Keryl Raist's Blog, page 50

Indie Book Review: Black Earth The End of the Innocence.

I started Black Earth: End of the Innocence with a lot of hope.  I did my usual pre-review routine of reading the blurb and the first chapter.  Both of them looked good.  The first chapter is arresting and sets up the promise of a really interesting story.  I was happy to agree to review Black Earth.
Unfortunately Black Earth starts going downhill from there pretty swiftly. 
This is a big book, and it's the first in a series with, I think, thirteen point of view characters.  It's entirely possible I've forgotten a few.  On the upside I rarely found myself confusing them with each other.  On the downside the whole book is more or less character introductions, a little back story, and a tiny bit of plot.   I read the kindle version, so I'm guessing here, but this is probably a 400+ page story where by the end of it we're just starting to get a feel for what might be going on.

What is going on?  It's hard to tell.  The world is falling apart.   Meteorites are crashing into the planet.  Aliens or demons, possibly alien demons, are ramping up for war against God.  Teenagers with superpowers are fumbling around trying to figure out what is going on.   The President of the United States appears to be the Anti-Christ, or working for the Anti-Christ, it's fuzzy.  There's some sort of time-travel-fix-the-future, and counter-time-travel-keep-the-future-the-way-it-is angle.  Other planets have been destroyed by Legion (the alien demons).  There's something about getting humans off of Earth to a new planet (which may have been destroyed in the future, by Legion) so they can evolve and avoid the destruction of Earth.   There are bad guys galore (more on this later), and absolute scads of purposeless violence.    Any one of these threads could have been a book by itself, but they're all scattered together, and none of them developed enough to do more than give the reader a glimpse of a building story.  Basically, we get to read the first third of something like six books.
And then it just stops.  Part of how a series is supposed to be built is that each part is a story of its own.  Look at Harry Potter, each of the novels has a complete story arc while building up the larger arc of the series.  It's possible one of the arcs this story began with ended.  All the rest of them are left dangling.  If there is an overarching theme of this book, it's everything falling apart, and that's well and truly going gangbusters by the time Black Earth has ended.
There's a saying: a book is only as good as its bad guys.  And while that isn't always true, clunky, melodramatic villains will just kill a book.  Unfortunately Black Earth has a lot of them.   There's Evanescence, Witch Queen of the Damned (something like a Super Satan), The President of the United States (the Anti-Christ?), Mr. Silver (misogynistic, super-rich-corporate-tycoon-James-Bond-style-villain),  Alpha 1 (psychopathic killer working for Mr. Silver), Theresa (counter time travel sociopath), and a few other random psychopaths.  And all of them need mustaches to twirl.   There is not a single subtle, sane bad guy in the lot.   Be prepared for clunky dialog; psychopathic musings; megalomaniacs; ice-cold, stone-hard killers, who can be distracted and overpowered by untrained victims; random, useless violence; and monologues that give the good guys the chance to escape.   
Good dialog makes me want to sing the praises of a book.  Bad dialog makes me want to cry.  This book is riddled with stilted and stiff dialog, mostly coming from the mouths of the bad guys.  On top of that most of the characters use the same basic vocabulary.  Quick example: things are falling out of the sky and crashing into Earth.  With the exception of one NASA scientist, everyone calls them falling stars: not meteors, meteorites, comets, shooting stars, or anything else.  All of the characters have precisely the same internal vocabulary for this event, even the ones who come from another planet.  Here's another example: no one curses.  At first I thought this was a young adult book, but no, it has a not-suitable-for-under-17 note on it, so there's no reason that no one ever utters 'shit' or 'fuck.'  There are some seriously scuzzy people in this book and one rough teenager, and none of them ever says anything beyond a PG rated word.   Not to say I'm a fan of profanity for profanity's sake, but I am a fan of realistic dialog, and at the very least, the kind of teen girl who sets up her own sex club in high school is likely to mutter something untoward upon finding she's been drugged and raped.
And that leads into another aspect of this book, it's Christian fiction.  (Not that you can find this out by reading the description or the genre.   Why this isn't mentioned in the description or genre is puzzling.)  I think this is why no one curses, even though it would be in character for at least a few of them to be doing it.  This might also explain the fact that there is only one gray character and everyone else is fully a black hat or white hat.
I like eschatology, and while there's a lot of creative work going on in this version of the end times, it's heavy handed.  The President is a bad guy.  How do we learn that at first?  We find out she's had the "under God" bit removed from the Pledge of Allegiance.  As a work of theology goes, this one isn't sophisticated.  There's plenty of room for theodicy in this story, but either his characters or Alderman isn't up to it.  Instead of spending some real time on what it means that an all powerful God allows evil and suffering, we get the tired tropes of 'it makes us stronger' or 'keep the faith.'
Then there's writing as a technical aspect of putting words together.  Parts of this book are eloquent and graceful.  Parts feel like a car with a shot suspension driving over a pitted, rocky, country road.  Word choice was problematic.   Alderman often uses a word that sounds similar to the one he wants, but isn't it: equitable for equal or correlating for corresponding.  Likewise he comes up with sentences that sound good, but don't actually mean what I think he was trying to convey.  Point of view is also an issue.  He's either writing third person omniscient badly, or head hopping from one third person limited to another.  Either way it's distracting.  You think you're in one character's head, next thing you know there's an info dump involving stuff the character shouldn't know, then you're in another character's head.   Top this off with many scenes ending in a cliff hanger, and when next we see those characters they've suddenly gotten off of the cliff, without Alderman bothering to tell us how it happened.
All of this is excruciatingly disappointing because the first few chapters are good.  Alderman can write decent teenagers (adults and children not so much).  The first chapter has stunningly beautiful imagery and makes you want to read more.  The first few chapters that follow were good enough I kept working out so I could read more.  (And I'm not what anyone would call a fan of the elliptical machine.  Reading the beginning, my normal twenty minutes grew to thirty before I hit the first rough patch.)  Then suddenly, it all goes awry and we're stuck in the land of stilted dialog and insane bad-guys.  I'm giving it two stars, and wishing the promises of the first chapters could have been fulfilled.

