Now a published author!

 

 I have been itching to make this announcement for months! For the last several months I have been deep in writing, editing, rewriting, re-editng, cover designing, and hiring a formatter for my first novel. And now, after months of work, it's finally done!!

 

"Miss Gemquist and the Pearl of Peking" is the first book in my series "The Gemquist Chronicles." A young adult/new adult Steampunk/spy adventure with a hint of romance thrown in. Here's the synopsis:

 

Miss Loralai Gemquist, the 23-year-old daughter of famed gemologist Jacob Gemquist and granddaughter of Lord Bramwell Gemquist, The Baron of Aethleton, thought that her life couldn’t get more difficult than surviving the London Season and the schemes of her match-making aunts. But when she discovers an anonymous note, her life will never again be the same. Thrust into a world of shadows, secrets, and intrigue, she’ll be forced to use all her wits, intellect, and knowledge of gemstones as she tries to prevent a war when a priceless, Chinese pearl is stolen. Along the way, she’ll meet some unexpected allies and make some dangerous enemies as she learns who she can trust, but just one false step and it will be more than her life on the line.

 

The ebook is available on Amazon for just $2.99 and is also available on Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Online Lending Library. A paperback edition is also in the works and should be available within the next week or so if everything goes well.

Resurgence of Episodic Fiction

If you've ever looked through all the thousands of ebooks out there, chances are, you've come across one that said 'season 'blah' episode 'blah.' Episodic, or serial, fiction is a popular format among ebooks. It allows the author to write more pieces in less time by publishing shorter pieces at regular intervals (often at once a week, every other week, or once a month) so readers get new stories more frequently and don't have to wait as long as with regular novels. Episodic works are very like TV shows in how they're done. You'll have a more complicated storyline that may or may not fully resolve at the end of the season while each episode also contains their own, less complicated, plots that resolve sooner. For a story to be considered a novel it generally has to have a word count of at least 40,000 (unless it's a middle grade story, then you're looking at 20,000-55,000 depending on whether it's upper or lower middle grade) though the exact word count ranges based on genre. With episodic fiction, each episode tends to be only 10,000 - 20,000 words (give or take). For the reader, this helps if they have a short attention span or simply don't have much time available for reading. They can still read a full story, but in much less time. Also, since the author puts out a new story more frequently than they would with a regular book, the reader doesn't have to wait frustratedly for the next installment. For the author, it's easier to write and they can start selling their stories much sooner. Episodic ebooks can also be more profitable. Besides the individual episodes, once a season is complete, it is often sold as an ebook set which may also be offered in a print-on-demand paperback form.

However, episodic fiction is not new. It's actually been around for a very long time with celebrated authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Alexander Dumas being among the many to publish this way. For a long time, paper and printing costs were very expensive so it was much more affordable for an author to publish their works as installments in weekly/monthly magazines or newspaper. It was only when advances were made in creating paper and printing methods that it became cheaper to publish the story in it's entirety.  This form of serialized publishing was common during the 1800s and early to mid 1900s with the penny dreadfuls and half-penny periodicals (or half-penny dreadfuls). Dime novels were also often serialized. However,  serialization began to go down as both printing costs went down and various forms of broadcasting started up. Apart from comic books (another example of episodic fiction), serialized fiction mostly disappeared until the internet where it is now re-emerging as a popular format.

Goodreads Confession: Bad Reviews

I'm sure anyone that uses Goodreads has been faced with this: you finish reading a book and you didn't really like it, or you liked it but it has serious problems. The question that immediately follows is this: do you leave a bad review or just choose not to review it at all? Unless I really hated the book (and I have read ones that I just relished shredding to pieces), I hate leaving a bad review.  When I read a book, I want to like it, and the more I want to like it, the worse I feel when I don't, or when it just falls short (you know, the ones that aren't out-right awful, but aren't great either). I just feel so mean doing it, however, I do it anyway. Why? Because no matter how upset the author may be about it, and I realize that for some this may be very upsetting if it's a new author, I have to be honest about what I thought.  They published the book for everyone to read so they have to accept that not everyone is going to like it and might even hate it. However, I also write them because others may have the exact same issues with them that I do and would rather know about them before getting into the book and being disappointed.

Why am I writing all this? Well, the last two ebooks I read I had to leave less than stellar reviews for.  In fact, I really rather shredded one of them and felt pretty bad about it while writing it.  You see, the book just came out in March and I'm the first one to leave a review of it on Goodreads. To make matters worse, it's a new author. I only gave it 2 stars and a fairly detailed (and brutal) review.  Hopefully, the author will learn from reviews like mine (I'm quite sure I will not be the only one to leave such a review) and will improve their future writing.  Perhaps even do a major rewrite of the one that I reviewed and then re-release it (it really needs it!!).

(However, I must admit some perverse pleasure in shredding a book I truly hated!)