Monday 12 February 2024

Two more short stories from The Library Trilogy!

Returns is a collection of two short stories. 

The first is called Returns (8,000 words). It looks at the journey of a single book outside the library and the journey of two librarians (Yute is one of them) sent to recover it. It's a story about varying ways different people interact with the book. When people say, "Did we read the same book?" there's a truth behind that question and I examine it here.

The second story is About Pain (6,000 words). Here the tale concerns the interactions of just two people (Clovis is one of them) with a particular book, and how what they take from the novel changes over the course of their lives. When we consume a book we may find between those covers a very different story from the next person, but more than that, when we come back to it ten years later, twenty years, thirty ... we find that the more powerful a book is, the more its contents will have changed.

Here's the cover art from the great Tom Brown.

You can buy it as prints:

A4: https://thomas-brown-1.sumupstore.com/product/wentworth-in-the-library-a4-print-1

A3: https://thomas-brown-1.sumupstore.com/product/wentworth-in-the-library-a3-print


Get yours today!

UK: amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CTYNQGBX

US: amazon.com/dp/B0CTYNQGBX

& throw some stars at it on Goodreads!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/207589471-returns





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Wednesday 3 January 2024

The Book That Broke The World - the cover art!

Unexpectedly (and, for the 2nd year in a row) the cover art for my latest book accidentally appeared on Amazon, prompting me into a hasty social media reveal using draft art, and nixing my plans for a more elaborate blogger + jigsaw puzzle reveal.

Lesson learned. Next year I do what I want with the art as soon as I get it!

Anyway - let's put that behind us and focus on the magnificence of Tom Roberts' work.


Here's a small portion near the last "t" of "That" blown up!


Have a search and see if you can spot a certain doggy from book 1.

Anyway - you'll have to wait until early April for the contents. Pre-order, why don't you?

US

UK

And of course, the short story "Overdue" is there if you want more Library RIGHT NOW!


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Friday 29 December 2023

The Fake Me, and how utterly crap / irresponsible Facebook is.

About 6 weeks ago people started telling me about a fake account on Facebook that was going around pretending to be me and trying to scam authors.

Here is is:  https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100089611129570

They've stolen my photo and show my books:


The account's interactions with other authors sent up immediate red flags - they were trying to sell writing services.

The account has been reported hundreds of times but nearly 2 months later it's still operating, still trying to scam people. Only today I was told by someone that the account had approached them and encourage them to use this person's marketing services:



Note - I have only the word of one facebook user concerning this connection and I am making no accusations against this person.

I have no such reservations concerning the person using my image to try to scam people though.

Facebook on the other hand, seem perfectly happy with the situation. Despite hundreds of people reporting the account, and it being a blatant example of scamming with all the evidence right out in the open ... 6 weeks later they're fine with the scammer still scamming.


That's it. Just be careful out there. I'm busy writing. I don't go contacting random people I've never spoken to.


UPDATE!

Clearly someone else reported the account today (probably the guy who alerted me that the account had just tried to scam them):


It took the braniacs at Facebook ONE MINUTE to decide that the account using my name, my photo, and images of my books "isn't pretending to be you".... 



                                      

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Saturday 16 December 2023

My reading in 2023

I do this every year, so you can step back for more than a decade should you so choose. Here's the link to 2022.


Goodreads (via its 'Year in reading') decided to make The Blacktongue Thief bigger than the rest, but coincidentally it is my favourite read of 2023.

All of these were good reads and several of them were excellent. The Words of Kings and Prophets was a fine follow up to The Children of Gods and Fighting Men. The Prophet of Edan was a strong sequel to The Way of Edan. I'm looking forward to book 3 in both these trilogies.

Here are links to my Goodreads reviews for all 9 books (in the order I read them):


The Blacktongue Thief

A Discovery of Witches

Sons of Darkness

The Hexologists

Morgan of Sea and Storms

The Prophet of Edan

The Words of Kings and Prophets

The Tenth Gift

Hills of Heather and Bone







 

Thursday 14 December 2023

A Year In Numbers ... 13!

Wow ... 13. I've been at this a while. It's starting to rival the time spent doing my 'real' job, the 23 years spent as a research scientist (overlapping 5 of the 13 years spent as a published author).

I'm actually starting to get old 😮

60 has been sighted in the not too distant future.

Anyway, onto the traditional accounting:


It has been a very good 2023 all told!

I have spent some weeks in hospital with my youngest daughter which is never much fun, but they were somewhat less critical than in the previous 3 years, and there's never been a year of her life we didn't spend some time there. I did quadrupal my number of nights with zero sleep, which had previously stood at 1, arising from a ball at university and the studenting afterwards. The three this year resulted from stays of 27, 23, and 19 hours in the emergency room with Celyn.

This post follows up from similar posts at the same time in 20222021202020192018201720162015201420132012 and 2011 I record a year of ups and less ups. I take a minute to do the sums and raid the scrapbook.

