Submission Guidelines

In case you haven't noticed, until now there has not been an official statement of the submission guidelines made readily available to visitors. The information has always been present, scattered throughout several pages, but now that the site has grown up, I think an official guidelines post has become necessary. As this post passes from its front-page viewpoint, I shall add a link to it that will always be available to new visitors. I still highly recommend that any author seriously considering a submission should go back and read the earlier posts that deal with the subject in detail. This is just a simplified version of my opinion on the matter.

How do I request a review for my book?

Place a comment on any post on the blog or send a message to ice9 at e-tabitha dot com with a request that you desire a review of your book. Include a direct email address at which you can be contacted. Please do not use an address at MySpace or some other monster-sized site. Your real name and/or the title of your book are optional as long as I can find this information from the email or web address you send. I shall respond promptly to the email address you have provided.

Do you review only books published by iUniverse?

No. This was the case when the site was established back in 2006. We added additional reviewers in early 2008, and now all self-published POD imprints, except Lulu, will be considered for review. Lulu Book Review offers a similar, free service to Lulu authors. Click the link in the left column of this site to visit Lulu Book Review.

Does the genre of my book have to fall within any particular category?

No. Any book will be considered if it fits all the other acceptable parameters.

Does my book have to be a new release?

No. Any iU or other self-published POD book from 1998-onward is eligible. Lulu authors will be referred to Shannon's Lulu Book Review.

What types of books will you not accept for review?

Cheaters and those written by Gomer Pyle and edited by Ernest T. Bass. You can find many descriptions of cheaters in the other posts on this blog, but the basic idea is that if you write a book about a dead blonde from Mexia, you need not apply. Ditto for any book with a celebrity's name in the title, any book that implies a connection with any famous book or characters, and any get-rich-quick schemes.

Do you accept any electronic formats or unpublished manuscripts for review?

No. I shall send you my address and you will send me a published copy of your iUniverse book. An author's signature on the title page is always appreciated. The books are read and reviewed in the order they are received in my mailbox.

Will I receive the standard personal-service package of four separate reviews and email updates on the status and progress of my reviews?

Yes, as long as I do not get swamped with a backlog of books to review. If that happens, I shall have to decide at that time what I can do to remain on schedule.

Will you sell my book on Amazon or elsewhere after the review has been completed?

Absolutely, positively no-way-Jose! As an iU author myself, I find that practice despicable. I shall keep your book displayed on my bookshelf until I think of a reader who I am quite sure will read it and like it. I may give some books to libraries eventually, but so far, I have not done so.

Where can I read other reviews you have done, so I can decide if I like your style?

You can, of course, read all the reviews on this blog site. You can also find entirely different reviews I have composed for the same books at Amazon, B&N, and Authors Den. You can even go to Amazon and round up the reviews I have posted there and read them all at once!

Read all the posts concerning submission guidelines.

My Summer Vacation

 My Summer Vacation 
by Hannah R. Goodman(iUniverse / 0-595-39430-2 / May 2006 / 144 pages / $11.95)

Hannah R. Goodman is a new writer of informative novels for young adults. Her two books parallel those of Lyda Phillips. In fact, the two authors even know each other. Like Ms. Phillips, Hannah writes short novels that surround the lives of teenage characters who have serious underlying issues. My Summer Vacation is her second novel. My Sister's Wedding (not reviewed here) received accolades galore, and this second book is a continuation of the life of sixteen-year-old Maddie Hickman. The married sister's history of alcohol problems weighs on younger Maddie's mind as she prepares for a quiet summer at camp with her friends.

The pack of friends at the coed, creative-nerd camp have plans that do not include quiet. Two of the boys in Maddie's clique put up their dukes over one of the girls, and both get thrown out of camp for fighting. This is a clique of teenage Counselors in Training, not a bunch of ten-year-old boys, so a brawl over a girl gets everybody's attention. Catfights of a similar, but less phsyical, nature will break out among the girls, too, so Maddie has to seek solitude elsewhere. She finds it in a final-year camper (not a CIT) with Tourette's Syndrome and a love for the classic rock of his parents' generation. The teenage soap bubbles keep on developing as the teens learn to deal with the sudden passing of loved ones, addictive personalities, and the kissing of other people's boyfriends. It may not be Meatballs, but My Summer Vacation is a quick, lighthearted read, even with the trials, tribulations, and tragedies.

