traciloudin

I seem to be striking out a lot this year. I'd heard Saberhagen is awesome, but since this was written over 35 years ago, the writing seems awful compared to contemporary writers. This is coming from someone who grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and Andre Norton, so I'm definitely used to reading things written more than a few decades ago, and in ERB's case, about a century ago.

Here's an example:
He realized vaguely that he was standing in an attitude of thoughtfulness, though in fact his mind was almost entirely blank. But he had to think.

This review is for the 2nd Edition. This book rocks. It's pretty much your step-by-step guide for success in indie publishing. I can't wait to put it all to the test later this year.

I got this book as part of the Indie Power Pack, but it's worth buying at full price. Of the three books in the pack, this book is much more straightforward and rambles a LOT less than [b:Write. Publish. Repeat.|19173266|Write. Publish. Repeat. (The No-Luck-Required Guide to Self-Publishing Success)|Sean Platt|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386152927s/19173266.jpg|27214781] and is specifically geared toward fiction writers, unlike [b:How To Market A Book|18135290|How To Market A Book|J.F. Penn|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1372403900s/18135290.jpg|25475736].

I will say that it gets off to a slow start if, like me, you're already sold on the idea of indie publishing. The first chapter or so is devoted to explaining why you should indie publish and myths of self-publishing, but I found it interesting anyway. You may just want to skip those sections and jump into the meat and potatoes of the book.

I found the following sections most helpful:
Pricing to Sell
Sales Channels
Marketing
Developing a Sticky Readership
Kickstart Your Sales
Appendix A: Publishing Checklist
Appendix C: Let's Get Physical (Print)
Appendix D: Shorter Stories
Appendix E: Reviews

Essentially... the whole thing! Pick this up if you intend to publish anytime soon!

This book rambles. A lot. While referencing your own works as illustrative examples is expected and necessary for understanding in a lot of cases, these guys also just spend a large portion of the books talking about themselves. This was my problem with their podcast as well... Too much of it felt like inside jokes. But despite the chaff, there's a great deal of wheat here.

One thing this book excels at is reassuring you that you really CAN do this. I think if I'm ever feeling doubtful, I'll have to go back and reread some parts of this book.

I bought this as part of the Indie Author Power Pack, and I'd rank it as the second most important book of the three. [b:Let's Get Digital: How To Self-Publish, And Why You Should|12085614|Let's Get Digital How To Self-Publish, And Why You Should (Let's Get Digital, #1)|David Gaughran|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1311786288s/12085614.jpg|17053693] is by far the more straightforward, to the point, and helpful of the three. Here's my review of Let's Get Digital.

Let's face it, though. Most everything in this book and in the Indie Author Power Pack you could pick up for free by reading not only the authors' blogs, but others as well, such as The Passive Voice, Catherine Caffeinated, Kristen Kathryn Rush's blog, Joe Konrath's blog, Lindsay Buroker's blog, Smashwords blog posts, storyfix.com, Terribleminds, the Book Designer, the Savvy Book Marketer, Wise Ink, WoW! Women on Writing, Writer Beware, Dean Wesley Smith's blog, Nick Stephenson's free stuff, etc. I've got all these in my RSS feed. But like many things, reading blogs here and there does tend toward spotty knowledge. The nice thing about the Indie Author Power Pack is that it filled in any gaps I had in my knowledge.

This one seemed way better than the first. I loved the main characters' arcs. I do agree with the Tor.com review, though, about how the characters should've talked to each other more. that's always a frustrating plot device.

Started off really cool. Kicks you in the face with awesome tech and all kinds of jargon right from the start, which made me think it was going to be wall-to-wall ass kickery the whole way through. Instead it turns into murder mystery intrigue and continues along for at least one-third of the book that way. Not sure how much further, as I stopped reading for a week and never got the urge to pick it back up again. So if you're looking for a futuristic murder mystery, this is a great book for you.

At some point, I'd like to finish this book, but the politics became too tedious for me. The plot seemed to move slowly. Although it introduced some interesting worldbuilding ideas, I would've liked to have seen them better explored. (But note that I haven't read to the end.)

One culture has three genders and one has five. And though there's some mention of accidentally using the wrong pronoun for people, that's about the extend of it. In practice, there are really just two genders. In one mirror world, the males are the weaker of the two, and it's really just a flip flop of our world, with women having more rights than men and so forth. I hope that the latter half of the novel would do a better job exploring this, as well how the mirror world differs in that regard, but I just couldn't hang in long enough to find out.

A very unique world. However, despite what I said earlier, about how the author managed to tell so much backstory without it being boring... You can only do that to so many characters back to back before it becomes a bit irksome. This book definitely tested my limits. It seemed like every time I started a new chapter, I was inundated with a huge chunk of backstory for a character I hadn't gotten to know or care about yet. Over and over. So the pace seemed really, really slow.

Then, suddenly, it picked up. Things started happening at a frenzied pace. Everybody was discovering something or doing something interesting all at once. I couldn't put the book down. Strangely, though, this all seemed to happen before the climax.

Unfortunately, I doubt the climax will be that memorable within a couple weeks. For one thing, it seemed like they gave up too easily. Why didn't she just go ahead and stick him back into his lamp? And for another... neither of them actually did anything in the climax (the random secondary ice cream character saved the day—really???), and the sacrifices they made didn't seem to matter. I think the narrative even shifts viewpoints at once point and even says something like "It seemed like the three of them were just standing in the room, having a quiet discussion" from Ice Cream Sauleh's POV. The Golem sacrifices her freedom to save Anna, but it goes back to classic ethics. Do you save the pregnant woman's life instead of stopping a psychopath who will enslave jinnis the world over, doing terrible things, and probably not giving a damn who he kills on his path to glory? Or do you stop the psychopath at the potential loss of the pregnant woman's life? I suppose the point was that the Golem thought of Anna as a friend, and sacrificed to save her friend, but I never really got the feeling that their relationship was that strong, even at the dance hall. I guess I just wasn't convinced by any of that scene.

Still, the incorporation of Jewish mysticism, the time period it's set in, and the idea of combining a jinni and a golem into one story... These were all very fresh. It's a great read.

Sometimes it's the books that are so close to being truly extraordinary that disappoint me the most. For what they could have been.

Once you get past what I can only describe as an extended prologue and the main character gets captured, this book gets pretty awesome. You follow along as the character's hope is crushed, making you wonder how any humans will ever get out of the situation alive. The tension ramps up quickly and I found it difficult to put the book down. So it definitely made up for the momentary lapse in good writing at the beginning.

Things I liked:

The slavery aspect. I've always loved a good slave uprising book, and this one is the kind where you realize you've been a slave your whole life and never knew it until they showed their hand. The only thing that annoyed me was at the end, how the Warden just assumes she needs to lead the slaves, when the people have no reason to trust her. She's been different from all of them from the beginning. She's had an elevated status over the amaurotics, and she's been kept separate from the pink & reds. Why would any of them follow her?

The constant tension over whether her master is actually a good person, making you wonder if she's just falling into a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. I love it when a character can't determine who's an ally. The romance seemed a little tacked on, though, I will say. I liked that she didn't try to stay with him, and he didn't go with her, and that he knew it would be best if they never saw each other ever again. She only fell for him because of the fact that he's pure aether, anyway. And from the descriptions of the creatures, I would've found a sex scene between them repulsive. Which is why I doubt I'll read the sequel... I'm betting that'll happen sooner or later.

Things that didn't work:

The first 5% of this book is telling, not showing, the whole way through. You barely get outside the character's head enough to even orient yourself as to where you are. It's as though the first 5% is written by someone else, or the author just took their "backstory" file and dumped it into the book as an extended prologue.

For a publisher as big as this one, I was surprised at how many errors there were in this book. I remember at least one typo any word processor would've caught ("theif"). A couple mangled sentences. And the ebook formatting was probably the worst I've ever managed to read. The paragraphs barely had an indent, so if one paragraph ended close to the right margin, I often wouldn't realize a new paragraph started on the next line, because its first sentence was too close to the left margin.

Pretty cool pre-apocalypse book. It gets pretty dark at the end, but there is redemption to be had, of a sort. Certainly a bittersweet end.

A very unique world. Awesome, detailed worldbuilding. Definitely give it a try if you enjoy fantasy of any kind. No graphic violence or sex.

A day later and I'm still not sure what to think of this book. It's amazing, to be sure. Let's just say that it gave me a variety of complex emotions, much more than most books' endings.

Warning for violent rape scenes throughout.

The all-out insane conclusion to this awesome YA trilogy.

For some reason, this book is told in reverse order. At first, it makes you think Book was Alliance all along. Then you find out that before that, he was a Browncoat and infiltrated the Alliance and brought them their worst-ever defeat. Because of that, to me it felt like it negated the Firefly episode where the Alliance is so quick to help him. If this is what happened with the Alliance in his past, why would they be so quick to help him?

Other than that, good backstory, nice art, and it's crazy to know that we never really knew his real name.

This book had a much slower pace than I'm used to, nor do you see any magic first-hand until about 200 pages in. But it was worth it.

I learned a great deal of writing technique from this book, I think. I only hope I can retain it!

Her characterizations are flawless. I never doubted who is a main character, a secondary character, or a minor character. It's in very close third, so close that Cazaril's thoughts are often reflected in the narrative itself (and not in italics).

At first I thought the plot was a bit meandering, but everything had its purpose in the end. I also like the subtlety of the gods in this book. Too many fantasy novels have them coming down and directly affecting so many things that one wonders how the characters have any purpose at all. The theology and the limitations of the gods are very well explained, though sometimes the characters doubt the gods' will and capabilities, as only makes sense.

Another interesting thing about the plot from a writer's perspective was the control of tension. Before the climax, all the tension completely disappeared. I almost felt like I was reading the denouement, though there were still quite a few pages left, which made me wonder what could happen next. When Cazaril reaches the Fox's stronghold and finds out the Lord Bergon is none other than the kid he risked his life to save on the galley, it seemed almost too easy. The tension briefly increased when they faced the ambush in the mountains. But then again, the royal wedding went off without a hitch, leaving me wondering what could possibly go wrong. The tension was very low at that point, and the fact that the shadow remained not only around Iselle but spread to Bergon confirmed my suspicions. At that point, I thought maybe that plot point might be resolved in a sequel, but no, they were under siege next. So it was interesting to me to see that the tension could take such a nosedive right before the climax, and still maintain my interest by making wonder what could possibly happen next, because it was all too easy!

I also liked the realism of the battles, particularly the one at the end (despite the supernatural happenings toward the end of it). Cazaril is too busy with his swordfight to know anything about what's going on around him. He doesn't know if the royal couple obeyed his command to run. He doesn't know if reinforcements have entered the courtyard to help him or if he's the only man left standing. When he tries to glance back, he pays for it. He has no idea what else might be taking place throughout the rest of the palace. All of these thoughts were running through his head even while he was fighting, but described in an expert way.

This is the first Lois McMaster Bujold book I've read, but it certainly won't be the last!

Better than I expected, and definitely better than [b:City of Bones|256683|City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1)|Cassandra Clare|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309277410s/256683.jpg|2267189]. The concept is more of a thought experiment than anything you can fully suspend disbelief over (essentially 5 political parties who each only have 1 plank in their platform and who segregate themselves from each other). But the characters are rounded, even some of the more minor ones. And the romantic subplots (which apparently every YA is required to have) seemed truer to life to me than any other YA I've ever read... less angst, more uncertainty. Overall, a pretty good way to while away a weekend or so.

I completely dislike the narrative voice of this book. At first I thought maybe the book just started in summary-mode and would eventually get to the point where the narrator would stop telling us stuff and start showing us. Unfortunately, that rarely happened throughout the entire novel. The whole time, you have quite a bit of distance between yourself and the story. Now, the story did get more and more interesting, and that's what kept me reading. The world, the mysteries kept by the Sisterhood, and the mystery of the Return were all intriguing, though I was disappointed by the end. She doesn't tell him about the others or try to get them to rescue them? I'm not interested in continuing reading the rest of the series for a character this shallow.

Interestingly, the character doesn't so much develop as gain a greater and greater understanding of her own character and how her actions affect others, which was a growth arc I haven't seen much in fiction. Overall, I recommend that if you don't like the first two chapters' voice, don't continue reading this book, because it doesn't often go any deeper. If the narrative style doesn't bother you, then you're in for a fun ride.