I've now had my Patreon for more than 2 years and it has been great fun so far. It's a platform that allows readers to support authors directly and encourages more exchange. I've done loads of chapter critques, sent out 100+ signed books as prizes, tuckerised a bunch of people. We have a Discord that gets a lot of chat, and each Patreon tier comes with perks, which can be anything from book plates, and free stories, to free signed books and writing consults. I currently have 118 patrons, up 5 from last year, so a definite slowdown there, but these are hard times for lots of people - many thanks!


The Book That Wouldn't Burn came out in 2023, opening the Library Trilogy trilogy (correct, the trilogy is called The Library Trilogy).    



The book's performed well with multiple reprints in hardcover and it made the Goodreads Choice Awards for best fantasy. It's just passed 9,000 ratings, which probably makes it my bestselling book since one or all of the Ancestor trilogy.

April 2023 sees the release of book 2, 

I can't share the cover yet, but here's a small detail!



Pre-order for the win (US or UK)! 

10th anniversary editions of Emperor of Thorns are coming from The Broken Binding!

They're signed & numbered.

In the US you can order a leather-bound deluxe copy with internal art from original cover artist Jason Chan. An object of beauty!



Lies, damn lies, and statistics to follow:

Goodreads continues to bug out in major ways every week, but at least this year my stats have headed up rather than down. In fact, having gathered over 42,000 new ratings I've passed the half million mark!





The blog is bumping along around 1,000 hits a day - which isn't terrible - and passed 4.5 million in total in 2023.


The blog also had what was by far its biggest single day ever (a hair shy of 100,000 hits), after an AI-generated cover won the SPFBO cover contest after being misrepresent as the work of a human artist.

I'm still on Instagram. And have added Threads and Bluesky to the failing Pintrest and Tumblr (I'm easy enough to find on them and too lazy to put links). 

And finally, as ever, our favourite cesspit of witch hunts and fake news: Twitter, where I continue my crawl forward with an extra 2,200 followers this year, despite Mr Musk's continuing attempts to incinerate his 44 billion dollars.





Many thanks to all my readers for keeping me going! I hope you all have happy holidays and that 2024 is good to us all!




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Monday 27 November 2023

Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Fantasy 2023

THE BOOK THAT WOULDN'T BURN got selected for the Goodreads Choice Awards nominee list, of 20 titles vying for Best Fantasy of 2023.

This happened to my first dozen or so books, with a bunch of them making the finals (I think King of Thorns came 4th!), but it hasn't happened for a while, and the merging of the fantasy catagory with paranormal romance buried the chances of making the list for a lot of epic fantasy since romance is so popular.

(For the record my books have been in the Goodreads Choice Award category for Best Fantasy eleven times, once in the Best Science Fiction category, for One Word Kill, and miraculously I was even in as an artist! That was for Wheelmouse And All The Crazy Robots which I did with Cely and was included in the award's Best Picturebook category.)

Anyway, don't be mistaken: this is entirely a popularity contest.

I'm posting this late since the first round of voting has just finished, and I very much doubt I'll make the final ten.

This year there's a new catagory called Romantasy, that has sucked out a lot of the super popular romance fantasies from the Fantasy catagory and this (plus the success of TBTWB) has allowed me to sneak back onto the list.

Here are some of the nominees.


The reason I make a song and dance about the vote is that it's a great marketing opportunity, and when you write for a living, such chances are not to sniffed at.

Look at the impact of the contest on the "to read" stats of TBTWB!




I say this is a popularity contest because it's the simple truth. Very few readers will have read more than a handful of the 20 nominees. I suspect most will have read 0 or 1.

Thus people are going to vote primarily for the book they read, rather than compare across the field and vote for the one they thought was best.

Votes will be tightly correlated with number of readers, which in turn is tightly correlated with number of Goodreads ratings.

Below, I've plotted "number of goodreads ratings" for the 20 titles, and indicated TBTWB with an arrow. As you can see, it's one of the least read titles, and as such has almost no chance of making the final ten.


However, if it did, that would be big boost in visibility, and thus it's well worth motivating my readership to vote for the book.

Additionally, every vote appears in that reader's friends' timestreams on Goodreads and advertises to them the fact that their friend really liked the book. And that helps win me more readers.

So it's all good!


Technical aside: 

A final note on selection. It's a numerical thing, not a value judgement. Goodreads runs an algorithm that looks at 'number of ratings', 'number of "to reads", and average rating. It also applies a heavy weighting towards book 1s.

The weighting for "average rating" can't be linear since this year Godkiller didn't make the list despite having more ratings than TBTWB (~10k vs ~8k) and similar "to read" / "added" numbers. The difference in average rating can't account for the selection in a linear mannner, so clearly having a lower average hurts quite a bit.


So, that's it! Many thanks for reading the book, and for voting for it, if you did.



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Tuesday 14 November 2023

THE BOOK THAT WOULDN'T BURN cover art!

You can get Tom Robert's raw art in poster-sized A2 format on deluxe paper. There's a ton of detail that goes unresolved on the book covers and can be dived into in this magnificent image.


Here is my framed copy along side Tom Brown's uncoloured original for the cover of the library short story, Overdue. The coloured version seen at an unflattering angle on the carpet.

The massive picture is Jason Chan's cover art for Prince of Thorns.

Get your copy of Tom Robert's cover art here: https://tomrobertsillustration.com/





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