Tanya Lisle

  • I read this series before and I’m revisiting it now. I’m realizing that I’ve got different feelings about it this time than I did the first time, which happens. I’m looking at the formatting of the book for one ((And I don’t like it. For the record.)) and paying more attention to the structure and how the series itself is constructed. Which is interesting, loose, and a little on the hybrid pantser/plot side of things.

    So the book itself is about Gansey. The back of it claims it’s about Blue, but she is honestly treated as an observer to the series, watching as three out of the four boys go about their lives with an easy out if she ever doesn’t want to deal with it anymore. She has the most interesting setting around her, with her psychic mother and her being a battery for the supernatural rather than having any psychic abilities herself, and she wants to have an experience that will make her feel more like the rest of her family.

    Gansey is the centre of it all, but also the least interesting part in the cast of everyone else. He is a rich kid looking for Glendower, an long dead Welsh king that has for some reason been buried somewhere near Henrietta, the town this all takes place in. He and his friends go to Algionby Academy, and the book is less about this story than it is about the individual characters.

    Which works well for me, because some of the individual characters are far more interesting than this idea of wake up dead king and he’ll grant you a wish. Ronan is a main focus, though he is never a perspective character, for instance. Whether this is to shroud him in mystery or because he just doesn’t have much to do besides set up how others see him in this book, I’m not sure, but just using this book to establish the resident badass with a cute pet raven and tragic backstory is fine by me.

    And then there’s Adam, who really needs a bit of a trigger warning on him. He’s also got a tragic backstory, but you actually get to see it unfold in this book. He’s a poor kid on a scholarship and working many jobs to cover the rest of the cost and comes from an abusive household. You get to see how that unfolds over the course of the book and probably should come with a trigger warning for anyone who may find the scenario familiar.

    The main plot running through it turns out to be about the sidekick character, Noah, who is just… there. I love him, but narratively he’s serving as motivation to move the plot forward, and structurally the plot only serves to make the characters interact with one another. It’s not ultimately treated with as much importance as the individual characters and what they are doing.

    Which is to say, I still really like the book, but I’m having a lot more fun this time around taking apart the story on a structural level and examining the pieces of it. Bring to decide if it was really meant to be four books for the series, or if it was made that way because of editorial demand. This book is, in large part, just set up for the rest of the series, with more time spent establishing where the characters came from and where they stand as opposed to telling the core story about the kids trying to find the old king. And I’m wondering if that’s because she wanted to make the series as long as she could manage, or if it was actually because that’s how long the story she wanted to tell was.

    Check it out on Amazon

  • I don’t think I really liked Blue Magic. It’s not that it was a bad book, but there were just a lot of little things that rubbed me wrong until eventually t all came together into this box. The elements I liked from the first book were less prominent and the ideas I didn’t much care for were expanded upon which is unfortunate.

    For instance, there’s the whole thing about fairyland where the vita has frozen everything? That bit I didn’t care about? That is half of the book, or so it seems. Maybe only a third. And there’s characters in it that I just do not care if anything happens to them, good or bad. There’s a man meant to be a romantic rival and I just don’t care at all.

    Speaking of, there’s a lot of romance in this book. Astrid is meant to be with a guy and because it’s predestined, there’s a lot of mentions that they will end up together with no actual developing of that relationship. Which I’ve learned tired me even more than romance, and I have talked about how I feel about romance in books.

    The story is also very different from what the first book was. Where the first was framed as how the world came to be ruined, this one is meant to be much grander, but there’s more about what’s happening than the actual character motivations and actions that I’m much more interested in. Instead of being in the story, I feel like I’m watching it from a distance and I can’t really make a connection with any of the characters.

    Speaking of the characters, there’s a whole bunch of new ones. I hope you like characters that have names and single personality traits because there’s too many of them in one book to let them have full personalities. Someone died and I have no idea which one it wasI. Apparently it was sad, but I only know that there was a camel and he was important, but I don’t know who he was. What he did. Why I should care as a reader. I don’t even know his name.

    Everything seems to be done as a means to an end. Astrid is a chess master and socially inept and incapable of really helping herself in a lot of scenarios. It’s an idealized version of what might actually happen, where everyone’s just okay with the powerful woman being in charge with the most minimal argument. And, as contrast, a competent woman being in charge in fairyland, but having an uprising that kills her.

