Tag: indie author

Books, fantasy, great reads, indie author, Reviews, scifi

Dragon Storm by Lindsay Buroker

Karen

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Lindsay Buroker was the first indie author I ever read, and I still love her books. This is the newest series she is realeasing. First the blurb:

Telryn “Trip” Yert has always been a little odd, with hunches that are too accurate to explain. Magic is feared and forbidden in Iskandia, so he’s struggled his whole life to hide his eccentricities. As a boy, he was forced to watch his mother’s execution. Her crime? Witchcraft.

Understandably, Trip wants nothing to do with the power that lurks within him, always threatening to reveal itself. Instead, he dedicates himself to serving as an officer in the king’s army, to battling pirates and imperial conquerors. He longs to become a soldier as respected and renowned as the legendary General Zirkander.

But his country is in need of more than a soldier.

After disappearing for over a thousand years, dragons have returned to the world. A few of them are willing to be allies to mankind, as they were millennia before, but far more want to destroy or enslave humans and claim the world for themselves.

There are few people left with the power to fight dragons. For reasons he doesn’t understand, Trip may be one of those people. But if he chooses to learn more about his heritage and the power he can wield, he risks losing everyone he loves and everything he longs to be.

This book reminded me of why I fell in love with indie authors. This is quality writing, a fast and fun fantasy and it was $1 (free if you have KU)!! I know I’ll pay more no doubt for the rest but that’s okay because I’m hooked. I loved the world, where swords talk and dragons power depends on their color, I enjoyed the cast of characters, most quirky and crazy, and the story was fun.

You should grab this book.

Books, great reads, indie author, Reviews, scifi

Extant by Anthony Vicino

Karen

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Anthony Vicino is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. So when he sent me this story and asked if I would read it I said of course! then I realized I already owned it..I know, it’s sad when you get a book more than once. Don’t deny it, you know you’ve all fought with Amazon demanding to buy a book that they refuse to let you click on, and then after 10 minutes of you being sure that the whole system is broken and you’re convinced you are going to have to call customer service you finally read what’s on the screen and you realize that it’s been trying to tell you this whole time that you already own the book. No? That’s just me? Okay then moving on…

Let’s start with the blurb, totally snatched from goodreads: Manipulating time always comes at a cost. For Special Agent Kaelyn Kwon, Blinking means living with one foot in the past and one foot in the present. Torn between memories of what was, and what could have been, she must use her power to decide what is yet to be.
A 10,000 word short adventure filled with action, time travel, and intrigue!

It is a shortie, I originally owned it in an anthology called The Time Travel Chronicles but since I still haven’t gotten around to reading the whole thing I’m going to stick to just talking about this story.

What I really liked about this book was the concept. You’ve got this place where people can control time, but it’s limited to 32 seconds (there are reasons for this, reasons I accept) and three different abilities. You have ones who can move forward in time, backwards, or freeze time. My favorite part was when three of them were working together, it was backwards, forward, forward, forward, backwards, stop, forwards, (please don’t quote me on that order I just made it up) but it felt like a rush constant time flipping I felt the craziness of that and loved it. Also as Anthony does so well there was an standard plot rescue mission and then the deeper psychological plot of how time travel effected the traveler.

This story did leave me with many questions about the world and the players within but it was a great read and from what I understand a great set up for the next book to come. It’s on sale now for $0.99 from Amazon, you know what I’ll even be nice and throw up a link for you to go grab it. Support your local indie author today, and read a fun short story, everyone wins!

Out of the Box Blogs

My Love/Hate of Ebooks

debra

First of all, I have a love relationship with my Kindle Fire and my ebooks.  Sometimes, I am a mood reader which is why I keep a couple of books going at a time.  With my Kindle, I can take it with me and have many books available if I am in a mood for something particular.  I enjoy the portability of having lots of my books available to me while only carrying a few ounces of weight.  However, I also have a hate relationship with some ebooks I have gotten over the years.

I started reading ebooks before ereaders were common place among us.  At that time, I downloaded the books from ebooks sites generally in PDF formats.  I still have them, have converted them using Calibre and moved them to my Kindle.  When I got my first Kindle (keyboard generation and still my favorite although it died), I got a lot of inexpensive ebooks from new authors or authors who had not been traditionally published and had opted for self-publishing. Before continuing, I want to say that I have found some authors this way that I love and am very happy with.  However, I have also noted many problems with these types of ebooks.  My pet peeves:  bad grammatical errors, spelling errors, etc.  Kid you not, I purchased an ebook from an indie author that had a sentence in it wherein the lead character went to one of the tropical island paradises and the author mentioned the name of the capital city.  Immediately after the capital city’s name was a set of parenthesis with a question mark in them, so we had the name and then (?) behind it.  My only thought was that I did not have a problem with the author in their draft not being sure of the name of the capital and leaving herself a note to check it out, but then it was published with the question mark still there!  Really?  I don’t remember now if I checked to see if the name of the capital city was accurate, but at that point, I did not care.  More than once, I have screamed, “Where is the editing in this book?”   I certainly do not mind the occasional error—it happens.  Nobody is perfect.  But repetitive errors in the same book are not acceptable to me when I pay hard-earned money for a book.

I need to stop ranting now.  Seriously, I love ebooks, but I feel that the industry has a lot of work to do.

To Be Continued.

Happy Reading,

debra