Thea Atkinson's Blog, page 11

Black Holes and the (Meta)physics of Popularity

Reblogged from Zen and the art of tightrope walking:

 

Black Holes and The (Meta)physics of Popularity

Have you ever stopped to question how something becomes and remains popular? Has it ever baffled you beyond words why a singer or a film or a book gain a massive following, and yet has left you cold, and unable to see its appeal? Have you ever finally succumbed to peer pressure and bought the latest must-read book, that must-have music and found yourself wondering why the blazes this has somehow hit the big time when you can see few redeeming features in it?

Read more… 1,105 more words

Vivienne Tuffnell has written a post that I think is a nice companion to the thoughts I express in my Haystack Giveaway. Although my post was purely in the hopes of gaining some visibililty, Vivienne writes eloquently as she always does about her bemusement of some viral book and blogs. Great post, Vivienne. I always look forward to your postings.

Is Your EBook Lost In The Straw Jungle Of Amazon?

A Peek From The Haystack: (aka:Haystack Giveaway)

by Thea Atkinson

I used to call Amazon the jungle. I’d refer to my books as being lost somewhere in the depths and needing rescue. Now, I’ve decided the most apt analogy is a straw heap where my books are nine little pieces of dried out grass somewhere in the haystack. They look the same on the surface as any other piece, so why not just pick from the top of the pile?

Like many writers, and especially the ones who self publish, I find it tough to reach my audience. Despite scads of social media and blog posts, I still don’t ‘move’ many books.

Could be a ton of things: from the covers to the blurbs, right down to the stories themselves. I’d like to think that amid the other scads of promotions that other writers are doing, that I just get lost in the pile and would-be readers that might truly love a Thea read, just don’t know I even exist.

I’m hoping to peek out of the pile of straw for a few days, and I’d love to give back to the folks who help me do so.

During the launch week of Water Witch, (UK link)I ran a contest through Rafflecopter. Wow. Was I ever impressed with the ease it offered me. The end result was a few sales, one whole review (Thankyou so much Paul Graves!), and quite a few tweets and visits to my blog.

I consider that a success. Even better, I got to give a reader $25 and a beautiful GelaSkin.

I’d like to try it again, but with a different mindset. To enter without the preamble,

Click Here: (Please note: you can also enter on Facebook on Thea’s Writing Page)

This time, I plan to give away $50 plus a Thea read of the winner’s choice. The ways to enter are:

Blog or reblog about the contest. That means you can simply click reblog on the wordpress bar at the top of my post, or you can write your own post about the contest, or just leave a review of one of my books as a post. I’m OK with any of it. I’ve even found a way for you to post the contest rafflecopter widget right on your blog. (If you’re wordpress free, then alas, you can’t I don’t think) Just go to: the Rafflecopter site and copy/paste the appropriate widget code.
You can buy a Thea book from just about anywhere. I just need some kind of assurance though. (like a forwarded email receipt…just be sure to delete any of your sensitive information)
You can leave me a new review of any Thea book you’ve read! I especially like this entry type. So I’ve given you a chance to leave 2 reviews. Grin. (If you complete this option, consider adding it to your blog as another entry)
You can Tweet about the giveaway
You can share the giveaway on FB or Pinterest or Stumble

If you’ve already left a review for Water Witch, fill in an entry anyway as I consider that a new review

For me, it’s all about trying to peek out of the vast straw pile of books and wave at folks, call them over, introduce myself. It’s also a chance to offer folks who have given me a chance, an opportunity to get something back.

The contest will run over 6 weeks so new readers have time to read me and leave a review. I might even stick in a few extra goodies over the six weeks, so keep checking back, and do share.

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If you liked this post, please do share.

Thea is the author of several novels that she considers left of mainstream. You can find her on BN, Kobo, Sony, Apple

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Filed under: Thea bits

Launch Day means something for nothing

April 30 is Launch Day!

I’m celebrating all week and I’d be delighted if you would spread the word. The games will continue until May 5 so you have plenty of time to celebrate with me.

First off, The giveaways!

 $25 Amazon Gift card.
A GelaSkin for the Kindle Fire with Water Witch art


Rattling Bones is FREE at Amazon for April 30 only. So grab it while you can.

NOW:  click to enter

Buy from Amazon

(my apologies for making you leave the site to enter, but WordPress will NOT let me put javascript on the blog, so to make it easy for you, I have to put it on Blogger.)