Indie Book Review: Optical Delusions In Deadwood

Deadwood Violet is back in Optical Delusions, and she's brought along all the things I loved about Nearly Departed.   Witty writing, killer dialog, red-hot sex scenes, a corker of a mystery, and a tinge of paranormal that leaves the reader wondering if the supernatural is really happening or not have all come back for Ann Charles' sophomore offering.
In the wake of the action in Nearly Departed, Violet's developed something of a reputation as the local spook finder.  All the more ironic because Violet still doesn't really believe in ghosties and ghoulies.  But, setting fire to the "haunted" residence of the local psychopathic killer will get you that sort of reputation.    Newly minted reputation in hand, Violet gets approached by a small, mousy woman in need of a realtor.  In a matter of minutes, Violet knows why she was picked, the house, in addition to having a reputation for being haunted, was also the location of a murder-suicide a few months earlier.    
On the good news front, the house is perfect.  On the better news front, the Sturgis Harley Davidson convention is on, and Deadwood is packed with out-of-towners, some of whom are looking for real estate.  On the downside, something just isn't right about the owners, and that triggers Violet's need to get down to the bottom of what is going on.  She's thinking it's a simple matter of a not-all-there mother being taken advantage by her daughter and almost daughter-in-law.  But of course, it's so much more than that.  Next thing Violet knows she's got witches, demons, and spooks in her life again, and she'd really prefer they weren't. 
If that was all the plot this story had, it'd be a great read.  But it's not all the plot, the Deadwood mysteries are romances as well as who/what-done-its.  I'll admit to being a bit disappointed in the romance for Optical Delusions.  When we left Nearly Departed, Doc and Violet were heading toward happily ever after.  There were some big obstacles in the way, and I wanted to see how they would deal with them.  Two weeks later we begin Optical Delusions and apparently during the intervening time Doc's character got a personality transplant and went skittering into hiding because he's oh-so-scared of a real relationship.  So, for all practical purposes Doc and Violet go back to square one and start over again in Optical Delusions. 
Now, the actual romance plot line of: guy acts like jerk, guy decides he can't live without woman, guy does valiant things to get back into woman's good graces, forgiveness, and happy time is just fine.  It holds together well and works.  Charles handles it with grace and wit.  But I was hoping to see the romance actually move forward, as opposed to end up in precisely the same place it was when we got done with Nearly Departed.  None of the major issues facing Doc and Violet as a couple are any closer to resolved.   He's still a psychic.  She's still not sure she believes such things are real.  Her best friend is still in love with Doc and she's not sure how to handle that. 
And, while I wouldn't call that a minor issue with the book, it is one of personal taste.  Optical Delusions is extremely well written.  The characters are vibrant and spending time with them is a genuine joy.  The mystery has twists, turns, red-herrings, and fully satisfying ending.  Charles' ability to balance paranormal creepiness with the real world and leave the reader on the fence as to what is actually going on is reminiscent of the best episodes of the X-Files.   Plot threads that were sprinkled into both Optical Delusions and Nearly Departed look like they'll get picked up in the third book.  This is another carefully written, carefully plotted book.  I want to know what happens next.  I just hope it doesn't involve Doc and Violet heading back to square one again.

