Greg Scowen's Blog, page 3

Market Position: #1 NZ Novel and More!

I undertook an interesting exercise last night. And the results surprised even me.

Comparing The Spanish Helmet with NZ 2011 Top Ten Fiction

Nielsen produce lists of top selling books in New Zealand. You can find this information on the Booksellers NZ website.
I took the list of the top 10 selling NZ fiction for adults and compared the statistics, rankings, reviews, and likes of these on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Goodreads (a popular social network for book lovers) with the same for The...

Book Review – The Southland Times 21st Jan, 2012

The Spanish Helmet was reviewed in the Southland Times on the 21st January, 2012. For those of you without access to this paper, the review follows:

Alternate History Delivers

The Spanish Helmet

By Greg Scowen (Whare Rama Books, $20 for an autographed copy by post) Reviewed by Jillian Allison-aitken

New Zealand author Greg Scowen has come up with an interesting concept for his conspiracy thriller The Spanish Helmet: what if the officially accepted history of New Zealand is wrong?

A mysterious...

Book Review – Saturday Express 20th Nov, 2011

The Spanish Helmet was reviewed in the Saturday Express on the 20th November, 2011. For this of you without access to this paper, the review follows:

The Spanish HelmetBy Greg Scowen

Reviewed by Elizabeth Winter

Take a mysterious Spanish helmet held in Te Papa, a large pohutukawa tree in La Coruna, Spain, which locals believe to be 400 to 500 years old and a 16th century Spanish expedition, and you have the makings of a conspiracy thriller and an alternative history of New Zealand.

Dr Matthew...

NZ Press Interview

You live in Switzerland now. How much influence does New Zealand have on your writing? New Zealand has a large influence on my work. I started writing because I had a story to tell, the story of The Spanish Helmet. This is New Zealand's story. Admittedly, I wanted to inject some Switzerland into it too, [...]

Spanish in New Zealand Before the Dutch or British?

The official story is that the Spanish didn't reach New Zealand's shores before the Dutch, right? Well, kind of. In actual fact, there has been plenty of suggestion to this theory long before most Kiwi's would imagine. Here follows some excerpts from a 1949 publication of Joseph Angus Mackay (the good bits are often quotes [...]

The Spanish Helmet – Pohutukawa in La Coruna, Spain

A tree in Spain sparked some debate about the possibility of Spanish having travelled New Zealand before Cook and rightly won a mention in The Spanish Helmet. The tree in question is a large pohutukawa that the locals believe to be 400-500 years old. That would fit in well with a discovery by Francisco de [...]

The Spanish Helmet at Lüthy Glattzentrum

It is my great pleasure to be able to advise my Swiss readers that The Spanish Helmet is now available at the Lüthy book-store in the Glattzentrum Shopping Centre, Wallisellen, Zürich (rrp. 16.90 chf). Lüthy Buchhaus The Glattzentrum is Switzerland's biggest shopping centre and offers a special shopping experience. The Lüthy book-store has a floor area of 1,100 sqm. [...]

Editing an EPUB Without Having to Rebuild It

It takes some effort to get your book in the EPUB format. Sure, it is made much simpler with great free software like Calibre but it still doesn't happen by itself. So when you discover that you have a handful of misprints in your document and you want to clean them out (you want the [...]

31 Places to Promote Your Book Trailer

So many self-publishing gurus tell us that we need to have a book trailer, so I made one. But what do you do with the book trailer after production? Upload it to YouTube and forget it? Do that and a week later all you are likely to have as a return on your investment (be [...]

The Spanish Helmet – Trailer

The Spanish Helmet video trailer has finally been completed. I hope you all enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it. Don't forget to tell your friends to have a look too. SpanishHelmetTrailer.mp4 Runtime0:56 Views1