Year: 2014

Wattpad: final thoughts

With the publication of ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ rapidly approaching, I’ve finally taken down most of the chapters posted on Wattpad, so that I can sign up for Amazon’s exclusive program, KDP Select. I’ve left six chapters up as a sample, but I don’t expect them to get many reads. I started posting the book on Wattpad a chapter at a time, many months ago, and then posted the remaining chapters more than a month ago. So how did it do? Some numbers: Total reads: 2,018 (each chapter viewed counts as one read) Votes: 344 Comments: 156 This is barely a blip in the Wattpad world, where the most popular books garner reads in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions. It’s more interesting to look at individual chapters. Chapter 1: 450 reads Chapter 2: 69 reads Chapter 3: 60 reads Chapter 4: 54 reads and so on. So a […]

Posted August 30, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing / 3 Comments

SciFi Short Story Collection Review: ‘Echoes and Memories’ by Tristan Gregory

This is a nice mixture of science fiction short stories, varied in both length and subject matter. I have to confess, I’m more of a fantasy reader, so I got a bit bogged down in some of the sciencey bits. However, the author’s trademark smooth writing carried me along. The first two stories, Digital Soul and Pillar, were both awesome – beautifully crafted, immersive and with that deft little twist at the end which makes a short story so satisfying. The third story, The Last Gasp of the Dragon, was short and sweet – maybe too short to make an impact (or maybe I just didn’t get it – always possible). The fourth story, Orphaned World, was long and filled with blow-by-blow detail which lost me somewhere along the way. The tension built and built, yet the resolution felt insufficient for all that build-up. I had the feeling there was […]

Posted August 28, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 2 Comments

‘The Plains of Kallanash’: ARCs available

‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is getting closer to publication! I now have ARCs available, so if anyone out there would like a copy to read for review, please email me at brightmoon@paulinemross.co.uk. I have both mobi and epub formats available (sorry, no print copies yet). Reviews can be posted immediately on Goodreads or your blog, and on Amazon after publication in mid-September. ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is an epic fantasy adventure with a strong romantic element. Here’s the blurb: Thousands of years after a magical catastrophe reshaped the world and pulled the moons out of alignment, the secret of magic has seemingly been lost. At the centre of the vast, forbidding Plains of Kallanash lies a land ruled by a secretive religion, whose people fight a never-ending war against the barbarians in the wilderness beyond the border. Amongst the nobility, double marriages are the norm. Junior wife Mia always dreamed […]

Posted August 17, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing / 8 Comments

Mystery Review: ‘Rough Edges’ by V J Chambers

A lot of books are described as psychological thrillers, but very few genuinely merit the label. This one is everything a psychological thriller should be. The characters – all the characters – are in some way damaged, and therefore nothing is certain or reliable, and all their actions are questionable. Here’s the plot: Sam, the narrator, specialises in writing biographies of women who’ve suffered major traumatic events in their lives: kidnappings, murderous boyfriends and the like. Trouble is, his approach inevitably leads him to become involved with the victims he’s writing about. When he has to abandon his latest book after an affair with the subject leads to the breakup of his marriage (to his previous subject!), he finds himself scratching round for a new project. Fortuitously, he is approached by Lola, a woman whose parents were murdered when she was twelve by a man who then kidnapped her and […]

Posted August 16, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Another new cover

When I arranged for the cover for ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ with Streetlight Graphics, there was a lead time of several months. So, thinking ahead to the release of the next book, ‘The Fire Mages’, I thought I’d better get on and book it early, so I wasn’t held up waiting for it. Inevitably, a slot came up much sooner than I expected, so, lo and behold, I have another cover to reveal. ‘The Fire Mages’ is set in a different part of the same world, and is more town-based, so I wanted a more built-up feel to the cover. However, the designer, Glendon Haddix, has kept the turbulent sky, fonts and layout to give a very ‘series’ feel to the two covers, even though they’re both stand-alone books. And he’s taken the ‘fire mage’ aspect to produce a very striking image which captures both the fantasy and romance elements. […]