The Not Even Remotely Indie Book Review: Dragons of the Hourglass Mage

Amazingly enough, I do actually read the occasional traditionally published book.  Especially if it's a book by authors I like about a character I love.

Back in 2008 I found out that Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman had come back, yet again, to DragonLance to do something called the Lost Chronicles.  Basically, they were filling in the bits of the story that didn't make it into the first Chronicles.  So I was pleased to see them.  Then I started reading, and they were, well, blah.  Apparently there was a reason those bits didn't make it into the story.  They were boring.

But, hey, stories of Dwarven intrigue and Dragon Highlords in the midst of romantic angst were never my thing.  But Raistlin, dark, hacking, anti-hero Raistlin, golden-skinned-outsider with the weak body and the Herculean mind, he was always my thing.  (The particularly astute reader might notice a similarity between my name and his, and the serious DragonLance geek might get the entire reference.)  So, it was with some hope of joy, I waited for summer 2008 and Dragons of the Hourglass Mage.

Summer came and no book was written.  As the release date came and went word was there wasn't even a finished manuscript.  And with that I more or less gave up, the first two books had been lame, and the one I was hoping for unwritten.  With two kids, a book I was writing, and fan fic waiting to be read, I let hopes of Raistlin's further adventures go.

Fast forward three years, and I'm on Goodreads chatting with another reader about the comparative merits of DragonLance and Forgotten Realms.  During that conversation it comes to my attention that Dragons of the Hourglass Mage had eventually gotten written and came out in 2009.

Twenty-four hours later I had finished it.

So, how did it look to a mad fan girl, now all grown up?  Decent.  The actual plot seemed solid, if improbable.  It fills in the period between when Raistlin vanished with the Dragon Orb in the Maelstrom and then pops back up again during the final battle to make sure the Companions win it.  Basically we're asked to believe that Raistlin joins the resistance, infiltrates the temple at Nerka, and more or less singlehandedly overthrows the Queen of Darkness (while getting Fistandantillus out of his head).  It hangs together pretty well, but it wasn't what I was expecting.  Having read it, I can say with assurance that Hickman and Weis had no idea whatsoever how it was Raistlin came to be on the platform in time to save Tanis, or if they did, they tossed those ideas to write this book.   There was one plot hole that needed some patching, but nothing that caused me to want to toss the book aside in disgust. 

Now, in the twenty plus years since I picked up Dragons of Autumn Twilight, I've changed.  We all have.  The problem is, Raistlin shouldn't have.  Dragons of the Hourglass Mage supposedly takes place less than six months from the end of Autumn Twilight.  His internal voice shouldn't have gone from high functioning sociopath (which was something I always loved about him) to a pretty well adjusted Objectivist Hero.  (I defy anyone, having read Dragons of the Hourglass Mage to come up with a substantial difference between Raistlin and John Galt.  What this says about Hickman and Weis and their ideas of what constitutes evil might make for an interesting discussion.  But I digresss...)  He's actually emotional, sad, scared, unsure, angry.  Besides angry we didn't see much of that out of Raistlin before.  And, while Hickman and Weis were always a little vague about what precisely it was that made Raistlin evil, they've gone from flat out vague to not evil at all.  Seriously, the guy who would step over his brother's corpse to get to his goals is gone from this book.

I still enjoyed this latest installment of Raistlin,  (I like Objectivist heroes.) but he's not the same man he was before.  This new version is close, but not quite right.  And while I enjoyed Dragons of the Hourglass Mage, I'm honestly not sure if I was happier not having read it.

You know what they say: you can't go home again.  They're wrong.  You can.  The question is: should you?  Hickman and Weis took me home again, and I found the furniture rearranged and the walls painted a new color.  It looked okay, but it wasn't home.

