The Book Stacks

Of course, I’m so utterly distracted that *other people* had to tell me the blatantly obvious fact that we are half way through the year. Wow. Anywho, what better excuse for a round up, right?

Books Reviewed:
*Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
*Holler for Your Health: Be the Key to a Healthy Family by Teresa Holler
*Moments of Clarity by Michele Cameron
*Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
*Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card
*Project Apocalypse by Anita Bell
*The Spell of Rosette by Kim Falconer
*Mad Kestrel by Misty Massey
*ShapeShifter: The Demo Tapes by Susan Helene Gottfried
*The Secret of Dragonhome by John Peel
*Erotica Cafe by Tilly Rivers
*Dead Ringer by Mary Burton
*Mainline to the Heart by Clive Matson
*Cabal of the Westford Knight by David S. Brody
*The Flow of Time and Money by Dr. Lloyd Watts
*The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen
*Abarat by Clive Barker
*Caught Between Two Worlds by Scott Russell Hill
*Earth – A Visitor’s Guide by Ian Harrison
*Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies
*Lizzie’s Rake by Hazel Statham
*The Accidental Bestseller by Wendy Wax
*Synarchy Book One – The Awakening by DCS
*Living Like You Mean It by Dr. Ronald J. Frederick

Wow. You don’t really think about everything you have done until you actually sit back and look at it. I was amused to find a 1/5 star rating on our pointless (as far as I know) rating system on one of my reviews. It was a not recommending review, so I wonder who put that rating on…

Eh, it’s a lot better than outright harassment, which I’ve been able to escape so far.

What books have you read so far this year?

There is a talk going on right now in one of my author/blogger groups about the difference between book promotion and book selling, and I wanted to talk about it on my blogs.

As a writer, you should know by now that writing the book is just the first step. If you dream of money along with publication, then you are going to have to learn a lot about marketing, networking and book promotion.

I am a virtual book tour coordinator with Pump Up Your Book Promotion, and I have been working a lot with authors to help them promote their books. Everything from setting up a blog to finding podcasts to be a guest on gets covered. Many authors know this and are becoming quite familiar with the virtual tour process.

However, too many authors are still confused about one thing:

Book promotions are not book sales.

My job as a tour coordinator is not to sell your books, strange as that may sound at first. My job is to promote your book. Promotions and sales are two different things.

As much as I would love to sell thousands of books for all of my authors, I can’t. I’m not a salesperson; I’m a publicist. Two different things.

Bottom line? Even if you go on tour (or do some other promotion) and your sales don’t skyrocket, that does not in any way mean your tour or other promotion(s) failed.

The point is to get your name out there so people ‘know’ you. You want to be in the top of the search engines, which will help you heaps when it comes time to sell the books. Promotions and marketing are an amazing help in the grand scheme of things, but they do not directly equal sales.

No, not the winner for this week, the winner for last week. I apologize for the delay, but these things happen.

Congratulations to Amanda! Unfortunately, she didn’t leave a URL to a blog or site to link to, but that’s okay. Amand

After starting to recover from the nearly week-long heatwave that blasted through Melbourne last week, we have once again been hit by the heat and reminded that yes, in fact we do live about eight miles from the sun.

Today Victorians and those residing in New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory were advised to stay indoors, keep as cool as possible and keep the fluid intake up. Of course, there was (and is) a total fire ban in the hopes of making the lives of those out saving other lives in this heat easier. But add in the dust/smoke storm we had brewing in my part of the neighbourhood and things were just plain not easy.

Tomorrow, it is forecasted that areas in New South Wales will be the hottest place on Earth, reaching temperatures of 47 degrees C – 116.6 degrees F.

What does this have to do with me blogging?

Where I live, it got up to (at least) 45.5 degrees C – otherwise known as 113.9 F. While we did learn from our mistakes last week and ordered an air conditioner, my husband and I do try to be conscious of the environment so we turned it off as soon as we could open up the flat.

Thanks to the aircon, my brain is only partially melted, but it was also mostly melted last week and didn’t get long enough time to recover.

If I owe you an email, a response of some sort, if you wanted me to check out a video on YouTube or something on your blog, anything, I apologize. I am catching up (now that things have cooled down locally and I can think) as fast as I can. You can feel free to send reminders just so long as they are polite ones. I truly thank you all for your patience.

Oh, and if you could, please think positive thoughts for the men and women out there saving many Australian and international visitor lives by fighting bushfires and responding to calls in the SES (State Emergency Services).

Soon after arriving in China in 1854, the “godfather of China’s modernism” Robert Hart falls in love with Ayaou, but his feelings for her sister go against the teachings of his Christian upbringing and almost break him emotionally. To survive he must learn how to live and think like the Chinese.