Hannah R. Goodman has approached the subject of enablers with humor and delicacy. Yes, some of the lead characters in the story are the psychological enablers of family members who just cannot seem to get their acts together. Although it never bellows from the pulpit, the book is intended to provide insight to teens who may be facing similar issues in real life. My Summer Vacation offers entertainment and enlightenment suitable for teens and their parents. It's too bad that the second novels of Hannah Goodman and Lyda Phillips cannot be packaged and sold together at a much lower price. The two summer camp stories for girls would double the insight and double the fun for the appropriate teen readers who most need them, but at $23 for about 250 pages, iU's price structure is still the company's Achilles heel. I have heard that Ms. Goodman is working on the acquisition of a more cost-effective publisher, but in the meantime, this book fills a need that I'm sure exists within many troubled families, for whom the price should not be a deterrent. Hannah Goodman is an ex-high school English teacher who has experience with troubled teens that climbs out from between the lines of the story.

The Sun Singer

 The Sun Singer  
by Malcolm R. Campbell
(iUniverse / 0-595-31665-4 / June 2004 / 320 pages / $19.95)

Robert is a normal teenage boy who has lots of very imaginative dreams inspired by his adventures in a time he has never known. Yes, the dreams feature a teenage girl or two, but his special relationship with his grandfather has taught him that the strange dreams contain a new reality he will soon enter. He has been groomed for this new adventure since he was very young. He had witnessed a tragic accident in which a young girl was killed, a day that would forever haunt his consciousness. After his grandfather dies, the remainder of the Elliott family takes a summer vacation to the mountains of Robert's destiny. One by one, the places, characters, and events of his dreams begin to come to life.

In my opinion, the best element of The Sun Singer is the way the story holds its ties with Robert's real world and family. Once he enters the dream world for real, the story becomes a fantasy in which Robert is now known as Osprey, and also as The Sun Singer. The Disney classic movie, Dragonslayer, stars a similar young hero who must save the tribe of the good guys from the evil villain. If you liked Dragonslayer, you will enjoy The Sun Singer, as there are similarities in the plot and characters. I mention that old '80's movie because it was of a particularly high quality, and so is the storyline of this book. The difference lies in The Sun Singer's firm grip on the current millennium. In this respect, the book owes more to the Carlos Castaneda Don Juan adventures with psychotropic plants than it does to Dragonslayer. Robert Adams lives in the current time and Osprey exists in a time long ago, but not in a galaxy far away. Robert flashes back and forth, at least within his own mind, between then and now. He was Osprey then and he is Robert now, but both are operating at the same mountainous location in the Western U.S. Robert steps through a time portal often traversed by his grandfather. While his body is apparently in one time, his mind can sometimes fluctuate between the two eras. They didn't call him the Soothsayer of West Wood Street for nuttin'!

That is all of the plotline that should be explained here. Malcolm R. Campbell has successfully crafted an elegant, romantic fantasy of good vs. evil that most fans of the genre should appreciate. The novel has been promoted as one for both old and young adults, and I concur with that assessment. I particularly like the way Robert acts like an adventurous, intelligent, well-behaved teenager. Although the book offers an appeal to adults with its separate reality ala A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, it does not include language or attitudes that tend to influence young readers in a negative manner. The character development is well done, and I mean that with a double entendre. Fantasy fans will eagerly await a sequel when they can step into another time with Osprey without leaving Robert or his modern lifestyle completely behind.