Should You Self Publish-The Definitive Answer

Should you self publish? It's a pretty hot question, and among writers can get the sorts of vitriolic responses usually reserved for devout Christians seeing the Piss Christ.  If you read my blog regularly, you know I said yes.  But and as much as I think it was the right answer, I know it was the right answer for me.  Is it the right answer for you?  Well, let's take a few minutes and find out.

Are you capable of being honest with yourself?   None of the rest of these questions are going to help if you don't answer them honestly.  And by honest I mean not hyper-critical and not too easy on yourself.  For women there's an easy test for how honest you are, look at your butt, how big is it compared to everyone else?  Small, average, or big?  Now look at your pants size.  Average in the US is 12-14.  You can do the rest of the math yourself.   If you're the kind of person who can look at your body and see what's really there, you're probably the kind of person who can look at your life and determine if self-publishing is a good fit for you.

How easily can you learn new skills?  Being a self-publisher means you've got to run a business, deal with tax information, market and promote your work, format it, edit it, get art for it, set up an online presence, and really I'm just scratching the tip of the iceberg here.  You can either hire out for these things or you can do them yourself.  The more skills you can learn, the faster you can learn them, the more of your book budget can be moved from low priorities to high priorities. 

Do you have money?  Your book needs editing, cover art, a website, and distribution.  This takes cash.  How much is up to you, but at the least it requires some.  I'd say a good rule of thumb is about $2,500 per book.  For most books that's enough to get decent editing, a good cover, a website, plus whatever incidentals.  Long books might take more, short books less, and if you've got mad skills or friends out the ears with useful skills, it might cost even less.  But, if you want to make a go of this as a professional you will need at least some start up capital.

Can you read critically?  What are the best selling works in your genre?  Why?  You need to be able to locate those books, read them, and understand why they sell.  And by this I do not mean look at Twilight and say, "It sells because teens are idiots and vampires and werewolves are hot."  It's because Bella has been so carefully crafted that basically any teen girl can immediately relate to her, and within the blink of an eye she has two ultra-alpha men hanging on her every word.  She lets anyone who reads the series get to experience being immeasurably desirable.   Who finds being desired above everything else irresistible?  Teen girls.   You need to be able to understand what need a book fulfills and make your books fulfill that need.

Can you accept criticism?  The single smartest thing the self-publisher can do is realize he doesn't know everything.  If at all possible you want as many talented people you can find looking at your products and giving you their input.  You certainly don't have to take the advice, but you need to know how to hear it and analyze it.  To put it very bluntly, even Ayn Rand had an editor she listened to.

Are you shy?  Do you consider talking up your own works unsavory?  If either of these are true, run to traditional publishing.  Most of the game of getting people to buy your book is about making connections with other people and making them want to get to know you or it better.  If talking to strangers is your idea of hell, self-publishing it likely to be an exercise in torture.

Are you comfortable being the ultimate authority on your book?  If you publish traditionally, you can blame someone else if your book has a bad cover, the formatting is off, the electronic version is riddled with OCRs, it still has typos when it went to press, and so on and so forth.  Heck, depending on what sorts of edits they demanded you can even blame them if the book isn't as good as you wanted it to be.  When you self publish it's all on you.  The upside of absolute control is that everything ends up how you set it up, but that's also the downside.

Can you market?  There are book, websites, seminars, and all sorts of information on how to market your book, so it's not a matter of can you learn it, it's a matter of can you do it.  This takes time.  Do you have the time to invest in this sort of work?  It takes chutzpah.  You've got to tell strangers you've got something they want.  Can you keep at it, year after year, when the bad reviews come and the sales go flat?  Many writers have said this is a marathon, not a sprint.  With that in mind, can you run the marathon?  It might take five or ten years to catch on.  Can you keep plugging yourself as an author to get to the point where it finally takes off?

Are you a writer or an author?  A writer writes.  An author writes, edits, re-edits, makes a name for him or herself, writes more, edits more, and keeps at it.  Writing is a hobby, being an author is a career.  (Actually, this is a question you need to ask yourself if you want to self or trad publish.)

Lastly, did you write a good book?  Why is this the last question?  Honestly because this matters less than the above.  If you can't do/won't do the above it doesn't matter if you wrote a brilliant book.   You may be the finest writer in the history of the written word, but if you don't have the discipline to do the work above, it won't matter.