Plus: did you know you could gift free books to friends? Why not gift a FREE copy of Rattling Bones to someone you know who likes dark chicklit short stories and who has a Kindle or Iphone or Ipad, or heck just a computer they can read it on? (maybe a mom or a sister or an aunt) They don’t need to know it was free. Wink

Thanks for visiting and I do hope you’ll grab a copy. I’m guesting at The Farthest Reaches and at West of Mars over the next two days and I’d love for you to visit and join in the fun.

 

The winner will be announced on May 6 and contacted via email. Winner will need to provide an Amazon email address so the gift card can be awarded, and a snail mail address so the GelaSkin can be sent out. Good luck, everyone, and thanks for partying with me.

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If you liked this post, please do share.

Thea is the author of several novels that she considers left of mainstream. You can find her on BN, Kobo, Sony, Apple

Filed under: Thea bits

Where has the Hunger Games Taken YA?

by Thea Atkinson

Buy from Amazon

Like many readers, I’ve come to realize I like a good young adult novel now and then. It all started with Harry Potter, I think, and moved to the likes of Graceling and more recently, The Hunger Games trilogy.

My strange interest in young adult began to baffle me the more I read. After all, most of my own novels, and all of my short stories, are built around broken characters. Or more to the point, characters who are very much in the darkest times of their lives and who are struggling to find some light.

I have a few friends who even prefer not to read me because they can’t reconcile the person they know with my penchant for floundering around in the darkest parts of a character’s psyche.

It’s too much for them.

Enter Harry Potter. I was awestruck at the world JK Rowling created and found myself fighting with my daughter to read this series.

YA should be more light, I thought at the time, not driven by dark needs. Voldemort was deliciously evil and Harry – well, Harry was a little broken too. The series moved through some pretty dark issues, all hidden behind a light veil of the magic of being different.

I thought then how brave the author was to take children – yes, children – down some pretty dark alleyways, and in so doing, rewrite the genre.

Or so I thought.

When I read The Hunger Games series, I remember thinking: yes, it does have many of the hallmarks of what I thought were young adult. It has a little romance, a lack of real parenting presence, easy-to-read language, etc. But it had something else to.

It had darkness.

Children hunting other children and killing them for the amusement of an audience.

How dark is that? I mean, really.

Sure, the romance is kept to kisses and flirtations, there is no strong language, the graphic scenes are light on too-explicit details, but the premise is pretty darn dark.

Of course, that got my motor running.

I love to try writing in new genres. I think it keeps my writing muscles supple. And I always learn something – even if it’s that I’m not cut out to write in that genre.

Plus, I always gain a new respect for those authors when I see how hard something is that they make look remarkably easy.

You know where I’m going. You’ve seen me tweet and blog about it.

Water Witch is my first young adult novel – and it’s fantasy to boot. Two things that are outside my usual litfic arena, so it was doubly hard for me.

And doubly fun, too as it turns out.

At first, I thought I’d write Alaysha as she first appeared to me, but I soon realized that it was too far into her jaded timeline. I discovered that what drove me to write about Alaysha was how she got there in the first place.

Which meant I had to pull back.

 I picked her story up when she is 17. Seventeen meant young adult (I thought).
 Alaysha is a witch of a unique sort. Which meant fantasy (I thought).

And so the first in the series is born. Of course, there are some spots that a reader of mine would immediately recognize as typical Thea style (be that for the good or the bad. grin.)

The official launch date is April 30, but you can grab an advance e-copy for $.99 from Amazon if you like right now. Before it hits all of the other distributors like Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Sony, and Apple and goes up in price.

But do come back on launch day because I have a few pressies for you.

And tell your friends. I’d love to know how my new foray into the authorship world of TA Atkinson, young adult fantasy author, sits with you.

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If you liked this post, please do share.

Thea is the author of several novels that she considers left of mainstream. You can find her on BN, Kobo, Sony, Apple

 

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Inside the Author’s Mind – Thea Atkinson (edenbaylee.wordpress.com)

 

Filed under: Thea bits

I love your book and other nasty emails

by Thea Atkinson

a nice range of emotions

I suppose I'm like many writers: I say I write because I love to. That I write because I simply can't not write. I write to explore topics of interest to me, to discover stories that haven't yet been told, to communicate. Yes. That last one. I write to communicate.

Well, I'm no different than most writers. I have an ego. It does get slashed and burned at times and it does every now and then get stroked. Yes. I like it when that happens. I'm human after all; doesn't everyone like a little love now and then?

Like most writers I get all warm and fuzzy when someone tells me they loved what I wrote. During my freelance days, I never really cared one way or another if someone loved my essay or my article about Uncle Bob getting an award. I just wasn't invested enough.