Two very small, negative issues need to be mentioned. By doing so, maybe the next time Robert becomes Osprey, the adventure will be even more enjoyable. The first is that a little more care should be applied to the proofreading stage. Although of the most trivial nature, the typos in this book reach a far higher number than they should. These are of such a miniscule type that they do not slow down the reading or comprehension a whit, but a book with this high quality of storytelling deserves the look of a completely professional effort. The second issue is that I think the story would be more immediate in its feel of excitement if it had been told in the present tense instead of the past tense. The present tense would better serve the reader's wonder and exhilaration of the time-travel experience. I have no further complaints. I am not a rabid fan of the fantasy genre, but I liked the book and I enjoyed the experience of flashing through time and space with well-developed characters within a psychologically believable storyline. If an old nonfiction writer like me found the trip entertaining, certainly many of the multitude of fantasy readers out there will be ecstatic from the journey.

The Latest Updates

If you are here, you probably already know there are a few honest book review sites out there in the ozone, and that this is one of them. I have just posted a new article at Authors Den about the subject: Made in China

Coming soon will be a review of the first fantasy book on this site, Malcolm R. Campbell's The Sun Singer. So far it's gotten off to a good start. The Sun Singer will probably be followed by Hannah R. Goodman's My Summer Vacation for young adult readers. As always, we are a first to arrive, first reviewed website. Thank you for coming.

The Proof is in the Nitpick

Probably the most boring task in writing and producing a book is the proofreading stage. Any POD author must develop a taste for this task or the result will just invite the slap-fighters to a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and we all know who's posterior is getting stabbed with pins! Did I say who's? Now this is exactly what today's lesson is about. We are also going to discuss how to sit your paper down on you're desk and read the text of your the book from your comoputer screen. Their are of course many other ways author's make a mess of there proofreading job, and I hope to manage to compile a complete listing of all the many ways I have encountered them doing so. So, get the led out of your pencils so I can lead the ways. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him durnk.

The final inspiration for this article was a post by POD-dy Mouth. She has a link to a site that is currently displaying the first chapters of many potential POD books. A read through some of the chapters with particularly low ratings will quite promptly expose a lack of proper proofreading. After many comparisons of what the Girl on Demand says about her multitudinous submissions for reviews with the few submissions I have received, I can only conclude that I have discovered the way to read a selection of very high-quality iUniverse books, while she has waded through the depth of the POD pit to discover the few diamonds she seeks. As I have covered in previous posts, I can only conclude that we each effectively find what we seek. The key difference is the manner in which we run our respective slushpile operations. I think I can honestly surmise that Poddy Girl and I both feel that many deserving POD authors do not get the attention they deserve. I also think there is no downside to the production of a POD book that has been as perfectly composed, edited, and proofread as possible.

For those of you who do not wish to play the donkey at the next party, here is a list to help keep the pinholes out of your derriere. Just for your information, the last book I completed contained more stupid, careless, proofreading-type errors than any iUniverse book I have read or reviewed on this site. It was a 500-page, traditionally published book on the subject of HTML. It was published in 1998, so you cannot say that the sloppy proofing was the result of Bush's bad trade policies. It was written by a PhD, so you cannot say it was written by a moron, either. Does a computer nerd know how to use a spelling and grammar program? Somebody just did not care enough to properly and carefully proofread the book.

Here is your first hint to use in the betterment of your future publications: the errors increased in frequency as the text neared the final pages of the HTML book. By the end, I was spotting at least one every other page! This is a common problem that I have observed in both iUniverse and traditionally published books. My guess is that the proofreader is tiring of the tedious job as he plods toward the end. I deliberately misstated the problem. I don't think the proofreader is plodding enough. He is rushing to complete the job as the finish line comes into focus. He is missing little boo-boos that he would have easily caught when he was feeling fresh and excited on his first run through the text. He's fumbling the ball in overtime. He dropped the ball in the last inning. There was a turnover at the five yard line. He was being led by the text when he should have gotten the lead out. Do you see how I got in a hurry and let the tense get jumbled while I began repeating myself? Rule #1: Pay even more attention as you read Chapter 50. I know its boring, but do it anyway! And while your at it, do it again... and again. Proofread the whole book three times.