Posted August 14, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing, The Fire Mages / 4 Comments

Writing process blog hop

I don’t normally do these things, where you get mentioned on someone’s blog and you are asked to pay it forward by mentioning several other blogs. It always seems a bit like those chain letters, or a blog version of pyramid selling. But recently this blog hop came to H. Anthe Davis’s rather splendid blog, wherein she describes in astonishing detail all aspects of her created world, as seen in her ‘War of Memory’ series. And you know what? This particular blog hop is rather fun. The only requirement is to talk about your own writing process, and mention three other writers you admire. What could be easier? Who doesn’t like talking about themselves? So here goes. 1. What am I currently working on? I have four books on the go at the moment, at different stages. 1) ‘The Plains of Kallanash’: epic fantasy with a strong romance element, set […]

Posted August 2, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Current writings, Writing musings / 10 Comments

Writing progress report: third book finished

So another one bites the dust. Today I typed ‘The End’ on ‘The Mages of Bennamore’, the third epic fantasy set in the Brightmoon world. Because I like statistics, here are some numbers for the three books for comparison: Book 1: ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ Elapsed writing time: 1 year Total days of writing: 190 Total words: 220,000 Average words per writing day: 1,100 Chapters: 58 Book 2: ‘The Fire Mages’ Elapsed writing time: 5 months Total days of writing: 90 Total words: 151,000 Average words per writing day: 1,700 Chapters: 44 Book 3: ‘The Mages of Bennamore’ Elapsed writing time: 7 months Total days of writing: 119 Total words: 157,000 Average words per writing day: 1,300 Chapters: 44 This third book is much the same size as the second, but it took 7 months overall instead of 5 months, largely because I was also working on revising ‘The Plains […]

Posted July 27, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Current writings, The Fire Mages, The Mages of Bennamore, The Plains of Kallanash, Writing musings / 4 Comments

First books and second books

Writing a book is no different from any other craft: it takes practice. Nobody is able to paint or to make model aeroplanes or to write phone apps or drive a car straight out of the box. Well, growing potatoes, maybe; stick them in the ground, then dig them up three months later and enjoy delicious new potatoes with butter and a sprig of mint. Yummy. But I digress. Everyone needs to learn and hone their skills, and (except for potatoes) that takes practice. A lot of practice. For driving a car, they say it takes one lesson for every year of your life. For writing, the received wisdom is that it takes a million words. So the first effort is always a bit wonky. It’s like those clay models kids bring home from school – they’re always a bit lop-sided. ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is my first, wonky effort. […]

Posted July 25, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in The Fire Mages, The Plains of Kallanash, Writing musings / 4 Comments

On Wattpad and KDP Select

Now that I’m getting closer to publishing ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ in September, I’ve been starting to think about marketing (for want of a better term). Which online retailers to sell through, pricing and all that jazz. And how to build up some awareness of the book beyond the three regular readers of this blog (hi folks! {waves}). I had already devised a plan to post ‘The Plains of Kallanash’, chapter by chapter, on Wattpad, a process that would take many months. I’ve now uploaded more than half the book, and somewhere around the two-thirds point would fall the actual date of publication to Amazon. The idea was to make Wattpad readers aware of the book itself while uploading the final chapters, and even if that didn’t translate into sales, it might generate a review or two. But then I started looking into Amazon’s programs in more detail, in particular, […]

Posted July 19, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing / 9 Comments

A year on Amazon: how many reviews?

A year ago, for reasons not relevant here, I decided to record every Kindle ebook uploaded to Amazon for a full month. For the sake of my sanity, I restricted it to epic fantasy. I recorded 390 ebooks uploaded over the month of April 2013, excluding foreign language ones. A year on, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to see what had happened to those 390 books. So during April 2014, I looked each one up on Amazon, and noted the number of reviews. These are total numbers; I didn’t attempt to track numbers of 5*, 4* and so on. I noted rankings, too, but these are just a snapshot in time, whereas reviews are cumulative.

Posted July 9, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing / 2 Comments