So, hopefully that was a helpful checklist.   Good luck to all of you out there debating your options.

Indie Book Review: Hungry For You

A while back, I remember a friend joking about how there were vampire romances, werewolf romances, ghost romances, and finally after musing over the different shades of paranormal romance out there, he said, "What's next? Zombie romance?"

A.M. Harte's Hungry For You answers that question with a resounding yes.  It's a collection of short zombie love stories and poems.  The topics range from zombies in love, to humans in love with zombies, to humans in love with each other fighting off the zombies, to humans facing their loved ones slowly turning into zombies.  If zombies and love can be worked into it, Harte's written about it.

As writing from the point of view of flow of words, elegant prose, and vivid description, these stories were quite lovely.   As writing from the point of view of world building and taking an old classic trope, the zombie, and spiffing it up for the modern reader, they are very well done.  In fact, my only real complaint about this book is that it's a collection of short stories and not a novel.

There are so many intriguing questions raised by this collection: How did the zombie plague start?  How did it end?  Why?  What happened to the zombies when it was over?  and on and on, all of which I would have been very happy to know more about.  It's high praise to tell a writer that you wanted more, but this collection was a bit like going to a really good restaurant, getting a plate covered in little tidbits, some are plate licking good, some are just tasty, but in the end, as you're staring at that empty plate, you're still hungry.  

As with any collection of short stories, some of the tales were stronger than others.  The first few in particular didn't seem like complete stories to me.  I kept expecting the book to go back to those characters and tell me more about what happened.  But they were left in eternal literary limbo.  Once past them, I lost the sense of "Huh?  That's it?" and enjoyed the stories that came next immensely.

So, if you'd like to expand your paranormal romance horizons, go grab a copy.  It's well worth the money and time.  And, maybe, if enough of us buy Hungry For You, we'll encourage A.M. Harte to write the full story of her version of the zombie plague.

Indie Book Review: Hard Day's Knight

"I hate waking up in an unfamiliar place. I've slept in pretty much the same bed for the past fifteen years, so when I wake up someplace new, it really throws me off. When that someplace is tied to a metal folding chair in the center of an abandoned warehouse that reeks of stale cigarette smoke, diesel fuel and axle grease - well, that really started my night off on a sparkling note."

Thus starts Hard Day's Knight, first book in the Black Knight Chronicles.  I love this book.  It makes me happy in a way that hasn't happened in a long, long time.  Now, this is not lofty literature here, this is Jay and Silent Bob get turned into vampires, grow up a bit, and decide to become private eyes.   It's cute.  It's fun.  It's insanely well written.   If it were food, it would be a perfect chocolate chip cookie with just enough milk.  The kind of thing that makes you feel good after you've eaten it.

The plot is what you might expect if Keven Smith were to write an episode of Angel.  Jimmy Black, and his sidekick/partner Greg Knightwood  (The Black Knight of their detective agency and the title.) have a problem.  The client pissed off a witch big time, and needs help so his whole family isn't killed.  They go in thinking this will be an easy little case of use the vamp mojo to scare the witch and all will be fine.  But it's never that easy.  Turns out the problem isn't a witch, she's a possessed little girl.  And, in the meantime, kids have been disappearing, and the demon's got something to do with it.  What started out as a quick little job turns into a full on forces of hell in the black hats versus Jimmy, Greg, their best friend who's a priest, and a fallen Angel in the white hats. 

The characters may not be breathtakingly original, but once again, they're perfectly done.  Just like the chocolate chip cookie, it doesn't have to be original to make you happy, it has to be good.   

John Hartness' strength is great dialog, and he compounds that strength by telling the story from Jimmy's point of view.  Jimmy is literally telling us the story, which means John gets to use his best skill through the entire tale.    And once again, someone who's really good at a skill, using that skill, makes me very happy.

I'll leave one final bit of praise here, before I go from enthusiastic reviewer to mad fan girl: Dad, the priest, is actually a good guy.  Lately it seems like every third paranormal book has an evil priest in it, like the whole point of being Catholic and joining the priesthood is to rain terror and unholy pain down on innocents everywhere.  So, I'm pretty happy when I see a book that shows a man of faith using that faith to make the world a better place.

Hard Day's Knight is my first five star review of 2011, and it's well earned it.