He also finds himself thrust into the second bloodiest conflict in history, the Taiping Rebellion, where he ends up making enemies of men such as the American soldier of fortune known as the Devil Soldier. During his first year in China, Robert experiences a range of emotion from bliss to despair. Like Damascus steel, he learns to be both hard and flexible, which forges his character into the great man he is yet to become.

When I first read a summary of this book, I was quite eager to read it. I know next to nothing about China’s history and I love books that focus on the intimate details of people’s lives. Lloyd Lofthouse has written a very good book about learning to accept different cultures and ways of behaviours, finding your true self within the wars between your feelings and your upbringing, and learning to love that which is not you.

I found Ayaou and Robert’s love to be quite fast, but Lofthouse did such a good job of portraying Robert as a romantic – a little too appreciative of women, but still a romantic – that it wasn’t hard to believe he would fall so deeply in love with a woman he barely knew.

However, speaking of love, there is also quite a bit of sex involved. Lofthouse isn’t shy when it comes to getting into Robert’s head, and Robert is a tortured man when it comes to his physical desires versus his conscience. If you’re not fond of sex in books, then you probably won’t like this book.

Given the way women were treated in 1850s China, Lofthouse would have chopped off his nose to spite his face if he had left all sex out. It was part of the lifestyle of the times and Lofthouse treats it as such. Not once is it awkward or does it slow the book. He handles it quite well.

I recommend this book to anyone who would like a view of China in the 1850s and beyond or if you’re like me and enjoy biographies – even fictionalized ones. If you want hard facts about Robert Hart’s life, this might not be the place to start, but it is an interesting (fiction) book about a man struggling to find who he truly is in a land he doesn’t know.

From InkyGirl, “Publishers and authors have joined forces to launch Booksaregreatgifts.com/. Produced by Random House and organized by the Association of American Publishers, this video features authors from many publishing houses, each explaining why books make great gifts.”

When it comes to times being tough for all sorts of people all over the world, it never fails to inspire me when people come together to help support each other. In this case, the publishers and authors coming together in the book industry to promote what wonderful gifts books are is wonderful.

Books really do make a wonderful gift. You can read them multiple times, give them away or cherish them, and take from them any one of the things mentioned in the video or more.

Books have always been a big part of my life, be them reading them or writing them. Books taught me how to love unconditionally, why I should love and take care of the environment, and how to help me though the dark times by focusing on my writing. Books inspired me to start creating my own worlds through creative writing and that is a gift that has kept giving to me for more than a decade now.

Books can be expensive - especially here in Australia for various reasons - but I do hope each one of you is able to give the gift of a book this season.

I sincerely hope that everyone has a wonderful holiday season no matter what holiday (if any) you celebrate and that we all come through this time of uncertainty feeling better about the world and our fellow human beings.

Because it’s the weekend and because I haven’t had such a good laugh in a long time.

Have a great weekend.

I’m taking inspiration from the archives of Booking Through Thursday once more here on The Book Stacks. If you’ve been with BTT since the beginning and have already answered this question, please leave me the link in the comments section.

In this blast from the past, BTT says:

Probably most books stand on their own. But a lot of them are part of a series. J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy comes immediately to mind, as well as Stephen R. Donaldson’s Gap series, Elizabeth Peters Amelia Peabody series, and lots more.

1. Do you read books that are part of a series?
2. Do you collect all the books in the series before starting?
3. What if the series is brand new, and the only book that’s been published so far is Book 1?
4. As subsequent books in the series are published, do you go back and re-read the preceding books?

I’m definitely someone who reads books in a series, but I have never collected (scratch that – I did once with the Sabriel books) all of the books before reading them. That takes too long, and often I find a series before all the books are out.

I’m certainly not going to wait years to read the next ones.

When I read a series, whether I go back and read the preceding books usually depends on how long it has been between one book getting published and the next. If it’s fairly quick then no.

However, I have done it before. I had one book for a couple years before getting the second one, so I went back and read the first one before reading the second one.

Would you like the chance to win a free book?

Yes, of course you would. Free books are lovely.

All you have to do to win one is stop by Fiction Scribe and play the meme game there.

Leave your response in the comments and you have a chance to win a book!

Awesome.

By Marvin L. Zimmerman
Author of The Ovum Factor

Every novel starts with an inspired writer - a person who draws from a fountainhead of emotions and feelings they have accumulated from reading the fictional works of others.

As a young boy, I was especially fascinated by tales of great adventure that took place in far off lands and overlapped with tales of tragic love - the best kind of all since it is short-lived and never withers. Books such as Knight Without Armor and Lost Horizon by James Hilton, captivated me from the moment I opened them and became immersed in their tales of people struggling against almost insurmountable obstacles.