    While I do like a lot of the ideas here, I wasn’t really a fan of the execution and it didn’t feel like a sequel to the same book Maybe taken separately this would be fine, but it’s not what I liked about the first. If you want to find out what happens, maybe pick it up from the library.

  • I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the script for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is bad. Like, really bad. And yet, I still flew to New York and saw it on Broadway.

    You guys. The show is so good.

    The acting really does make the whole thing so much better. A lot of lines that seemed flat or off in the script were delivered so well and made it work so much better than it ever did on paper. The characters come to life and become far less flat, and Scorpius in particular ((was my favourite!)) was so well acted and portrayed. The screaming was a choice that I am totally behind, and his interactions with Albus and the other characters was fantastic.

    Even the adults, while I don’t agree with a lot of the script decisions, were well done and I loved the way they were portrayed. They managed to retain enough of their book-selves in the portrayal that it didn’t feel too strange while I was watching.

    And the special effects! There were some great magic sections in this show. It wasn’t just the wands lighting up, but the transformations of characters from one to another, to quick changes, to characters appearing from nothing, to that absolutely fantastic time travel effect. The sound and lighting are things I don’t normally think of when I’m watching a performance, but they did such a good job with the whole production.

    The thing I expected the least were the dance numbers. No singing, but there was a bit of interesting choreography, and the fact that almost every robe swish was punctuated by this sound effect and, well, I really loved it.

    It is a very long show, though. We were up in the nosebleeds, but for about 5 hours of show, $100 is not bad at all. We could see everything, even the pool that appeared on stage for part of the show. Honestly, it was such a good show. If you’re anywhere near Broadway, even if you didn’t much care for the script, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is still a show worth checking out!

  • I read this book first ages ago when I met the author at a conference. I could talk about my experience with her, but this is a book review and that is therefore irrelevant. She was smart, nice, and endlessly interested in the craft, though.

    Indigo Springs is about Astrid Lethewood and finding out the legacy that her father left behind that she’s since forgotten. There’s blue magical water, vitagua, that she can use to enchant items that will produce a single spell, and a whole world of this water frozen in ice behind the chimney of her father’s house that she has now inherited. The blue water is melting and she and her roommates are all caught up in the mess that this creates.

    I like the ideas in the book quite a bit. While there is a feeling of danger that there’s some outside force that may come after them if the knowledge of the magic gets out, that works more to keep the narrative contained to the characters and how they interact with the magic. In the end, it’s much more about how Saraha, Astrid’s best friend, manipulates the people around her for her own ends and how Astrid really doesn’t have enough of a backbone to stop her before it’s much too late.

    There’s also a lot of interesting queer content. Astrid’s bisexuality is portrayed matter of factly, with mentioned of an ex-girlfriend that she lived with and how Astrid’s hesitation to stopping Sahara is rooted in large part in the fact that she has feelings for her.

    Spoiler

    And, of course, in how she chooses Jacks, her other roommate, in the end because he will actually love her back.

    [collapse]

    I am not sure if I wanted more or less of Astrid struggling to understand her mother coming out as a transman, especially since there wasn’t much of a coming out so much as it just was at one point. The conflict all seemed to happen before that coming out point, and vanished after, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.

    Spoiler

    The climax also felt really messy. There was a big emphasis on the fairy world that felt like it could have been cut, but it might have just been because I am not interested in the fairy world whatsoever. The big bad that showed up felt like a plot device so that there could be a climax, since he was mentioned only in passing before this point, but he had no real character or build up. There was no real fear or tension, and I feel like instead they could have made it Jacks’ father instead of some guy melted from the vitagua ice who came in to try and murder everyone at the end. It just felt bloated and unnecessary.

    [collapse]

    Overall, it’s pretty interesting and I do recommend at least checking it out. The way they treat magic as more of a chemical spill and how they deal with the switch from modern present to flashback with the tense switch is interesting to see, if nothing else, though there is plenty else to like about it.

    On to reading Blue Magic!

  • I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf for ages. I got it entirely because I liked the cover, namely because it doesn’t have any of the things that I dislike about YA covers. ((I will rant at length about the female without a face standing there while vaguely interesting things happen around her covers at length if you give me a chance)) I was a little iffy on it because it is a first person narrative, which I have been hesitant about, and I’ll get into that in a bit, but first, thoughts on the book!

