I'm sharing my love of good books with this urban fantasy series review. The review is not just for readers, it's also for authors, because in it, I tell you exactly what is so great about this series, and those are the things you need in your book if it's to do as well as Lindsay Buroker's books do. She's a full time author. It's been a long time since I wrote my last review. I gave up because I was already spending enough time on the keyboard editing and writing appraisals for authors who wanted my opinion on their work before they published it. But I realised recently that I'm quite happy to video me talking about books I've read. I always have a book on hand, reading a lot just for the pleasure of it, so I have plenty of books I can talk about. Hence this review. And everything I read for pleasure is on Kindle Unlimited. When you pay for that service, you don't want to pay for more books, so you keep your reading to what's in KU. At least for fiction. So enjoy this … [Read more...]
Why a Book Review Channel on You Tube?
With so many book review channels already on You Tube, why have I made another one? Good question. Guess I might be doing something a bit different. Watch the video below to find out what. And don't forget to Subscribe to the channel not all the reviews will appear on the blog. https://youtu.be/t21PFfL9cDs … [Read more...]
Big news – enormous mind stretching stuff – a bunch of new releases
Okay, maybe it's not that big, but it is to me because I'm feeling really good about several things. I have a whole bunch of awesome reviews for You Can't Shatter Me (read the full bunch on its Goodreads page ) and things are moving along in the new release department. Run is out. This is the short story prequel to Lethal Inheritance and its free everywhere (except Amazon who are a bit slow getting it together.) You can get it for all devices at Smashwords and on epub at Kobo.It's a great introduction to the world of Lethal Inheritance and a wonderful reader wrote a terrific review of it here. The extended version of The Drorgon Slayer's Choice is out. I'll be talking more about it in another post, but it's now a novella instead of a short story (16,000 words instead of 6,000), and richer for it. Click on the cover for more info. I'm really proud of this one now. The second edition of A Matter of Perception is out. This includes the full novella length of The Drorgon … [Read more...]
What’s in a star?
In the past, before ebooks and the rise of self-publishing as a viable option for serious authors, we could assume that although we didn’t necessarily like every book we read, we could assume that the writing was of a reasonable quality. If we wrote a review, all we had to do was say whether or not we liked the book. That’s easy. Now, however, especially if you’re reading ebooks, you can’t assume that quality, even from mainstream publishing houses. On the other hand, even at the cheap end of the market, you can’t assume poor quality, because there are plenty of books from self and Indie publishers that are every bit as good or better than anything published by the mainstream. This gives reviews the vital function of being an arbiter of quality, not just an indication of how many people liked the book. However, we can’t assume that a review indicates the degree of quality of the writing because people use the star rating systems in different ways. The personal opinion rating star – … [Read more...]
Should authors publish negative book reviews?
Soon after I began writing reviews and publishing them on my blog, I asked another author if he would review my book of short stories and post it on his blog. He said that he didn’t write reviews because he didn’t want to be a target for disgruntled authors who might not like what he said about their work. I took his point and decided that if I couldn’t say something good about a book, I would say nothing about it in public. I also want to support good authors, not talk about books that aren’t so good. Who wants to hear about them anyway? So my policy for reviewing is that I will only publish reviews for books that I can give 3 or more stars for. That doesn’t mean that I give 3-5 stars for everything I read; it means that I don’t publish my 1 & 2 star reviews. If the author had requested a review from me, then I send them a few private notes. However, in the same way that fake 5 star reviews have consequences for the whole rating system, so does this policy. Many reviewers, … [Read more...]