But I've been writing fiction for years. Really. YEARS. I've studied the craft, worked at it, practiced, edited, critiqued, and judged it. I still have a long way to go before I'm a Margaret Atwood or an Alice Munro, or an Annie Proulx. Heck. I'll probably never get there, and if I did, by now I'm old enough that if I ever do get there, I'll be gone the next day.

But I digress. I always do.

I'm just saying that the worst kind of email a writer can get is a piece of spam that starts out with a subject line: I loved your book.

Really?

You know I was going to open it. I had no other choice.

And what was within? Oh, dear heaven. SPAM. Spam for some other writer's book. What kind of lowly author would do such a thing? What kind of masochistic writer would use another writer's sensitive and fragile ego as bait to schlep their own wares. (Hmmm. I'm amazed my spell checker didn't scream at me for the word schlep…it must actually be a word)

Ok. So this writer is a moron. An insensitive, sociopathic moron.

Or smart.

Could it be that the writer 'gets' his audience? The book being schlepped (teehee. Still no spellcheck warning) was about how to market your independent book, the market was writers. Not readers. Writers. Could it be that this author really understood his audience and captured it the best way he could?

Well, I clicked. And then I read. And then I got angry. And now I'm blogging about it.

Regrettably, I learned a few things. One: that my ego isn't as hardened as I'd thought. Two: that I still seem to need validation. Three: That there is a right and wrong way to market even if I nailed the 'click'; there is within the message, a need to be authentic to achieve buy-in. Four: that my mantra of pay it forward and back is even more solidified in my mind. We writers need to stick together, not use each other.

Did you get the email? What did you think?

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If you liked this post, please do share.

 

 

 

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Filed under: Thea bits

Find your Tahiti

"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life." Herman Melville: Moby Dick

 Recently, I gave away 6000 copies of my enovel: One Insular Tahiti.

For a few weeks, I watched as the novel stayed in the top 20 of Canadian Literary Fiction. There was a point for a few gaudy hours I was in front of Leonard Cohen. (Imagine how I felt at that point. Giddy would describe it best)

I was even lucky to get a review from the glut of copies that went out free.

Now I sit each day watching the numbers fall again, and while I might be tempted to feel despondent that I might not ever  "make it as an author", I'm reminded of the line that has driven me over the last 2 years to remember the temporary state of this life and all that is in it. I'm reminded that this little wave in my serene ocean is but a small one compared to the larger tsunamis that sometimes strike. I know from the past that these little swells are nowhere near enough to swamp my boat, and I'm able to better pilot the vessel.

There are worse things, as we all know, than to be a modest seller on Amazon. I'm pretty good by now at keeping things in perspective. I think of the Melville quote and recall the year I've led, the year before that, the year before that one, and the one before. I've had a pretty decently happy and blessed life. And yet, like many, I've had some major upheavals. A close family member's addiction, friends and family suicides, my mother's heart attacks and consequent surgery: all things that affected me very deeply.

These are all those "horrors of the half-known life" to me, and I am forced to remember that there is a place of peace within myself that I can return to when I'm feeling out of sorts. That small space has helped me through the recent job less and re-assignment, it's helped me through the diagnosis of my husband's illness and all that means to our family and to him, it has helped me through some pretty strange times all through my life when I thought I just might not be able to cope.

In One Insular Tahiti, Luke MacIsaac (yes, I used my maiden name: my dad was always complaining that my family name would never show anywhere if I ever published, so that was for you Dad.) needs to find his Tahiti. Does it matter that he's already dead? He has forgotten that space within that connects us all to a divine sense of completion and peace, and he needs to rediscover it. For Luke, Tahiti is the womb and all the possibilities of remaking his life and starting over, of being given a chance to fix all the mistakes of his past life.

So what does that 'Tahiti' look like to you?

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If you've not picked up a copy of One Insular Tahiti while it was free, it is still available to borrow from the Amazon Lending Library.

 If you did pick it up while it was free and you enjoyed it, I encourage you to leave a review. I am grateful to you all for giving this indie author a chance.

 

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SOMEthing’s Gotta Go

Reblogged from Diane Lynn Tibert:

Sometime during the course of my writing life I somehow decided some to be an appropriate word for many things. After all, it’s generic. I could say sometime, somewhere and simply some. It meant a lot of things. I didn’t need to go looking for the perfect word to describe something; some summed it up.

Some was the perfect word for everything I didn’t want to identify.

Read more… 379 more words

I love this post by Diane Tibert on words we use and overuse in our MSS. Pop on over and tell her what you have to edit for the most.