Rule #2: Proofread the book in a somewhat different manner each of the three times you go though it. If you are reading it silently the first time, read it aloud the second. If you are reading it in a goal-directed, short-term manner the first time, read it at your leisure on the second go around. The best method is to read it out loud to another person while that person follows along in the text. If one of you is reading from a computer monitor, have the other one read from a copy you have printed on junk paper. If you like to mark up the junk paper version with a red pen, do so. If you like to correct as you go in a Word document, do it that way on the second reading. Whatever floats your boat keeps it from being christened Titanic.

Rule #3: Don't never ever let your trusted assistant make any changes in the Word document. You and only you should make these alterations; that is, unkless you want to confuse yourself silly and widn up with errors you throught you fixed, but she said she fixed thm, and you assumed that you had the correct and lastest version of the document in your computer, but actually that was the one she threw in the trash when she said she thought you had the findal document version in you're comoputer. Whew! You got the message?

Rule #4: By all means, use whatever spelling and grammar checking program(s) you have, but keep in mind that Bill Gates doesn't know everything about writing the world's greatest novel and publishing it with iUniverse. Look carefully at the suggestions made by the computer programs, but make each final, small decision yourself.

Rule #5: You are no longer in middle school. Don't be afraid to open a dictionary whenever you have a question. There are no smart alecks in the back row to laugh at your nerdy ignorance.

Rule #6: As I have stated many times previously, the most common mistake is the misplacement, omission, or repetition of the most common words.

Rule #7: Watch out for incorrectly changing tense. It happens to the best of us. It happens within paragraphs, and it even happens within sentences.

Rule #8: No matter how clever you think you are, none of your readers like plowing though any particular conceit, grammatical element, or any other cute twist of the English language if it is repeated too often in your book. A few examples are: italics, bold text, super-short and/or incomplete sentences, too-long sentences, and words or phrases that are simply repeated too often. A particular point to keep in mind is that the iUniverse printing system does not handle underlining well. Any word or phrase underlined in an iU book looks as if the underline is in bold and the word is in regular text. I recommend using underlining in an iU manuscript only in applications in which the underline is the only grammatically correct way to display the word or phrase.

Rule #9: Many sentence structures are not exactly incorrect, but they are what I call funky. These are the ones that Word will highlight as grammatically incorrect every time, but we all know that real Americans speak that way anyway. For example, you may have discovered that Word sometimes spits up sentences with a passive structure. If you have no personal objection, then by all means follow Word's orders and fix the funky sentence. In many cases, you may want the sentence to still do the funky chicken, and this is not necessarily wrong, just funky. Pay attention to Word, but use your own judgement, too.

Rule #10: Punctuation is the little engine that could funk up your whole project, so give it its due. Capitalize the right words and put the commas in all the right places, but none of the wrong ones. Use too many ...'s and I'll have to send you back up to #8! Punctuate your whole book as if you were addressing an email or searching for a URL. You know where a lost dot can take you in that department, don't you? Ignore #10... and we'll be saying; we've got the tail, where are the pins?

Distant Cousin: Repatriation

Distant Cousin: Repatriation  
by Al Past

(iUniverse / 0-595-39929-0 / May 2006 / 182 pages / $13.95 / Kindle $4.00)

The action-packed sequel to the magical Distant Cousin is here! Matt Mendez and Ana Darcy try to continue to lead normal lives, even after Darcy's relatives from the planet Thomo have arrived on Earth. The pursuit of a normal lifestyle may have been successful if another nosy reporter, the FBI, the Mafia, and a conglomerate with scruples learned from Enron had not gotten involved. About the only normalcy Matt and Darcy can achieve is the discovery that if peppers are added to their toddler's green vegetables, she will actually eat something green. The whole affair hardly leaves time for Darcy to teach Matt how to drive her spaceship!

Al Past carries the story of Darcy, the ex-princess of Thomo, deeper into the realm of reality on Earth. Considerably more concise than Distant Cousin, the sequel carries the adventure into a believable sequence of events. The brevity of the descriptions of both characters and scenes does hamper the magic a bit, but the pace has picked up considerably from that of the predecessor, and that seems to have been the author's intent.

