It’s probably best not to use an apostrophe in a book title if you don’t have to. People get confused!

Also, it’s probably not a good idea to include a word in your title which gets autocorrected on the user’s device to something different and wrong.  Fiend => Friend.  Searching Amazon – less likely to work well for them.

This is how we make progress!

It took so much longer than expected to get this artwork done, but I’m finally happy with the illustration!
It took me 3 artists and even more iterations, but I’m finally there. The next step is to wing it over to a graphic artist to have the titling done and to sort out the spine and rear cover ready for the paperback.

Here’s two of the pictures that I decided, for various reasons, just didn’t work for me. I’m not saying they’re bad, I’m just saying that they didn’t fit in with what I had in my head.

Let me know your thoughts!

Book number two.

I’m excited, and I’ve just put up the opening few chapters for all to read right (here!)

My biggest inspiration here, if I had to sum it up for anyone in a simple tagline: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if Buffy was a vampire.

Which isn’t to say she’d slay herself… okay, that tagline might need work.

Why did I decide to do a young adult urban fantasy from a female perspective? Good question, thanks for asking!

For the last few years I’ve been very aware of women’s rights and the challenges any minority faces, and the need that everyone has for representation in media. For example, there are plenty of stories regarding the latest Star Wars, where a young girl, or a young black boy, grabs at the action figure of Ray or Finn, demanding to have it because finally they can see themselves as the hero. And frankly, that warms my heart.

Consider this my offering of a strong female protagonist. The dream being that one girl might read my book and feel… something. Who knows, but an author can dream!

And for everyone else? It’s a damn fun book to read, obviously!

I also made a very conscious decision to keep things moving along briskly at a much choppier pace than Demi Heroes. Subsequently it’s also a much shorter book. I enjoyed writing it, and spending time inside the world I created (which as someone that hates spoilers, I won’t say anything about!)

I took a long time flipping back and forth between different titles, but I finally settled on Sanctuary’s Fiend (Book 1 of Sanctuary)

I’ve arranged this to be one of those things that are ever so popular with authors and readers today, a never-ending series. It could go on and on! Certainly there’s a lot that I want to explore with the series, and I can see myself getting five books out of hints that I’ve left lying around in this first book without trouble.

I’m very happy with how this book turned out, and think that it’s a big improvement, technically, from Demi Heroes.
Exciting!

Along with the whole “I’m active but not so active that I’m updating my social media” schtick I have going, I have entered Mark Lawerence’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off 2016

300 books enter, 1 book gets crowned the champion. That’s it, there’s no further prize. But of course as an independent author, the hardest thing to achieve is publicity, and this gives exactly that.

Demi Heroes has been randomly dealt to Ria from Bibliotropic who seems to be doing a pretty damn good job considering she’s only a single reviewer! Of course all of the blogs that have received books to review are allowed to decide how to go about eliminating books to get to the final one that they will put forwards into the top 10, but I’ve seen that some of the blogs that are running in teams of reviewers are doing less in-depth coverage of their books. So a big thank you to Ria!

And, extremely excitingly for me, she’s narrowed her 30 books down to the top 9 that she’s going to do a full review for, and Demi Heroes has intrigued her enough that I’m getting the full review treatment!

Of course, that review could be “DNF after 4th chapter. Huge mistake”, but let’s imagine that I started as I meant to continue, with intrigue, guile, and readability.

This will also be the very first review from a book blogger that I will receive, so that also makes me very excited. An in-depth review of my own book. Not at all scary!

I’ll be sure to post a link to her review when it’s up.

PS. I had completely forgotten about needing interesting images for every post. I’ll get right on that!

It’s been a long time since I last posted anything here, and that is bad. I started out using “I don’t have a book so why should anyone listen to me” as an excuse, but then I realised that actually, I kind of prefer to just write books than have to do this whole marketing side of the “business”.

First order of business: I released Demi Heroes! That actually happened three months ago, but that’s how bad I’ve been at updating. I then also released it in paperback by using Createspace. I’m very happy with the end result!

Maybe buy it here for America?

Or here for the UK

The first draft of my second book is DONE and I’m trying to track down a suitable artist. I loved the artwork for Demi Heroes, but I just didn’t think it would be suitable for a YA Urban Fantasy. I’m hoping to do something a little bit… out of genre for my cover, but that depends on the artist I can find. I’ve got one in mind, but they seem to be rather busy. However I was just so enamoured with the artwork she did for me (below) when I met her at Comic Con that I felt inspired.

I’m hoping to get this second book released by the end of August at the latest, but that is still artist dependent.

And that’s it for this quick update! I’m going to try and be more active on here, but I assure you that my inactivity here, does not mean I am not writing!