Malasz

Each year, the reviewers here at the New Podler Review of Books pick the book (or books) which we feel are the very best independently published (or small press) works. The only other requirement is that we reviewed it here on the blog. Here are the winners for 2012. Libby Cone had two picks: "My favorite books of 2012 were Fred Setterberg's Lunch Bucket Paradise and Scott Dominic Carpenter's This Jealous Earth . Both featured excellent writing and interesting characters. Both had something intelligent to say about modern life." Rob Steiner had one pick: "For the second year in a row, I'll have to go with Colin McComb. Oathbreaker Book Two: The Magus's Tale had the beautiful language and vivid world-building I liked from Book One, but with different characters that gave added depth McComb's Empire of Terona. I'm looking forward to Book Three." It was difficult for me to pick the best story for 2012. There were five really good books among t...

Forged in Death , the first of six books in Jim Melvin's Death Wizard Chronicles, starts out with a scene from a claustrophobic's nightmare – Torg, the Death-Knower and king of the Tugars, is imprisoned by the evil wizard Invictus at the bottom of a cold, dark pit bored hundreds of feet into a mountain. He can't stretch out because the pit is too small, and he can't lean against the walls, because they're enchanted with flesh-burning magic. He either has to stand or curl into an uncomfortably tight fetal position. We're only in the prologue, and the book is already giving me the willies. And that's a good thing. Torg eventually escapes the pit and embarks on an Odyssey-like journey back to his desert home to stop Invictus from enslaving the world of Triken. Jim Melvin's world-building was at once fantastic and logical, from the unique human cultures to the strange twists on traditional monsters. It's obvious Melvin put a lot of thought into the...

This Jealous Earth by Scott Dominic Carpenter. Midwestern Gothic Press. It is interesting that one of these sharply written short stories, “The Spirit of the Dog,” takes place in a uranium mine. Instead of looking for sparkly bits of gold, the miners run around with Geiger counters after a preliminary blast, looking for little bursts of radiation. Most of these stories involve connections: their breaking, their forming, their resilience, their failure. Just as the forces binding particles in the atomic nucleus are enormously strong, many of the characters in these pieces are drawn, despite themselves, to their imperfect families, to their treasured pets. The opposite occurs in “The Spirit of the Dog”; the various miners pit themselves against the new, pretty engineer. Their individual stubborn egos form a sort of misogynist hive mind whose evil ideas drive everyone apart. The egos of squabbling or drunk parents get in the way, but their kids band together for mischief or otherwise st...

A young woman is haunted by a past she can't remember. She feels threatened by her father and his lascivious friend. In her efforts to elude the pair and track down her brother, a third man hunts her for his own depredations. Set in England in 1875, the story has a definite Gothic feel to it. Richards is adept at illustrating the scene. The "Blackened Cottage" where Lisbeth, our protagonist, lives evokes fear with every creaking floorboard. The air she breathes threatens to smother her in gloom. Richards doesn't hold back with her descriptive narrative. Every adversity that Lisbeth faces is given its due in highly detailed prose. She gets credit for her inventive metaphors. Here are three brief selections that jumped out at me: There is no response but the wind’s drunken slur. I whisper with the breath of a mosquito's wings... His nails scrape my skull like a wolf scraping soil for bones. The story is primarily told from Lisbeth's point of view. Not only does ...

One thing that an indie author has to be is resourceful. Book covers can be expensive and sometimes you just don't have the money to splurge, especially when you're publishing a short story for 99¢. Libby Cone explains how public domain artwork and graphic design shareware can be an indie author's best friends. I have designed the covers (if you can call them that) for all my Kindle books and short stories. I hired a designer I found on LinkedIn to execute my idea for the self-published paperback edition of War on the Margins . She did a very good job. When I published the Kindle edition of Flesh and Grass I used a Dutch painting that I thought was in the public domain. When I found out it wasn't, I obtained a public domain painting. I did the "cover" for "Quantum Fashionistas" using GimP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), but had to redo it when I realized its definition wasn't high enough. GimP is somewhat daunting, but I eventually figured ou...