Yes, I highly recommend this sequel to anyone who has already read Distant Cousin. Any reader who is approaching Mr. Past's saga of The Barbie from Outer Space for the first time with Repatriation in hand will miss a lot. Although the key background elements of the plot of Distant Cousin are mentioned in all the right places for those readers who may be meeting Darcy for the first time, there is absolutely no substitute for a careful reading of Distant Cousin first. Standing alone, I can only give Repatriation four stars, but as a sequel, it easily earns the full set of five. I do not wish to mention any further plot elements here. Just open your mind's eye and imagine Spielberg directing the movie. Would he combine the two books into one movie? Maybe he would because the plotlines are seamless; or maybe he wouldn't because you have to slow down the action to capture the real magic of a starchild. I just want to feel the delight of seeing Matt drive that space pod!

Legitimate Reviews for Legitimate Books

As I have often stated on this blog, the reviews on this site are reserved for iUniverse books that offer deserving, original material. We are not an equal opportunity employer and we do not cater to the lowest common denominator. Cheaters need not apply. In case you have any questions about which titles are considered cheaters, here are a few examples:
 

Best Stock Picks for a World Economy

Get Rich Off the Housing Bubble

The Flip-Flops of Kerry & McCain

Obama’s Pajamas

Ringo Starr: The Real Walrus

Madonna’s Guide to Adoption

Rosie O’Donnell: The Slap-fight of the Century

Naughty Blondes of the Internet

Lose Fifty Pounds with a Vibrator

The Legend of Britney’s Panties

Would these titles sell? Of course they would! Here is an equivalent list, except these are real iUniverse titles that are currently among the top 50 iUniverse sellers at Amazon. (Keep in mind, of course, that these titles were not selected from iU titles listed under the Writers Club Press imprint. There may very well be WCP titles that would shove some of these out of the winners circle.)

Sensible Stock Investing: How to Pick, Value, and Manage Stocks

The Maui CEO: Import from China, Sell on eBay, and Live Wherever You Want

How to Attract Wealth, Health, Love, and Luck Into Your Life Immediately

(112 pages, including front matter, for only $12.95!)

Effortless Cash Flow (if you give us $24.95)

More Letters From Pemberley: 1814-1819: A Further Continuation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Vlad Dracula: The Dragon Prince

The Russian Adoption Handbook

Twelve Step Plan to Becoming an Actor in LA

A Stripper’s Tail: Confessions of a Las Vegas Stripper

Pick-Up Lines That Work: Get the Girl Tonight!

Ten Hints for Prospective iU Authors

I have just posted a new article at Authors Den that many of you may be interested in, particularly if you have a book yet to be submitted to a publisher. It details a list of ten things that new POD authors often overlook when they submit their manuscripts. These are hints and ideas that I have encountered in my experiences with contributing to traditionally published books, publishing my own four iUniverse books, and reviewing iU books for this blog. Click the link to read the article.

...And Now for Something Completely Different:

Have you visited my political discussion blog? Suck the Boob

Have you seen how the Honda 50 changed America in 1959? Tiddlerosis

Would you like to see a picture of me looking stoopid, standing next to a big boat? Yeah, this is really me.

A Ship Full of Rats

Every new major development in America's commercialized culture follows a distinct pattern in its growth from infancy to a market past its prime. The computer industry reached this particular description of a peak in 1998. The internet followed with its peak in 2000. The POD industry began at the end of '97 and peaked with the internet in 2000. Those pioneering POD authors among us may remember the hope and joy we experienced back in the good old days. The feeling was both similar to and closely linked with the feelings we had about the internet in general during that same brief, glorious era. As the POD ship filled up to capacity with the artistic, technological innovators of the new millennium, the rats were climbing aboard, silently waiting for their opportunity. The rats usually fall into one of two groups.