So,You Want to Write Like A Yank

Hello Luvvies!

Today's post is for the Brits out there who'd like to do a convincing job of writing American (from the United States) characters.   Now, while in depth writing that will fool most Americans takes a lot of work and research, here are five quick tips so that your character doesn't scream British! every time he/she opens his/her mouth.

1)  The only curse word Americans use that starts with a B is bitch.  (Okay, we do say bastard, but it's rare.)  If you find yourself tempted to write bugger, bollocks, or bloody, don't do it.  Lord knows there are times when one of those words seems like the only one that'll fit, but nothing will convince an American that the character they're being asked to read isn't American faster than any of those three words popping out of the mouth of a character.

2) We say and write dates: month, day, and then year.  The Fourth of July is the big exception to this.  If your character says something like, "First January, 2011," it will sound very odd to us.

3)  Keep dialog sentences pretty short.  We usually don't speak in long sentences.  Granted some are fine (keep your character in mind), but less than fifteen words is pretty normal for most spoken sentences. 

4)  If most of your experience in hearing American speech is from TV keep this in mind:  most TV characters speak like New Yorkers or Californians.  If your character comes from one of those two places he'll sound a lot more realistic than if he's from Georgia or Iowa.  (Or God forbid, Texas.  There are more bad Texas accents written from people all over the world than from anywhere else in the US.  Gobs of Americans write bad Texas accents, too.)  Think of it this way, if you were going to suggest where a British character written by an American should live, based on how most Brits speak on television, would you suggest London or a tiny town on the Welsh border?

5)  Watch House MD.  Seriously.  Hugh Laurie does a flawless American accent that's fairly generic.  He could come from almost anywhere in the United States.  Study how he speaks.  If Dr. House would say it, it's probably an okay sentence.

Okay, so that's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek list.  But truly, if you do want to write convincing American characters the single most important thing you can do is get an American or two to read your work and suggest substitutions.  We all speak English, but we use it differently, and it's easy to get tripped up on things you'd never even think of being issues.  (My own crowning moment of attempted Brit writing glory was a story where the hero sat down on the bedspread and then talked about the view out the counterpane.  I thought it was a synonym for window.)  Good luck and happy writing!

Fotolia for Cover Art

Spooky Haunted HouseRecently I received an email from a lovely lady at Fotolia.com.  She wanted to know if I'd be interested in a free trial subscription to Fotolia so I could blog about it here.  After I spent a moment doing my happy dance, I responded with a polite yes.

See, one of the most troublesome aspects of Indie Writerhood is that we have to do it all ourselves or hire out for it.  And while many of us can master basic programming, how to format our novels for digital and print publication, and social networking, most of us are not visual artists.  We may have an idea of what we want our covers to look like, but we rarely have the skills to make that image come to life.

EroticaBut there are wonderful places, like Fotolia, online that sell something called stock photos.  And stock photos makes life a lot easier for the Indie writer.  We no longer have to become master artists or photographers.  We can buy images and either using what talent we currently have, or hiring out for someone who knows graphic design, get a good cover.

Bond, Jane BondFotolia works on two different options, you can buy credits (I'm not sure why you buy credits instead of paying straight off the bat, but, well, I don't really need to understand either.) or you can buy a subscription.   For most Indies looking at setting up maybe one or two covers at a time, I'd say the credit plan is probably your best bet.  If you're looking at producing a lot of covers, either as a cover artist yourself, or because you've got a ton of work that you want to get ready for publication, the subscription plan may be a better deal.  (And by a lot, I mean you need more than $200 worth of art in a one month period.)  When you use credits a standard sized image (about what you'll want for a straight electronic copy) runs a few dollars.  For a large image (what you'd probably want for a physical book cover) prices generally seemed to run from ten to fifteen dollars. 

Fairy ForestBesides the change in size, what does that money buy you?  The standard license gives you the right to make derivative works (mess around with the image, take a bit from this picture here, a bit from that one there, and put them together) for all print and electronic media.  You can't resell the original.  You can't give it to your buddies.  If you want to upgrade your license and spend a bit more than $100 for the image, you can use the image for goods for resale.  So if you want to go on a major marketing campaign with your cover art, use it on t-shirts, mugs, refrigerator magnets, then you'll need the upgrade.  If you just want a book cover and images for your website, the standard license will do. 
The White Queen
How about selection?  Well, as you can see from just these samples, they've got a wide array of styles and themes.  (And these are the merest tip of the iceberg of pictures I liked.)  There are millions of them on the site.  I tried all sorts of off the wall search queries, and the only thing that didn't bring up any hits was "Scottish Laird."  (Though Highlander turned up over 100 results.) 

