Year: 2014

Other World Mapper: Kickstarter

Other World Mapper: Kickstarter

I’ve always been terrible at art. Really. I can’t even draw convincing stick people. It never really mattered much, though, because I never needed to. I left all that painting, drawing and generally arty stuff to those with a talent for it. But now I’m writing fantasy, and really, a little drawing skill might be a rather useful thing to have, because – maps. Every fantasy world has to have a map, right? I’ve had people ask about maps for my stories. Oh, but you’ll have one when the book is published, won’t you? Well, no, because: see above. And I really can’t afford professional artwork for a map. Now, I know there is already software out there that supposedly allows anyone to draw maps, and I’ve even tried some of them, without any success. My hand-drawn back-of-the-envelope efforts are better, frankly. But I keep hoping for something simple enough […]

Posted October 23, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in General / 1 Comment

Mystery Review: ‘Hushabye’ by Celina Grace

Mystery Review: ‘Hushabye’ by Celina Grace

This is one of those British-based police procedural books where the author did pretty much everything right – interesting characters, a nice (but not gory) murder mystery/kidnapping, some intriguing reveals along the way – all in a pleasant, undemanding style. I enjoyed the read but it never quite caught fire for me, somehow. The central character is Kate Redman, a detective with a history, starting a new job with a case involving a disappearing baby and a murdered nanny. The parents are a workaholic self-made businessman and his Z-list celebrity wife. Kate has to unravel the mystery while staying on the right side of her new colleagues and keeping her past firmly out of sight. None of this is particularly radical, but the methodical police work rustles up enough clues to keep the pages turning. The writing style is sometimes pedestrian: whenever our trusty detectives meet with potential suspects, greetings […]

Posted October 18, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Kindle Unlimited: a change of heart

It’s only a couple of weeks since I wrote about Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s all-you-can-read subscription service, and concluded that I probably wouldn’t bother with it. And there I was this morning, looking at a non-fiction work and dithering. It was one of those how-to books that are so common nowadays, under a hundred pages but not too expensive. So why did I dither? Because I knew perfectly well that if I bought it, I would skim through it, find a few paragraphs interesting, forget the rest and never read it again. Very few such books are real ‘keepers’, that I would want to go back to repeatedly. I could have got it for free through my Prime account, of course, but I can’t do that from the Amazon book page. I would have to find my Kindle, connect to the store, search for the book all over again and only […]

Posted October 16, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in General / 2 Comments

‘The Plains of Kallanash’: the first month

A month ago, my first fantasy novel went live on Amazon. This is a status report of what’s happened to it since. Marketing strategy Erm… what marketing strategy? Experienced authors publishing their umpteenth book plan the launch with meticulous attention to detail, organising street teams to post reviews and spread the word, scheduling promotional campaigns with military precision and adjusting on a daily or even hourly basis if sales and rankings underperform. I didn’t do any of that. The received wisdom is that sales can’t be expected to take off until the third book at least, and even then only in popular, high-turnover genres like romance and YA, and when the books are arranged into a neat series. I write stand-alones, loosely linked but not in a series, in epic fantasy with added romance (sort of). So a big promotional push would almost certainly be a waste of money. My […]


A new review of ‘The Plains of Kallanash’

There haven’t been many reviews yet – one on Amazon, one on the UK Amazon also posted to Goodreads – so every extra one is much appreciated. Today marks the first review by a book blogger, although, to be fair, Anachronist is an online friend of some years’ standing, and also my fellow contributor over at book review site Fantasy Review Barn. She also beta read Kallanash for me, so not quite a random stranger. Here’s a snippet from the review: However you know what I liked the best? Like in real life there were no baddies rotten to the core, no really. Or rather I should say the baddies were so three-dimensional and complicated that, after a while, you didn’t perceive them as completely negative characters. You can read the full review (and many other great book reviews) at Anachronist’s blog here. And watch out for her interview with […]

Posted October 15, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing / 0 Comments