Since I began this blog, I have tried as tactfully as I can to expose the slap-fighters. These are the people you might call the Sean Hannitys of our little world. They will do or say anything to retain the power of the status quo. Their repetitive laments include the same old whines. Print On Demand is a printing method. POD authors have not really been published because they did not survive the slushpile. 99% of POD books are garbage. Authors are patently unable to edit and proofread their own work. You must have a professionally designed cover to succeed. Only family members will ever read a POD author's book. Amazon is not good enough: you have to have your book for sale in B&N stores. Libraries hate POD books. POD publishers are nothing more than vanity presses. POD publishers are printers, not real publishers. Bookstore employees hate POD books. Bookstores will not order POD books. Have you heard enough yet? Do I have to explain to you that many of these particular rats are just trying to sell whatever they are selling? Have you noticed that many of the loudest slap-fighters are cover designers, micro-publishers, message board flamers, or bloggers tooting their own horns?

The other rat variety could care less about denigrating your publishing efforts. Instead, this type just wants to sell you something. The something is as usually close to nothing as it can possibly be. Their entire purpose is to sell you nothing for something. They will tell you all about the sales success they can bring for your book. In this manner, they are the opposite of the slap-fighters. They are all honey. The slap-fighters are all vinegar. If you have published a POD book, you have probably been approached by at least a few of these honeydrippers. If you have been promoting multiple releases online for several years, as I have, you have probably seen every scam the 'drippers have dreamed up. You find them in your mailbox and you discover them whenever you boot up your computer. For only $5999, we will make you a best-selling author! Our websites have the professional look that you need to succeed. Our multitudinous contacts will bring you fame and fortune beyond your wildest dreams. Our professional marketing specialists will assist you in writing the best press release possible. We have arranged radio interviews for nationally famous authors. Would you like to sell your manuscript as a successful screenplay? Are you barfing yet? Here's a fresh bag. Mine's already full.

If you are wondering why I don't just name the names of these rats, it is simply because I choose to take the high road, publicly at least. I usually don't pull any punches when I am communicating with a fellow author via private email. That's the main difference between me and Sean Hannity. I feel about as strongly about the once-closed door that has been opened by iUniverse as he does about President Bush's policies. He spouts his opinion to millions of people (morons?) five nights a week. I try to be a little more low key. If you have a question about one of the rats, you can always email me and I shall privately name names and give you whatever opinion I may have. Blatant flamers will be summarily ignored.

Now let's get back to business. Poddy Mouth receives 100 submissions for reviews a day. I guess you submitters are the same people who play the lottery and eat at Burger King so you can enter the corporate contest of the day. Whoopeeee! Over here at the peasant blog, we just quietly wait for a book that is so good that our review has been quoted in the local newspaper. (Unfortunately, I do not have a link to that story at this time.) The review of that book's sequel, Distant Cousin: Repatriation will be coming soon. Watch for it here!

Distant Cousin

Distant Cousin 
by Al Past
(iUniverse, Inc. / 0-595-37292-9 / 978-0-595-37292-8 / October 2005 / 390 pages / $21.95 / Kindle $5.00)

Note: This cover is not the usual online version. There is a special, subtle quality to the cover that is not evident at B&N or Amazon. Just keep in mind that if you order the book, you will get a slightly better cover than is evident from the online JPG posted at Amazon and B&N. If you squint, you will see a face in the cover I have posted here. Now on with the show!

Distant Cousin is the best novel I have read in a long time. I can name about ten that I like better, and then I run out of titles. In what should be considered an appropriate fashion, the cover blurb (the same one you will read online) refers only to the first few pages of the book. The many pleasant plot twists of a book like Distant Cousin should never be given away for the sake of advertising. The author has added a new version at Amazon that provides a bit more information, but probably the less plot details you know, the more you will enjoy Distant Cousin.

Distant Cousin is a screenplay waiting to become a Spielberg movie. You cannot escape the visions in your mind from E.T. and Close Encounters as you read through it, and the magic so aptly personified in those two movies is also prevalent in Distant Cousin. The book is a SciFi love story with an adventurous plot. A human from another planet comes for a visit. She looks like Barbie, or the beauty from Species, except she is not a monster wearing a Barbie suit. She lands near Alpine, TX, which makes the landscape backdrop look like that in Wavelength, another movie with stylistic elements in common with Distant Cousin. A young journalist who has become somewhat bored with his job spots Barbie in the library, and he is fascinated by the combination of her beautiful innocence and the scientific books she is studying. The subplots begin to roll in, and that's all I'm going to tell you.