So, if you've got a complicated image in your mind.  Like say a male, red-haired, light-blue skinned elf with a celtic knot in ivy vines down his left arm, they probably don't have it.  But you'd also probably be amazed at how close you can get.  The White Queen looks a lot like one of my main characters.  Crop the image properly and she's dead on.  And if you're looking for something a tad less specific than my red-haired elf, you should have many, many options to work with. 

Go check it out, see if they've got the pictures you need to make your dream cover.

Indie Book Review: The Judas Syndrome

Okay, so supposedly, when you see a bad review, it's a case of the book not living up to the expectations of whomever purchased it.  That makes sense.  You rarely see reviews that state something like, "I absolutely loathe horror stories.  So in a masochistic fit  I picked up Seven Co-eds Get Horribly Murdered In A Haunted House.  It was a horror story.  I hated it."  (And if you do write that review, you deserve to be smacked upside the back of the head Gibb's style.)

No, usually bad reviews go something like this: "I purchased Seven Co-eds Get Horribly Murdered In A Haunted House because I love horror stories, and there were a bunch of great reviews.  Then I cracked it open.  I don't know what the other reviewers were smoking while they read it, but it didn't live up to the hype."

So, you see a book, you read the write up, you check out and the reviews and develop expectations.  You read the sample and develop more depth to your expectations.   Having done that, I expected The Judas Syndrome to be Red Dawn redone with a whole bunch of teen stoners.

Unlike the potential negative reviewer, I was very pleased to see my expectations were not met.

I'd say the first quarter of the book followed the traditional post-nuclear Armageddon script pretty closely.  We meet the main characters and the secondary characters.  We see them party and do a ton of drugs.  They come home and find the world has been blown to smithereens.  They huddle together for survival.  Up until this point it looks like a sophisticated version of many teen fantasies of life hiding out with your buddies, an unlimited supply of drugs, no parents to kill the buzz, and enough danger to keep everything interesting.

And then the story begins to shift.  We move from teen fantasy mode into metaphysical questioning mode.  We go from nothing deeper than getting laid and the next joint to an in depth exploration of a psyche at the breaking point.

This is not a light fluffy read with a happy ending.  The title, which I barely paid any attention to when I was thinking about the book before I read it, is a warning about how it's going to work out.  Joel, is a frighteningly well done psychological profile of a man slowly burning out and arising from the ashes not a phoenix, but a devil.  The world is gone.  Family and most friends have died horribly.  As the seven month course of the book continues, more friends die.  This is more stress than most people could possibly handle, add in the paranoia inducing effects of large quantities of cannabis, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

It's a compelling read, heartbreaking, but emotionally very, very real. 

There are however, aspects of the story I found jarring and out of place.  Joel and his friends are too young.  They're high school seniors, seventeen or eighteen years old.  And while I do not subscribe to the belief that all teens are twits, I can say that all the teens I've personally met who were as interested in drugs and partying as these kids were twits.  They needed more time to grow up.   College seniors would have worked better, post-grad students, better yet.  Basically, I just ignored how old they were supposed to be, and mentally advanced them to twenty-six ish, it made the story work a lot better.

What actually happened seemed quite fuzzy, too.  We know the terrorist mastermind had nukes.  We learn he had a lot more than anyone thought he did.  We know Joel and his buddies live in some middle of nowhere farming community, 200 miles from the nearest big city.  When they get back from their camping party weekend, they find town destroyed, sort of.  People are dead, some of them.  Some look like they died peacefully in their sleep.  Some are covered in burns.  Some are running around looting.  Some places the buildings have burned and cars are toppled.  Some are just fine.  What happened?  Is this some sort of fall out from a bomb over 200 miles away?  Did the terrorist have enough weaponry to go after little, middle of nowhere farming communities?  And why didn't any of Joel's group come down with radiation sickness? 