SOMEthing's Gotta Go

Reblogged from Diane Lynn Tibert:

Sometime during the course of my writing life I somehow decided some to be an appropriate word for many things. After all, it's generic. I could say sometime, somewhere and simply some. It meant a lot of things. I didn't need to go looking for the perfect word to describe something; some summed it up. Some was the perfect word for everything I didn't want to identify. …

Read more… 1 link

I love this post by Diane Tibert on words we use and overuse in our MSS. Pop on over and tell her what you have to edit for the most.

Amazon is giving away One Insular Tahiti today

I do hope you'll grab a copy while it's free. If you enjoy stories of reincarnation, and a story that can be a little dark in places, you might enjoy it–or someone you know might enjoy it. Please visit and download One Insular Tahiti and if you like it, please consider leaving a review

Gimme Some Reviews:

 Kim Tarbox:

This book is a well-written masterpiece. The story flows well. If I could have given this book more than 5 stars I would have.

Kate Policani

Thea's writing is vivid and gripping. I found myself itching to move on to Luke's birth, hoping as he did that the next chapter would be it. I joined him in his feeling of dread when he saw another awful epoch of his past life rush in again, and in his elation when he encountered moments of joy.

Sibel Hodge

Thea has such an eloquent way with words, her writing is smooth and the descriptions are vivid. This is an amazing book!

Gimme some Info:

Luke MacIsaac is dead, and not restfully dead. His death has come the way he always feared it would: in the claustrophobic, underground heat of a Cape Breton coal mine. He had suspected it would end this way, had embraced it even, so while his body is buried, his soul settles into a watery existence of endless waiting.

But in short order the placid waters of his afterlife turn to rolling seas of time and memory as his violent past plays out again for him. Images of war, childhood abuse, and the tortured life of a brother he loved and failed threaten to inundate him.

More than anything, he wants to escape.

In his confusion and pain, he senses a kindred spirit in Astrid, a newborn struggling to stay alive. Luke helps her in hopes she may one day be the one who brings him out of his purgatory and into a new incarnation.

What he doesn't realize is that Astrid's soul is linked to his own hellish past life and that he has selected her because of it. In order to live again, he must experience all the anguish they went through together, and watch helplessly as Astrid goes through sorrows of her own.

Can he endure those memories long enough to make the connection and find forgiveness?

Filed under: Thea bits

3 characterizations a scifi writer used to wow me

TAKE ME SOME TIME TO READ THE PREAMBLE:

So what is a literary writer, character driven reader doing talking about scifi, especially when she will nearly always pass on scifi even though she will readily admit to being a bit of a geek when it comes to Star Trek?

The answer is simple: I read an indie. It's no secret I love to read, and I do read a variety of genres. Independent publishing has opened up a whole new world to me. Recently, I picked up an ebook by KC May: Venom of Vipers. And I read it. And I loved it. And wait for it–I reviewed it. I rarely review. I hate to review, but when I find I've truly enjoyed a book for some reason, I just might put pixel to screen and pen a few glowing words. (Thus many of my reviews tend to be 4 and 5 star for indies)

Then I started to wonder why this character driven writer and reader so enjoyed the book, and I realized it was Ms. Mays's characterization.

That meant I simply had to think about it some more. So I settled down to dissect for you what I think made her characters spot on.

SKIP ME OVER SOME TO THE GOODS:

1st: The author introduced the main character straight away and stuck with keeping setting in the *ahem* background. This is a strange choice for scifi–setting is crucial, like fantasy, to show what the genre is. Let me explain: setting was in response to character rather than the other way round. The author showed the time and necessary specifics as they related to the character's emotional state. She didn't pause to layout each notion of how the world had changed, what timeframe it was, etc. She just let the character exist in the time and the reader connected to the character that way.

2nd:The characters ALL had flaws and ALL had good qualities. I fond myself rooting for one or two of the villains at one time or other. There was no clear-cut, black and white, hard edge to them. This had me wondering which side they'd end up on by the end.

3rd: The most important, I think: the writer always gave me the impression she'd spent time with the characters, that she knew them outside what she was letting come through in the book. this made me think they could live beyond the confines of the plot they existed in. This meant the characterization was invisible: something I always strive for. That  also means I can't say exactly what the author did to accomplish it. It simply showed that the characters were ruminated over outside the writing time. you can't fake this depth. Just like spending time with friends, there is no recipe for getting to know someone.

TELL ME HOW YOU WANT ME TO FEEL AT THE END:

Brava, Ms. May. You are one more indie author who has demonstrated attention to craft to me.

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Filed under: Thea bits