Alan Baxter's Blog, page 135

Free books and ebooks and promos, Oh my!

My first full post for Publishing Renaissance is up now. It’s all about the nature of ebooks, free books and giving away books for promotional purposes – all good marketing stuff like that. I’ve even cleverly shoehorned in a special two week promo in the post where you can get an ebook version of RealmShift for only a dollar.

Head on over there and read the post to learn more.

.

Publishing Renaissance

I was recently invited to become a contributing writer over at the group blog, Publishing Renaissance. To give you an idea of what they’re all about, there’s this from the site:

We are a group of indie writers putting our work out into the world and trying to navigate the web, social media, and all the new opportunities available. Each of us has a different perspective on what it means to be indie, why we’re indie, and the unique challenges that indie publishers face.

What we share in common is a

Millionth word scam exposed

Remember at the end of May I posted about the Global Language Monitor celebrating the immient arrival of the one millionth word in the English language? At the time I questioned the accuracy of their studies. In fact, my exact words were, “Personally, I think it’s all bollocks.” As the comments in that thread show, it was indeed a complete and utter load of rubbish.

However, the whole concept got a real thrashing recently, which is actually very funny. The Language Log site points out that Paul P

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Day June 23rd

As a sci fi and fantasy writer I’m a big fan of this idea. I picked it up from the blog of my friend, author David B Coe who directed his readers to this LiveJournal post by Sharon Lee.

(Yeah, the apostrophe bothers me too - I’ve mentioned it on the Facebook page where this image came from!)

The basic premise is a day to celebrate writers of science fiction and fantasy - for readers, you can talk about your favourite writers or those that influenced you the most, and read some quality sf/f. If you

RealmShift contest - the winner

Thanks to everyone that entered the contest to win a signed copy of RealmShift. Here’s the original post about it.

The response was great with entries coming in from all over the world. The majority of entries were from the US, but there were also entries from Australia, the UK, Canada, Italy, Denmark, Chile and Montenegro. It was very gratifying that so many entrants made a point of telling me how much they enjoyed the sample chapters that they had read in order to enter. I’m glad some new reade

Last chance to win a signed copy of RealmShift

Just a quick reminder that the contest to win a signed copy of RealmShift ends at midnight tomorrow, Australia EST. That’s about 36 hours from right now for those international readers. Still time to have a read, find the answer and email it to me. There’s been a great response so far, but every entry has an equal chance of winning, so hop to it.

All the entry details here.

.

2009 Ditmar Award winners

As announced at Horrorscope, the 2009 Ditmar Awards for Australian SF, fantasy and horror have been awarded at Conjecture in Adelaide.

The Ditmar Awards have been awarded annually since 1969 at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention (the “Natcon”) to recognise achievement in Australian science fiction (including fantasy and horror) and science fiction fandom. The award is similar to the Hugo Award but on a national rather than international scale.

The award is named after Martin James

New review for MageSign

A new reader review has appeared on the Amazon page for MageSign which is very nice to read. It’s not only a good review (which is always welcome) but also gets a good grip on the concept behind the book. I like reviews like this one - short and sweet, that really nail the ideas. I also like anything says I articulate uncompromising violence. This is the review:

In a clever yet bloody tradition, Alan Baxter has delivered a gripping sequel to his debut title ‘RealmShift’. Founding a refreshing app

David Eddings dies at 77

I picked this news up on Twitter yesterday and I’m still having trouble learning all the details, but it has been confirmed. It’s very sad news indeed that David Eddings, fantasy storyteller extraordinaire has died. Eddings was the author of many books, but most significantly for me were The Belgariad and The Mallorean.

Pawn Of Prophecy, Book 1 of The Belgariad

I remember being a teenager of about thirteen when I first discovered The Belgariad and it got to the point where I was desperately awaiti

Win a signed copy of RealmShift - one week left

I’m in the middle of running a contest for someone to win a signed copy of my novel RealmShift. All the details were in this post last week. There’s only one week left before the draw, so get onto it if you want to be in with a chance to win. There’s been a lot of entries so far and I’ve tried to respond to every entry personally, but apologies if I missed anyone. Rest assured that all correct answers have gone into the draw. There’s only been one wrong answer so far, which is funny given who it