Joel's home and a nearby barn are perfectly set up for surviving the apocalypse it turns out.  And while I get Poetl didn't want to spend too much time dealing with the physical hows of survival, the set up was just a bit too convenient.  It's not only that everything is already set up with generators, but that they also manage to find a tanker truck filled with gasoline so they could run those generators.  

What Poetl did want to spend time on was ripping away everything Joel knew or believed about himself.  He built his character up, turned him from a lay about stoner into a leader, and then as stress piled on stress, turned him into a paranoid addict.  And from there things only get worse.  As I said earlier, not a light and fluffy read. 

Joel is the only fully developed character of the lot.  And I'm not sure if this is intentional or not.  We get the story from Joel's POV.  So are two dimensional secondary characters an indicator of lazy writing or of Joel's inability to really see and understand the people around him?  Part of the reason I'm not sure if this is intentional or not is that the writing as a technical matter of grammar and construction ranges from great to error prone.  When I see technical mastery of prose, I assume that things like the shallow secondary characters when told with first person POV is intentional.  When it's not, I'm not sure if it's another indicator of sloppy writing or an indicator of deep writing with limited technical skills.

Voice, assuming you pretend Joel is twenty-six, is well done.  Action scenes are believably chaotic.  (Though, as others have indicated, the sudden military prowess of a crew of high school seniors wasn't.)  Joel's descent into self-destructive madness was extremely well done.  You almost don't notice he's slipping away because he doesn't notice he's slipping away.  The ending isn't much of a shock.  Once you realize the title isn't kidding, and the last line of the description really isn't kidding, you know how this is going to end.  And while not a shock, it still evokes the pain of losing a character you wanted more and better for.
   
More careful editing, and more attention to making the setting/characters match the gravity of what happened, and this would have been a five star book.  As it is, I'm comfortable calling this four stars.

Devil In The Details: Smashwords V. BookBaby

After my first go round with BookBaby I got a lot of comments and discussions, so here we are back again looking more closely.

For those of you who didn't read the first article, BookBaby is a new option on the market for self publishers. Basically, they're a one stop location to get your book into the hands of a decent number of stores.  Smashwords does this as well.  For BookBaby you pay up front.  For Smashwords you pay a percentage of each sale.

After my first overview, I had come to the conclusion that BookBaby was a legitimate way for an author who sells enough books (defined as enough to cover the cost of your set up fee) to make money.  And, while that conclusion is still true, a deeper look at the numbers shows that any author who takes this route has to sell A LOT of books at one store.

With BookBaby you get 100% of your royalties.  With Smashwords they take 10%  (or 15% if you are selling on their site).  With BookBaby you pay $99.00 (on sale now, usually $149.00) for them to take your .doc and turn it into an ebook.  Smashwords does it for free, and then gets paid based on what you sell.  With that sort of model, if you sell enough books, you'll do better on BookBaby then you will on Smashwords.  Which is where I left it last time.  Unfortunately that's more truthy than true.
 
Let's get deeper into the numbers (These numbers represent how much of the cover price of your novel you get to keep):

On the iBookstore:
BookBaby: 70%
Smashwords: 60%

Barnes and Noble:
BookBaby: 50%
Smashwords: 60%

Sony Ebookstore:
BookBaby: 50%
Smashwords: 60%

It's not that BookBaby is secretly keeping some of the cash.  It just hasn't managed to negotiate as good a deal with it's distributors as Smashwords has.  So, as it was pointed out to me, and I'll now point out to you, you've got to sell a lot of books, on the iBookstore, to make more money with BookBaby than you would with Smashwords.  Is it possible?  Sure.  Is it likely?  No, not really.

One other advantage in BookBaby's court, they will upload to Amazon for you.  Smashwords currently has the options listed, but apparently that option doesn't actually do anything.  If you do Amazon with BookBaby, you get exactly the same deal you would if you went straight to Amazon.  And while uploading to Amazon is nice, if you have the skills to upload your document to BookBaby, you've got the skills to upload it on Amazon for yourself and save $99.00. 

Now, let me add a little more shine to Smashwords.  A: Smashwords has it's own sales platform as well as distribution channels.  B:  Free coupons.  You can do them on Smashwords and they are great for publicity and getting copies of your book to reviewers.  C: Smashwords distributes to Diesel and Kobo on top of everywhere BookBaby does except Amazon. 

So, until BookBaby manages to negotiate some better royalty rates with it's non-iBookstore distributors, I'd suggest sticking with Smashwords.