When hunting for an illustrator, the Web is often the best option for an indie author. Online galleries are the most convenient place to check out an artist's work. Adam Copeland realized that freelance artists are in the same boat as indie authors. They're unknowns looking to make their mark. Working together is a win-win for both parties. When it came time to choose a cover for my book I perused DeviantArt.com , looking for artwork that was similar to what I had in mind. I found it, and made sure the artist was someone who was good, but not a professional (i.e., didn't make his living from his art). I emailed him and asked if he would be willing to be paid to make cover art for me. He was thrilled that someone wanted to offer money for his hobby and agreed. My original concept, however, was still very complex, time consuming, and expensive, so we compromised on a simpler version. The result is the art I have now, which I've had nothing but compliments on. I've had...

Once they were friends. Now two scientists race-one to save mankind, one to destroy it. Nanotechnology made Eva Rozen the world's wealthiest woman. Rage made her the deadliest. Marta Cruz alone can stand between Eva and the death of millions. But will a crippling illness stop Marta first? That's a great blurb. Unfortunately Steinman takes far too long to get to it. Except for the intriguing first chapter, he spends the first half of the book on back story. The plot is ignored in favor of character development, which might not have been bad had anything interesting happened. It isn't until two-thirds of the way through the book that we get a hint that the plot blurb is happening. The three main characters (and their specialties) are Eva (chemistry and computers), Marta (biology), and Jim (good with dogs). After the first chapter, Steinman takes us back to their youth where we see how they handled childhood adversity. Steinman does a great job developing the characters, but I...

Demonworld by Kyle B. Stiff is a highly imagined Lovecraftian tale that combines science fiction, fantasy, and horror in a way I've never seen. It's dark and dystopian, but with elements of humanity that hint at a hopeful future in the books to come. The world is dominated by monsters called “flesh demons." Most human tribes appease the flesh demon “gods” by offering them human sacrifices. But a small hope for humanity exists in a technologically advanced city called Haven. It has survived and thrived by staying isolated on a small, bleak island in the middle of a vast ocean, hidden for hundreds of years from the flesh demons and aggressive human city-states. Wodan, a gifted teenage boy from Haven, finds himself mysteriously exiled from his home for no reason he can comprehend. Wodan has to battle flesh demons, their twisted minions, and humans just as warped and evil as the demons, to return home to Haven and discover who kidnapped him and dropped him into the mi...

In his search for an illustrator, sci-fi author Thomas Carpenter found one much closer than he thought. He graciously shared his book cover experience with us and offers some advice to other indie authors. Initially I hired out cover design to a friend that did work similar to book design. The first covers he made for The Digital Sea and The Godhead Machine were passable, but not exciting at all. After he made those, I asked him to do the cover for my YA dystopia novel called Gamers . Unfortunately, we didn't see eye-to-eye on the design process. He hadn't read the book and didn't understand the YA market, so I fired him. In the meantime, my wife had purchased Photoshop with the idea that eventually she could make covers. Once I fired the other guy, I asked her to go for it (she'd done a short story cover by this time, which was a good starter cover). We'd walked the bookstores and studied covers for a while so we know want we wanted. The only problem was that we...

M. Terry Green is one of those authors fortunate enough to have graphic design skills. However, she learned that the path to cover creation can be a tortuous one. She was generous enough to provide us with a history of her Techno-Shaman series book covers. Hired an Illustrator First Novel - For the first book in my urban fantasy series, I hired an illustrator who did a great job and I was thrilled. She created the raw artwork by painting in Photoshop and then I put the cover together using Photoshop and Illustrator (I have some background in graphic design). Although I liked the cover (in fact, it’s still my favorite), I did receive some negative feedback from reviewers (which wasn’t specific). Second Novel - Prior to releasing the second novel, I wasn’t yet convinced I needed to change the first cover and so went back to the illustrator who had done it and asked for artwork for the second book. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to visualize my protagonist in quite the same way. We cal...