Fantasy Romance Review: ‘The Lost Book of Anggird’ by Kyra Halland

Fantasy Romance Review: ‘The Lost Book of Anggird’ by Kyra Halland

This is exactly the sort of book I love: a well-conceived fantasy world with an intriguing magic system; some great characters who behave in a believable way; a plot that’s driven more by the background and characters than the need for relentless action; and a strong, satisfying romance. Why can’t all fantasy be like this? Let’s start with the characters. Perarre (no, I don’t know how it’s pronounced) is a woman determined to make a success of her career in a male-dominated world. After a wild phase, she’s settled down to an academic life as a translator of old books, aided by her ability to magically ‘read’ the intent of the author (and haven’t we all read books where we could have used a talent like that?). Roric is the buttoned-up and demanding professor she ends up working for, a man hiding a surprising past. He’s given the task of […]

Posted October 10, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

‘The Fire Mages’: beta readers wanted

‘The Fire Mages’: beta readers wanted

Another book, another step on the road to publication. Yes, ‘The Fire Mages’ is critiqued and revised, and now it’s ready for beta readers. But here’s the problem: only two people have read it from beginning to end so far, and they both loved it. My daughter loved it so much that when I told her I was revising it, she said: ‘No! Don’t change anything.’ So now I’m looking for readers who will tear it to shreds and tell me everything that’s wrong with it. I want people who will find the plot-holes, the implausibilities, the continuity errors. Because nothing’s perfect, right? ‘The Fire Mages’ is quite different from ‘The Plains of Kallanash’, being a much more conventional fantasy work. It’s about a young girl with an unusual ability, a coming-of-age story. If I knew how to define the YA genre, it might be that, too. There’s plenty of […]


Fantasy Review: ‘Silvana The Greening’ by Belinda Mellor

Fantasy Review: ‘Silvana The Greening’ by Belinda Mellor

What a lovely book. Literate, elegant and charming, with a touch of whimsy, this is a story in the high fantasy style of Tolkien, although on a more domestic scale. It’s set in a world where tree spirits, Silvanii, reside in trees in the wildwood, living in harmony with men. Occasionally, a Silvana will choose to take a human husband, leaving her tree to take human form and live a different life. The story focuses on Fabiom, son of the lord of Deepvale, following his life from age four through to maturity. Fabiom has always been drawn to the wildwood, and on the eve of his seventeenth birthday he determines to try to win a Silvana wife for himself. What happens that night and afterwards affects him and his family deeply, and changes his whole life, bringing conflict between his duties as lord and holder, and the needs of the […]

Posted September 30, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 4 Comments

Kindle Unlimited

Back in mid-July, without any warning, Amazon launched a new subscription service: Kindle Unlimited. For a flat $9.99 monthly fee, subscribers could download and read as many books as they wanted from the 650,000 or so available (about a third of all Kindle books on Amazon). Now the same deal has started up in the UK: all you can read for £7.99 a month. For a voracious reader, this can be a terrific deal. You don’t have to read many books a month, even at cheap prices, to cover the subscription cost. You can download a book, read a few pages, decide it’s not for you and get another one. You can experiment outside your comfort zone, trying new genres and authors. You don’t have to feel guilty about the number of books you read, and the price of a book is irrelevant. You can read the first of a […]

Posted September 27, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in General / 4 Comments

Fiction DNF Review: ‘The Virgin Soldiers’ by Leslie Thomas

Fiction DNF Review: ‘The Virgin Soldiers’ by Leslie Thomas

It’s the curse of the book group, isn’t it? Someone suggests a book, and you think: yes, that will be a light, fluffy read, something to make us laugh, a bit light-hearted and not too heavy or intellectual. Well, it wasn’t intellectual, sure, but light? Fluffy? A book about incompetent National Service conscripts sent off to fight in the jungles of Malaya? There were a few laugh out loud moments, it’s true. And the book had some potential to be the comic novel it was billed as. Perhaps when it was first published in 1966 it resonated more harmoniously with the experiences of others who had served their time in the immediate post-war years. There was a risque element, too: the inexperienced ‘virgin’ soldiers (in the literal and metaphorical sense) whiling away dull moments in their two years by dreaming endlessly of finally losing their virginity, and finding willing helpers […]

Posted September 26, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments