Today I’ll be forgoing my usual fantasy musings to have a go at answering some questions for the Entertainer Blogger Award. Thank you to Kayla at Kdrewthebookworm for nominating me! You can go and check out her awesome blog and her answers here. Continue reading
The dramatic regicide-by-poison in Game of Thrones may have placed them centre-stage, but poisons have always been rife in the fantasy and science fiction genres, along with antidotes and remedies.
Poisoning may simply seem like a convenient (if dastardly) way to kill a character, but poisons and antidotes are used in a variety of ways to add twists, tension, and complexities to fantasy plots. Continue reading
A great tagline can help sell books and give readers an idea of what kind of story they’re picking up. However, titles, covers and blurbs play a much larger role in book marketing, so taglines (aka straplines or endlines in the UK) are rarely discussed. We’re more likely to associate them with the subtitles on movie posters or trailers, and most of us would be hard-pressed to quote the tagline of our favourite novel. In spite of this, I’d wager that at least one out of every two books you pick up will have a slogan or catchphrase that appears on its front or back cover.
So this week I’ve collected 20 stand-out taglines from various books on my shelf and analysed which ones I like, which ones I don’t, and why I believe they do or don’t do a good job of selling the novel. Continue reading
Okay, so this is going to be a bit of a short post this week, but I wanted to write about something that happened to my dad recently because I found it amusing, and because Father’s Day is coming up this Sunday (in Australia anyway). Continue reading
Last week I listed the ways a book can get my attention. I looked at how things like awards, recommendations and online lists can help a novel to stand out from the crowd for me. However, once a book has my attention, it usually still needs to jump a few extra hurdles before it becomes something I want to buy and read.
So this week I thought I’d analyse all the little factors that come into play when I’m investigating a book to see if it’ll go onto the “to-read” list, or even straight into the shopping basket. Continue reading
I’ve always been fascinated by how books are discovered – by how a person ends up finding and deciding to read a particular novel amidst the ever-growing sea of books swirling around them. Since starting to write myself I’ve become even more fascinated by this process, knowing I may one day have a book out there that I hope to get into readers’ hands.
Sadly I don’t have the expertise or the data to analyse how most people find the books they read. However, I do know my own habits and behaviours as a reader, so for interest’s sake I thought I’d take a look at how a book can stand out from the crowd for me and make it onto my “to-read” shelf. Continue reading
There’s no rule that says Fantasy authors have to avoid clocks and calendars when writing their fictional worlds. Many authors simply stick with seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years.
After all, the 24-hour clock and the Gregorian Calendar pre-date the Middle Ages, so if a fantasy is set on a medieval earth-like world and characters refer to hours and months, it won’t feel immediately anachronistic (though admittedly these measurements wouldn’t have been available in handy wristwatch or smart phone format). Continue reading
If a best-selling young adult novel sucks me in after only a few pages, it’s often because the book is wielding a secret weapon. Or rather, a not-so-secret weapon, because I’ve seen it many times before. And although I recognise it, it still has the power to peak my curiosity and get me rooting for a character I know next to nothing about. So what is this clever trope?
It has two components, and these usually form a kind of structuring device that shapes the plot and climactic points of the novel: Continue reading
The other day I came across this Wikipedia article listing best-selling books, and as I scrolled through the list (which is based on estimated number of copies sold), it struck me that many of the titles listed – including the top 4 – are fantasy novels. And I’m not just talking about Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings… these two series undoubtedly dominate the top of the lists, but there are other fantasy books in the mix too.
So this got me to thinking, what are the most popular fantasy books and series of all time, in terms of book sales? I thought I’d use the list to answer this question, compiling those fantasies that are estimated to have sold 50 million copies or more: Continue reading
With an ever-growing list of new books I want to read and new authors I want to sample, I’m often reluctant to put my ‘to read’ list on hold to plough through a series, especially a long one. As a result, it has to be a particularly brilliant, compelling or intriguing book to entice me to buy the sequels, let alone read them straight away. Continue reading
