The original edit of this post was about me probably moving to Draft2Digital to expand my books…and then yesterday it announced they are going to charge $20 for a new account and if you don’t make over $100, they will charge you a $12 fee yearly.
So, yeah.
My cover designer does D2D, and she only made about $30 last year, so this is not great news. As it was going to make my ebooks available to libraries, it was a good option. But to risk my tiny profits to get eaten up by the fee…nope. I might just take my ebooks off of Kindle Unlimited and see what happens. A sale for the pair of them (Destiny and Never Alone) will maybe come in June for the start of the summer, but will have to wait and see.
D2D is doing this to combat A.I. slop mass uploads, but I doubt, as do others, this will do much good other than make indie authors like me leave or not bother. Ingramspark I have heard, is not great for ebooks, so again, I will have to look into things.
Strawberry Festival
In June I will be near Grove City, PA for the Strawberry Festival. I will be dropping more details here soon. As with other events, I will have books to buy and sign, as well as exclusives you can get with your purchase. Next blog post, I will drop the poster and details.
The TBR pile: The Dwarves by Mark Heitz
I somewhat cheated with this one. It had not been on the pile for very long; I had picked it up at Goodwill a month ago. But I really wanted to read a fantasy, so I grabbed it to read next after I couldn’t stick with the Sherlock story (which I will return to; I just wasn’t in the mood for it).
It’s a good read, but I didn’t finish it. Why? It became a little too graphic for me. Its graphicness is right between the Inheritance Cycle (Eragon) and Game of Thrones, leaning a bit more towards GOT. I fell in love with the characters, very much enjoying having a dwarf as the main character. However, when the Dark Elves show up, things go dark real fast. I won’t say what they did to a light elf, but it was pretty gory. I did try to keep reading, but it got to the point of I knew I probably wouldn’t finish it just because of the harsh battle descriptions. It’s rare for me to stop reading something I like; in these cases, I just skim, but in the end, I decided to move on. The story is solid. A dwarf raised by humans has found himself in not only a fight over the throne of the dwarves but also a huge dark threat that will destroy human, dwarf, and so forth. It has a very rich world with an interesting magic system. As the author is German, I very much noticed the German roots of some of the creatures.
If you are someone who likes Eragon but wants a more adult read, this would be a good one. Due to some scenes involving graphic torture/death and very creepy reanimated corpses, I definitely say this is an 18 and up type of book. While double-checking some things, I came across a Goodreads review saying this would be fine for teens/pre-teens. Full stop. No. To not get into too much detail, a female elf was pinned to the tree and tortured (mutated), and then her body came back to life due to the dark magic from the Perished Lands. And that’s just that scene. So, no, it is NOT for preteens. Older teens maybe, but I would not give this to a 13-year-old. eye twitch
It’s a good read, if you don’t mind that kind of thing, so I won’t bash it. Has really fun characters. As I didn’t finish it, I can’t give it a proper rating, but I’ll give it one thumb up for the fun characters. The first book is 730 pages long. There are five books in the series.
That’s all for now.
Lots of Love,
Dragonninjawriter
Kathleen L Shay 