A great book cover inspires readers to ask the question the book seeks to answer. Since my design skills scream “amateur” (to put it kindly), I hired professionals to design great covers for two books I will publish in 2013. I think both designers did a fantastic job conveying the question of each book, and it was a pleasure to work with them both. ZERVAKAN ZERVAKAN is a fantasy novel set in a world with 19th century technology -- steam engines, guns, telegraphs -- where two magical bands of light suddenly appear in the sky one night, spanning the horizons like rings around the planet. A scientist and a priest must discover the mystery behind the rings before their world is consumed by an evil they're not ready to fight. Given the setting, I wanted a cover with a 19th century feel, but one that said "fantasy" and not "historical." TJ Lomas brought my vision to life. He found an old photograph and added two bands of magical light on the horizons. He added c...

You can't judge a book by its cover. While that statement is generally true in the figurative sense, when it comes to actual books we readers really do judge books by their covers. Despite all the lofty talk about literature being a form of art, the hardcore truth is that it is primarily a form of entertainment . The publisher, whether corporate behemoth or indie author, has to convince people that reading the book will entertain them. How do they do that? By capturing your eye with an appealing cover. Which of the following covers looks more interesting?   There is no right answer. Some might prefer the simplicity of text. Others are drawn in by the illustrated cover of a scientist at work in his lab. I prefer the illustrated cover and I suspect most people do too. It offers a glimpse into the story. While The Time Machine is a sci-fi classic known to a great deal of people alive today, there will always be a new audience that has never read the work. It is up to the publisher t...

Our email address has been snatched up by an email marketing company. No real surprise there. This is the Internet Age after all. We don't mind having our site listed on indie book reviewer lists. Most of them are courteous to both author and reviewer. They list the reviewer's likes and dislikes and other submission guidelines, and even provide a link to the reviewer's site. This is the right way to go about it. They save the author time in their hunt for reviews and the reviewers from having to deal with books they're not interested in. But that's not how this marketing company operates. Authors pay a fee to generate an email marketing campaign . Judging by the format of these emails, they fill out a form listing pertinent info about themselves and their book. Upon completion, it gets shot out to every book reviewer in their database, regardless of the reviewer's book preferences. We're tired of this. There's a reason why we have submission guidelines ....

Full Disclosure: Yes, Libby Cone is a fellow reviewer here at the New Podler Review of Books. She'd told me about the story over the summer and I was intrigued. She sent me the finished story a couple of weeks ago. I enjoyed it so much that I offered to review it. You can shout "shenanigans" if you want, but I believe future reviewers will bear me out. In "Quantum Fashionistas", we're introduced to Sharon, a middle-aged actuary for an insurance company. The twist here is that the company works across multiple universes. Yes, breakthroughs in quantum physics have enabled travel from one universe to another, provided one can afford the cost. Sharon is one of a select few people who can handle multiverse travel without losing her wits. Still, she's replaceable and constantly frets about her pension. While on assignment in sigma-Germany, she gets a call from her boss explaining that they have a special assignment for her. Unfortunately it involves time tr...

Kill Screen by Benjamin Reeves is as creepy as a late-night session of Resident Evil in a dark basement. An apt description, considering the book is about a dark and creepy video game that achieves sentience and drives its players insane.* Jack Valentine, co-owner of the video game company Electronic Sheep, finds his partner and best friend Dexter Hayward dead in a bathtub filled with his own blood. It's a confirmed suicide – something to which Jack is not a stranger – but it spurs Jack to discover why his friend abruptly killed himself. Jack's investigation leads him to Evi, a mysterious computer program embedded in a video game under development at Electronic Sheep. Evi shows Jack terrifying things, including horrors from his own past. To save his sanity, and gain justice for Dexter, Jack has to discover what the program wants and how to stop it from causing more deaths. Kill Screen is set in San Francisco during the 1990s, a heady time and place to be working in soft...