At the time I could not realize it. But reading these masterpieces was setting the stage for my own novels some forty years later.

In The Ovum Factor, I have tried to create a story that pulsates with the same restless energy that drives its protagonist through one seemingly impossible trial after the next. The plot overlays a tale of adventure and survival with the emotional angst of an unlikely hero who becomes separated from the woman he loves just when she needs him most. His struggle to survive and find what he desperately seeks is made infinitely more complex by the fact that the person he loves depends so much on him.

From the moment the hero, David Rose, awakes in his Manhattan apartment asking himself: What am I doing with my life? until the time he finds himself alone and critically injured in the deepest Amazon jungle, there will be a steady escalation of tension. And if this were not enough, the stakes are the highest possible - maybe even the very survival of mankind in the face of ecological degradation and climate change.

The reader who gives my first novel a chance will I hope be rewarded a story that will transport them from the centers of high-finance in New York to the California Institute of Technology in beautiful Pasadena - from China to the crime-infested slums of Rio de Janeiro, and finally into the hidden depths of the Amazon jungle. In between, there will be more twists and turns than the Da Vinci Code.

By the end of his journey, David will have completed both an actual and a metaphysical journey toward his true destiny - something that should prove emotionally satisfying for the reader.

To view The Ovum Factor video trailer, please go to www.youtube.com/TheOvumFactor

To learn more about the book and the author, please go to www.theovumfactor.com

I can’t remember exactly where or when it was, but the topic of books people never finished came up. I became curious about what books people haven’t finished because I can honestly say I have finished every book (with the exception of school textbooks – Algebra is just not that interesting) I have ever read.

It doesn’t usually occur to me that I can just stop reading…

As a reviewer who puts up reviews every week, reading a bad book means I finish it so I can give a complete review even if it is a negative one. Before my reviewing days I suppose I held to the hope that the author of the horrid book would somehow figure out to pull it all together so slogging through the mud all that way was worth it.

Needless to say, I was disappointed every time.

Even when I read bad books as a young girl, I would finish it and sit back, wondering how in the world something like that got published. Even so, I always finished.

Maybe I’m just nosey. Maybe even in a bad book I need to know what happens to everyone. Or maybe I’m hopelessly optimistic. Who knows? If/when the time comes that I’m no longer a reviewer, we’ll see if I can wean myself away from wasting my time with bad books.

After all, life is too short to read bad books, right? Unless you’re a reviewer.

What about you? Have you ever not finished a book? Why or why not?

xkcd.com

Last night my husband asked me to look over something he wrote to proofread and check for basic readability. He walked out of the room to do something in the kitchen and I sat down at his computer to look it over.

When he walked back into the room, he said, “Uh oh.”

I asked why he said that and he said that it must be bad if I was still sitting there looking at it. I frowned a bit because what he wrote was actually quite good, and I was still sitting there simply because I hadn’t finished reading.

My husband is a faster reader than I am. He got through his books from Christmas at a rate that amazed me. Still, like anyone with an ego, just because I’ll freely admit he’s a faster reader than I am it doesn’t mean I want to call attention to the fact that I read slower than he does. (How is that for a strange, run-on sentence for you?)

Admittedly, I take longer when I’m in editor mode, but I still was a bit irked that he thought I was still there because there was something wrong, not just because I wasn’t done reading yet.

I don’t think reading faster or slower holds any particular advantages unless you’re a reviewer on a schedule. Still, I can’t help but feel a little slow when attention is brought to my reading speed.

What about you? Are you a fast reader or a slow reader? Do you get annoyed with people who comment about your reading pace?

And here is my second forfeit, as promised for you winning the Monday book title game.

This is a poem I wrote in early 2006 while I still fancied myself a bit of a poet. The story behind this is that I was/am very shy and there was a hangout on campus that I wanted to into very much, but I was intimidated by the ‘regulars’. Eventually, I did go inside…

Enjoy.

Coffee Shop Poet Wannabe
by JM

Door stalked, admired, cursed
from across the tar and cracked pavement.
Should I? Could I? Dare I? Oh, yes,
for today, my sweet coffee shop,
today is the day of reckoning.

Jingle-jingle, jingle-jingle of the door.
Ah, a new girl, just a little bit of something,
perhaps sweet or perhaps spice
for the usual, eccentric pot.

“Um, I’d like a bottle of water please,�?
as if the purchase of water
is a sensible action rather than
a dollar twelve for a plastic bottle.

“And the turkey…�? mumbling ‘sandwich.’
“The turkey panini with the gouda?�?
Go with the gouda! Go with the gouda!
Don’t break code! Possible emergency evacuation!