    Shadow and Bone follows Alina in what feels like a fantasy version of Russia ((Apparently this is intentional)) as she discovers that she’s not just an orphan in the army, but one of the most unique Grisha ((Wizards, essentially)) alive. She gets whisked away to a place where she can train her magic while falling into the intrigue of the court and trying to learn as much as she can to help The Darkling, the most powerful of them all. The more she learns about the Darkling, however, the more she realizes that she’s in over her head.

    There’s a lot of really interesting world building. A lot of it is done in the language, which just feels Russian somehow. The setting feels like a fantasy universe that’s not too far off from our own, more like what might happen if there was magic out there and it were a couple centuries ago. I’m not entirely sure what the Grisha are since it doesn’t really go into whether they get to choose their specialties or if they are born with them, but I did like how they structured a lot of the universe.

    And I do find myself liking Alina, even if I wish she were less… well, less of a YA heroine. Unlike the rest of the court, she doesn’t care about how pretty she is and there’s a weird focus on how pretty other characters are in comparison to her. There was a nice break where she allowed herself to enjoy being pretty and dress up in clothes for fun, but there’s a strange focus she has on the appearance of other people that just rubbed me the wrong way. Other than that she was proactive and had a strong voice in the narrative that I liked, but there’s just a few things about her that bothered me a bit.

    I also had trouble taking a few things seriously. The Darkling never gets an actual name, and it’s strange that I’m supposed to feel like this guy is anything but a kid who picked a title for himself. I found myself waiting for someone to try taking him down a peg by using his real name, but it never happened. I’m also about 70% sure the twist with Baghra didn’t actually make sense. Like, why keep her there? Why doesn’t she take a more proactive role given what she knows? Just… why?

    But this book helped me figure out what it was about the first person narrative that bothered me so much as a kid. See, in the past I always felt that I was supposed to be that main character. Given that the stories I was reading at the time with a first person narrator were largely bland women that made it easy for the audience to slide into, and that these female heroines had mostly romance arcs, I hated the experience. In this book ((And Percy Jackson, actually)) Alina has a personality of her own and it felt like I was being told the story instead of along for the ride and supposed to be part of it.

    At some point, I think I will check out the rest of the series. Despite the issues I had, I still want to know what happens next.

     

    Check out Shadow and Bone

  • I’ve mentioned this book to some people, but let me talk about how much I enjoyed it. I’m not just saying that because I happen to know Latimer and I’m very happy to have her book finally in my hands.

    The story follows Bryony Gray, a young girl taken in by a family that doesn’t much like her but does appreciate what she can do for them. She’s been made to paint portraits by an abusive aunt and uncle who have taken her in and secluded in the attic where she can only look out at the next house and imagine she could be friends with the children who live there.

    Well, until the portraits she has been painting are linked to a series of disappearances. Then she finds that not only have some of the things she’s been seeing are a real danger, but she gets to break out and actually meet the neighbours who help her deal with her paintings and find out more about who her parents really were.

    Middle grade horror does not get enough love as a genre and Latimer does it wonderfully. There’s a good focus on the adventure with the horror elements being more of an addition. It’s also not that sort of horror that you find in the books for older folks. Not descriptions of blood splatter or gruesome murders but the more unsettling things that are different from the way they should be told through the lens of a character where these things are not entirely unusual.

    Plus it’s got some nice queer representation! There’s nothing official, mind you. It’s middle grade, after all. And traditionally published. A fully realized couple was not going to happen, but there’s enough in there that I read it as very obvious, even if others are reading it as subtle.

    I’d very much recommend it. It’s a lot of fun and, as middle grade, a pretty easy read. There’s a lot of interesting ideas in it, and it’s told fantastically.

    Also I want a sequel. ((It doesn’t need a sequel, but I want one anyway))

    Get The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray here!

  • This is not something I would have normally picked up now that I’ve read it, but I think I’m going to give more books like this a chance. RJ Plant paints a really interesting future, one controlled by organizations looking for a quiet domination of a populace via espionage and biological warfare in the most unpredictable ways.

    It honestly took me a little to get into it. There is a whole universe that needs to be set up, from a world that has been changed by the war to the differences between what’s happened in Ireland and the US, and it’s done very well. ((And there’s an organization called GDI, which took me ages to take seriously…)) But I knew the mind switching was coming up and I really love a two minds fighting for dominance over one body story.

