Cool

Quite a lot of self-published books are, y’know, cool. They’re set in post-apocalyptic Singapore, or their selling point is ‘Steampunk is sexually transmitted!’ [1] or they have their finger on the blue throb of the zeitgeist’s pulse in some other way. I admire that. The thing is, mine aren’t. The best I can really do […]

My books do more social networking than I do

I discovered yesterday that several people (or, as it may be, several robots) had found the blog by Googling ‘tzenni malabranca’, and this led me to discover that the books have shown up on a site called Shelfari. (Warning: it looks like Shelfari were putting up confusing pages that would spam everyone in your email […]

Slightly late end-of-year post

Looking back on 2010, the main event that stands out is that I published my books. (Well, all kinds of other stuff happened too. My husband crossed the country on a unicycle for charity, for example, and I got to get up at a ridiculous hour of the morning in February and walk around Stonehenge […]

Writing and Gaming: They’re Different

I write, and I also run games. [1] The writing came first, but only because up until I went to university a combination of geography and lack of social skills meant that I didn’t know anyone else who was interested in RPGs and wanted to do anything more complicated than ‘I hit the orc’ / […]

Britain After Rome

I am reading Robin Fleming’s Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 – 1070 and really enjoying it. Part of this is because it’s full of descriptions of clothing. But most of it is that I am hugely attracted to reading about cobbled-together, makeshift societies, and to the details of trade webs and burial […]

Things people have been asking me

Is it better for you if I buy the book from Lulu, or from Amazon? If you’re buying an ebook, Lulu is the only game in town at present. If you’re buying a paperback, I honestly don’t mind – I get more money on the Lulu sales and more Amazon rankings on the Amazon sales, […]

Update

Today brought cheering and unexpected news: I’ve sold more books than I thought I had, because apparently the Amazon and Book Depository orders all come through in one lump at the beginning of the month. Who knew? Not me, because self-publishing is a continuing voyage of discovery. 🙂 The beginning of the week brought a […]

Annoying things, no.1

Annoying things: looking at an inoffensive little scene that gives an outsider’s view on your heroine and her views and has some nice description in it, and realising that the reader already knows about the heroine’s outlook on life by now and that there was a snippet of physical description of her only a couple […]