“Yes please,�? and with no voice wobble,
no long stares, just glances and whispers.
Thank the benevolent coffee shop deities
for their small yet wondrous favors.

Order filled? Empty table? Affirmative.
Sitting down slowly, laser beam stares.
‘Flannel shirt, blue jeans, foreign body accepted,’
and a return to muffled conversation.

Put down my water, sandwich, and notebook.
A notebook? Ah. Acceptance melting into welcome.
Losing myself in the words, objective completed,
writing, wondering what the hell a panini is.

Hello everyone!

Please forgive the lateness of this post, but you know how it is during the holidays.

Last Monday, you all did extremely well and got enough book titles listed to make me forfeit. Last week’s word was ‘true’ and you got twenty-six of the twenty-five you needed.

As promised, here is one half of the forfeit. This is a story I wrote in second grade, typed completely with run-on sentences, spelling errors, grammatical errors, and lack of punctuation beyond periods and the one apostrophe.

I hope you enjoy this untitled forfeit… The poem will be coming soon.

Once upon a time a long time ago about 700 years ago there was a castle with a cave by it. There was a lazy dragon in the cave. Going back to the castle there was a knight. He did not do anything becuase there was nothing to do.

But when he heard about the dragon living in the cave next door, He got out his armar and he went to fight the a mean dragon.

He got to the cave. He looked at the dragon. He ran away. When he got to his castle he talked to himself. He said that he had to be brave. I can’t just look at a dragon and say he is to hard to fight.

He got on his armor. He got his horse redy. He went to kill the dragon and he did.

Aww, see? Isn’t that sweet? I knew how to write a moving story even back then.

AS if! needs your help!

The Australian speculative fiction review site needs your help. AS if is a massive review site that relies on volunteer reviewers - of which Food Past’s Gillian is part of - to provide reviews on the site.

Why donate?

Donations to paypal will go towards covering postage for review copies to be sent out to reviewers. They would also like to recruit more overseas reviewers, who sit totally outside the community, to increase commentary. However, this would significantly increase the project costs.

Donations will also cover reviewers stalking second-hand bookshops and bookstalls and buying out of print Australian specfic for coverage on ASif! They could also look into buying copies of works of the bigger name writers whose publicists still don’t send review copies. Or, if you’re a big name writer and not currently reviewed on the site, perhaps you might consider sending them a copy of your work for review.

Also, another reason to donate is you can win some fabulous prizes! For every $5 donation to the drive, you will get your name into the ASif! Donation Drive Prize Raffle. So if you give $15, you have 3 chances to win.

Here’s a peek at the prize pool:

1 copy of In Bad Dreams
2 copies of C0ck
1 copy of Aggressive Retail Therapy by Grant Watson (out of print Angriest Video Store Clerk in the World trade paperback)
2 copies of the Issue 1 of Henry & Gil vs the Infinity Engine by Grant Watson and Edward J. Grug III
2 copies of Polyphony 6
2 copies of Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth by Ben Peek
2 copies of Swans Over the Moon by Forrest Aguirre
6 copies of Fables and Reflections
1 copy of Daikaiju 3
2 copies of Fables and Reflections by Laney Cairo
5 copies of Shiny Issue 1
5 copies of New Ceres Issue 2
1 copy of Potato Monkey Issue 5 (the final issue!!)
1 signed copy of Seacastle by Tansy Rayner Roberts
1 copy of Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley
1 copy of Celtika, Book 1 of the Merlin Codex by Robert Holdstock
1 copy of The Iron Grail, Book 2 of the Merlin Codex by Robert Holdstock

If you are interested in donating a prize, please contact girlie dot jones @ gmail dot com

If you are a writer and interested/willing to participate in a short story writing stunt (you don’t have to write a whole short story) - soon to be announced - please also email girlie dot jones @ gmail dot com

The December Donation Drive has kicked off and all donations received from now till Dec 24th will be eligible for the prize draw.

To make a donation, go here.

win, free, books, contest, australia, speculative fiction, fiction, In Bad Dreams, C0ck, Aggressive Retail Therapy, Grant Watson, Angriest Video Store Clerk in the World, Issue 1 of Henry & Gil vs the Infinity Engine, Edward J. Grug III, Polyphony 6, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, Ben Peek, Swans Over the Moon, Forrest Aguirre, Fables and Reflections, Laney Cairo, Shiny Issue 1, New Ceres Issue 2, Potato Monkey Issue 5, Seacastle, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Winterbirth, Brian Ruckley, Celtika, Book 1 of the Merlin Codex, Robert Holdstock, The Iron Grail, Book 2 of the Merlin Codex