First, let me emphasize that New Podler Review of Books does not and never has charged money for book reviews. The only payment we get is a copy of the books we review. So the following article and questions are simply posted for conversational purposes. The New York Times has a story on the rise and fall of GettingBookReviews.com , a service owned by Todd Rutherford where, for a fee, authors could commission several dozen 5-star reviews and get them posted on Amazon and other online markets. “I was creating reviews that pointed out the positive things, not the negative things,” Mr. Rutherford said. “These were marketing reviews, not editorial reviews.” In essence, they were blurbs, the little puffs on the backs of books in the old days, when all books were physical objects and sold in stores. No one took blurbs very seriously, but books looked naked without them. One of Mr. Rutherford’s clients, who confidently commissioned hundreds of reviews and didn’t even require them to b...

I first heard about Jeremy Robert Johnson (JRJ) from Girl on Demand's POD-dy Mouth blog back in 2006. Her enthusiastic review of his short story collection, Angel Dust Apocalypse , led me to my first indie book purchase. I was not disappointed . After writing two short novels, Siren Promised (co-written with Alan Clark and nominated for a Bram Stoker award) and The Extinction Journals , he focused on his publishing company, Swallowdown Press. Unlike most indie authors who form a publishing company under false pretense of being anything other than a vehicle for the author's own work, JRJ actually publishes the work of other indie authors that he enjoys (Forrest Armstrong, J. David Osborne, and Cody Goodfellow to name a few). We Live Inside You is JRJ's second short story collection, featuring his work published between 2006 and 2011. When I found out that JRJ finally got around to publishing another collection of his short stories, I had to pick up a copy. From the cover...

Poor Jeremy Fade. He lives in Goom, suburb of San Francisco, with his second wife and three kids. He worries. About his wife, about his ex-wife, about his kids, about his job. An engineer-turned-salesperson, his career and peace of mind depend upon the closing of his first sale, that of a huge software package to an unnamed university. But first he has to negotiate all the postmodern everything-is-a-social-construct politics and then kiss up to the Bursar, who decides everything. And he keeps seeing a ghost. The beginning of the book deals with the various characters and their feelings of deserving things: Fade, his sale; the Bursar, deferential behavior; Fade's drug-counselor-wife's patients, her time. All are pursuing their agendas with varying degrees of success. The University faculty is distracted from their usual concerns by the impending visit of a delegation, headed by an Imam Walid, from the Islamic Institute of Wyrigistan. Pakistan has been defeated by India. Its remn...

England experienced a civil war and a Revolution, both in the seventeenth century. Each profoundly affected the English way of life: the civil war through violence, and the Revolution through a change in the power of the monarchy and modification of its succession formula to keep it out of Catholic hands, a change that was in effect until 2011. We do not like to think about it, but most of us with a knowledge of 20 th century and early 21 st century history have an understanding of the fragility of democracy and the strange, cultish, and often violent movements that threaten to replace it. In Helen Smith's dark book, parliamentary democracy has been replaced by an ideology of victimization that has turned strangely upon itself. A rise in global terrorism has resulted in the borders being sealed, and secret police lurking everywhere. Children are kept from unrelated adults (such as teachers) out of fear of pedophilia, and, in a bizarre sort of Stockholm syndrome, women are veiled ...

The Magus’s Tale , book two in Colin McComb’s Oathbreaker series, primarily follows young Alton, a boy plucked from certain death by Magus Underhill to become the elderly magus's apprentice.  Alton spends his childhood and adolescence excelling at powerful magic despite abusive treatment from his master.  Once Alton becomes a magus in his own right, he learns that great power comes with a price—loneliness.  To earn acceptance from his nervous neighbors in the village of Lower Pippen, he uses his magic to cure their ills and protect them from the bitter weather and wild animals that assault their farms. But what seems like a minor encounter with petty brigands blows up into an unimaginably horrible event that releases a terror upon the world that “threatens life itself.” The Magus’s Tale is Alton’s story, but we do learn what the main characters from book one, The Knight’s Tale , have been up to.  Sir Pelagir, General Glasyin, and Princess Caitrona are living a relati...