required. Most of the time if you hear someone say the words the distaste is evident in their tone, especially if you hear them spoken in the UK. The US is a little more forgiving.

And sure, there are circumstances where self-promotion can be an unpleasant thing. In an office/company environment, promoting yourself at the expense of others might be a necessary evil to some, or classless and unfair to others.


But for authors? C'mon! We're one person sales-machines. We write books. We need them to sell. We're not stamping on someone else's chance. And who else is going to promote them?

"The readers!" you answer. "If you can't rely on your readers to promote your work ... it must be a bit shit, no?"

Well, yes, word of mouth, one reader to the next, is the best sales mechanism any writer has and moves a lot of books... but why should it end there?

Should we only ever lift boxes with one arm for fear that if we use two we'll be seen to be 'trying too hard'? Or should we use all the resources at our disposal?

I earn my living as a writer. I pay my bills with the portion of each book's sale price that comes my way. Why would I not use the social media options at my disposal to remind people when those books come out, get discounted etc? Who else is going to do it for me?

Self-promotion for authors means book promotion. We're not declaring ourselves to have great teeth and spectacular soccer skills ... or to be better humans than the next person ... we're saying 'buy my book' in as interesting a way as we can.