    Felix is a hard character to get behind once you meet Conor, the brother who’s been trapped inside Felix’s body. I will profess a preference to Conor, given that he’s spent his life watching everything his brother’s done and never been allowed to come out. When he does come out and we start getting answers that bring about more questions, particularly about just who is behind everything and what the purpose of his chimerism is. The execution of the chimerism and the reasoning behind it is fascinating and a spoiler, so I will refrain from talking in too much detail about it here.

    Overall, it’s a really entertaining read with some good twists and turns. The world is uniquely set up to make Conor and Felix’s struggles that much more interesting and keep the stakes in the narrative high. I’d definitely suggest giving it a shot!

    Check it out on Amazon!

  • Paint the Roses Red is out! It’s the fifth book in the Looking Glass Saga and it will be available at a discount until the end of the month. Be sure to get your copy now!

    Time is running out.

    Alice only has one year left to win her bet with the Bandersnatch, or be trapped as a prisoner in his garden forever. And Alice isn’t the only one losing heart. The Queen continues to steal peoples hearts, and the refugees from Neverland are the latest victims. For some reason, Alice can’t put them back and Adam refuses to leave Wonderland until they stop her.

    The pressure is on for Alice to keep the magic books from falling into the wrong hands. The clock is ticking and failure means none of the stolen hearts will be returned, Adam will remain trapped behind the mirror, and Alice will be forgotten in the Bandersnatch’s garden. Forever.

  • This is post 13 of 13 in the series “Publishing Process”

    1. So, here’s what I’m doing
    2. File preparation
    3. Publishing as a Canadian
    4. Some things to prepare
    5. Distribution: Createspace
    6. Distribution: Amazon
    7. Distribution: Direct Distribution
    8. Distribution: Smashwords
    9. Distribution: Draft2Digital
    10. Distribution: PublishDrive
    11. Marketing: The Numbers, Social Media, and Mailing Lists
    12. Marketing: Paid Services and Free Stuff
    13. Marketing: Getting Reviews

    While getting your book into the hands of readers is a great way to convince people to take a chance on your books, there is one more thing that you have to still do in order to increase your chance at getting a sale. And it is by far the most frustrating part of publishing. More than dealing with all the files and distribution outlets. More than trying to set up your ISBNs, taxes, and banking information. Probably more than even editing.

    Reviews.

    Why you need them

    This probably doesn’t even need to be a section, but let me tell you as someone who has been at this for a while. Getting positive reviews on the sale page, whether that’s Amazon or Kobo or wherever, will boost your sales. People will still purchase your book without them, but it is much easier to convince someone to take a chance on your book if they see that other people like it already.

    For the most part, reviews are there to convince people who have stumbled onto the page to give the book a shot. This is less for the folks to have already gotten the free copy, which is probably the majority of the people.

    How high you need them

    You should try to keep your reviews above 3.5 stars in order to continue selling, in my experience, though you will get more sales if you keep them at least at 4. ((I say as if you can control that at all.)) People will still buy books with no star ratings, but if you do have a rating, it is best to have it high.

    White Noise had a noticeable drop in sales when it dropped below a four star rating. ((On Goodreads, though the ones on Amazon have since been purged for stating they were free copies)) After Destiny, on the other hand, has dropped from a sale a week to zero sales total upon getting the one two star review on Amazon. The rather perplexing one-star-that’s-supposed-to-be-four-star review on Return to Wonderland hasn’t had as much of an impact on sales because it’s been balanced out by the higher rating and free copies.

    How you get them

    This is tricky, because you also want to keep a generally high level of reviews. If the only review you have is a low review, then your sales will plummet. Which means you have to be sure to solicit reviews from people who are more likely going to like your book.

    Friends and family

    I don’t do this. If any of my friends and family want a free book, they are free to one, but it’s nearly impossible to get them to read the thing and leave a review. Some of them have, ((Thank you!!)) but for the most part it’s more like throwing a fish in the air and expecting it to fly. They might buy the book to support me, but most of them probably won’t actually read it. And even fewer will review it. ((10% of 10%))

    Goodreads

    So this exists. And I have had less than pleasant experiences with it so far. So here’s the thing: Goodreads is its own book reviewing platform. Many people don’t cross-post their reviews to Amazon. Which turns out to be a good thing for me, because they are much more critical of books on Goodreads than they are just about anywhere else, I’ve found.

