Publicize Your Book — Review #1

Lately I have been reading the book “Publicize Your Book: An insiders Guide To Getting Your Book The Attention It Deserves” by Jacqueline Deval.

Publicize Your Book

This book would appeal to anyone who is either submitting manuscripts to publishers or else planning on doing so. The time to think about marketing is very early on in the process, and this books makes that more than clear with its numerous examples. It applies somewhat more to non-fiction authors, but it has numerous examples related to fiction, so don’t let that prevent you from reading it.

Right now I am about half-way through it, and so this review #1 only includes chapters 1 through 8.

Scarlet By Stephen Lawhead — Part 2

Part 2 of the Christian Science Fiction & Fantasy Blog Tour finds me holding Scarlet in my hands. Now this book is the 2nd book of the King Raven Trilogy, written by the distinguished and revered author, Stephen Lawhead.

Scarlet by Stephen Lawhead

Unfortunately for me, I have not had time to read this book to review it properly. Seeing as our well-pipe has developed a large hole just before Thanksgiving (ever tried hosting Thanksgiving without running water?) my time has been cut short lately and I wasn’t able to get to it in time.

My daughter, however, is reading it and I expect it to be finished in record time. So maybe I’ll get some sort of review in tomorrow. She is a far faster reader than I, who ponderously plods through books, savoring each word and doing a million other things in between sessions.

Until then I can at least tell you what I know about the two books.

Stephen Lawhead Interview About Magic In Fiction

I found a recent interview with Stephen Lawhead where he discusses his view about magic in fiction.

This is very interesting to me because just the other day I posted about how my King Arthur books will be different from his. One of those points related to the use of magic.

Now, based on what I read in his article, I’m not sure if I was completely fair in my broad brush strokes. Here are a few clarifications:

King Arthur – My Odds Just Got Worse!!

Here I just posted about how difficult the odds are to get published in the Christian speculative fiction genre, and now my own personal odds just got worse!

I even knew it was going to happen. I just didn’t think it would be this soon. Once Stephen Lawhead started re-releasing his older books (Song of Albion and the Dragon King series) I knew it was bound to happen. It turns out that he was just notified that HarperCollins is going to “re-release the entire Pendragon Cycle in a new edition with new covers sometime in the next year”.

The Pendragon Cycle By Stephen Lawhead

What does this mean for me? I’m not sure, really. Here I am writing a series of books based on the King Arthur myths, and one of my inspirations is being re-released probably around the time that my first book will be sent to literary agents! This probably makes it much harder for an agent to seriously consider my work at this time.

However … there is the flip side that the added publicity could make it easier. Obviously this topic sells. Obviously there is public interest. Obviously there will be some buzz. “Hey, have you read Lawhead? Robert Treskillard has a book on King Arthur too…”