    When you can get them to actually leave a review at all.

    Seriously, hundreds of free books given out, six reviews back from those. It was really not worth the time sink. And on top of that, Amazon tends to purge reviews that came from free copies, so it ends up being kind of a useless venture if you’re looking for reviews to boost sales.

    NetGalley

    NetGalley helps get your books into the hands of professional reviewers and is considered by some to be a test for how good your book is. It’s also hella expensive, so I got mine in via Broad Universe in order to give it a shot. It was… less than fruitful in the end. At the end, you get a sheet telling you the revies and there were not as many reviews back as expected. Those that did come back did not all get posted to Amazon, instead posted on their individual blogs. ((Which was probably good because damn those were low reviews))

    And at least one of them posted a lower star rating on Goodreads than they did on the feedback sheet I got and I’m still salty about it.

    So what do I do?

    Nothing. I’ve stopped trying to pursue reviews at this point. There are services out there that will help you get reviews in the NetGalley sense, or that will just give you positive reviews for your page, ((Fiverr has a bunch of folks willing to do this)) but I’m unwilling to pay for these.

    In the end, I’ve found I get more positive reviews from people who have just come across the book on their own and decided to leave a review than from people I have solicited reviews from. Unfortunately, this means I have far fewer reviews than I probably should, but actively pursuing reviews is a part of marketing that I’m just not all that keen on continuing with given the experiences so far.

  • This is post 12 of 13 in the series “Publishing Process”

    1. So, here’s what I’m doing
    2. File preparation
    3. Publishing as a Canadian
    4. Some things to prepare
    5. Distribution: Createspace
    6. Distribution: Amazon
    7. Distribution: Direct Distribution
    8. Distribution: Smashwords
    9. Distribution: Draft2Digital
    10. Distribution: PublishDrive
    11. Marketing: The Numbers, Social Media, and Mailing Lists
    12. Marketing: Paid Services and Free Stuff
    13. Marketing: Getting Reviews

    So if I don’t like doing the social media thing, what do I do for marketing? What is the thing I’ve tried that actually ends up selling me enough books to buy a coffee or two a month?

    Paid services

    Don’t. Just save your money.

    I have tried a whole bunch of paid services over the years. Twitter campaigns, getting in with a bunch of authors to cross promote, Facebook campaigns, good old ads for authors, all sorts of things. Spent a couple hundred bucks over the years trying them. And do you know how much I’ve gotten back as a direct result of them?

    Email subscribers that don’t open the email or click on the links. Four sales. Total.

    Smashwords

    Smashwords is fantastic for giving authors promotional options for their fanbases. You can create coupons for individual books and give them out to whoever you want for whatever purposes you want, which is fantastic. If you just want readers and to get your book into as many hands as possible, this is probably the easiest way to do that. 

    On top of that, you can also set books to free on Smashwords. I think I’ve mentioned this in the Smashwords post, but I don’t set my books for free on Smashwords. I instead have a few books available where the reader can set the price, and that price can be free. In most cases, folks will just take them for free, but others will still offer you something that they can afford for them.

    Contests

    You know what? If you’re just looking for numbers of people to sign up for a mailing list, a contest is fantastic and you don’t have to arrange to sent too many books out to people. But from my experience, a contest is not how you build followers. The ones I’ve run and participated in have only earned me temporary followers with no sales boost, and a lot of unsubscribes and bounces as soon as I sent out the first newsletter. Getting people to your newsletter is great, but a lot of them don’t decide to stay.

    Instafreebie

    I’ve only been doing Instafreebie ((Use that link to help me out!)) for a short time, but this has actually resulted in a good number of sales since being part of the program. I have a mix of first books in series and previews of other books, and enroll in a bunch group giveaways. A lot of people download freebies and I see an increase in sales across all the channels I distribute to.

    The thing to remember with Instafreebie is that they require an ePub and do not offer a conversion service. Because of this, and because of how I use it, I use the ePubs from Draft2Digital again, because those have links to other books presented to the reader when they finish reading. If it’s a preview, I have to open up Calibre and manually add a link to the download page for the book they are currently reading.

    And, for the most part, that’s what’s worked. Except for that one last thing: Reviews.

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