Al Past is a very accomplished, literary author. The sequel to Distant Cousin is already out, and I know you SciFi fans love sequels. The author thought about, researched, and studied the details of his concept for many years before releasing Distant Cousin, and the depth of his effort shines from the pages. Yes, the usual number of ubiquitous grammatical and typographical errors are present in the book, but that is my sole complaint. When the characters and plot are this good, holding up for the entire, considerable page count, I won't let the boo-boo drivel tarnish a book that deserves at least five stars. The closest thing to cheating that this book does is have a plot related to many movies, and the author has told me that he has seen less movies and television than the average American. If I never review another book, Distant Cousin has proven my thesis once and for all. There really are regular novels out there published by iUniverse that have not cheated with an appeal to obsessive genre readers, and they are outstanding! I am not a SciFi fan nor a romance fan, and I read about equal numbers of fiction and nonfiction. Distant Cousin will stamp its wonderful magic on your soul.

See also: Interview with Dr. Al Past
Review of DC2: Repatriation
Review of DC3: Reincarnation
Review of DC4: Regeneration
Review of DC5: Recirculation
Review of DC6: Two Worlds Daughter
The 2007 PODBRAM Awards
Dr. Al Past's Blog

The Fat Lady Never Sings

 
The Fat Lady Never Sings:  
How a Football Team Found Redemption on the Baseball Diamond by Steven Reilly  
(iUniverse / 0-595-39467-1 / October 2006 / 228 pages / $18.95)


All the sports channels are programmed out of my cable connections to make it easier for me to channel surf through movies, Boston Legal, and CNN. Watching a baseball game bores me silly, and I get enough college football to watch without resorting to the sports-only channels. I am a certified nerd: knowledge and new experience to me are like winning the big game is to most people. I had a feeling about this book before I selected it for review, and my gut instinct was right on the money. The Fat Lady never sings a boring tune. This is a true story about passion, desire for success, and the ethics and overall goodness inherent in the teaching of life's lessons to a group of high school pitchers and bat-swingers.


The Derby Red Raiders were a winning football team in the smallest (by area) town in Connecticut, at least up until the 1992 season that yielded the first losing high school football team that Derby fans had seen in decades. At the end of that psychological disaster, three of the leading players faced an upcoming baseball season with two of them as pitchers and the third, the son of the town's mayor, as a hitter. The head coach of the baseball team and his assistant coach, Steven Reilly, faced an uphill battle to instill confidence into the team who had lost so much self-respect on the gridiron. The book covers the trials and tribulations of the baseball team as they work their way toward the championship.


Fans of Bull Durham, A League of Their Own, and the head coach's own favorite, Hoosiers, will love this book. You get to ride the yellow school bus to the out-of-town games, enjoy an inside look at the coaching strategies that sometime seem to come from out of left field, and of course, you have a dugout view of the detailed action on the diamond. The author's combination of closeup viewpoint and straightforward language sell the book. The point of my opening statement is that you do not have to be a baseball fan to appreciate the smooth storyline and depth of character The Fat Lady so adeptly presents. No, the grammatical editing is not absolutely perfect, and I would have chosen a cover photo with a lot less chiaroscuro for more online appeal, but that's about all I can complain about. Riles, as his friends call him, is a lawyer, a baseball coach, and a genuine writer. Even nerds will enjoy this book.

A New Ring of POD Reviewers

We seem to be informally creating a cadre of reviewer blog sites to accomodate the many genres of Print On Demand books. I don't know exactly who started it, but it seems to be happening. You can see for yourself by clicking on the links listed on this page. As one of these guys said to me recently, even I have a niche of sorts. Mine may be difficult to define, but so are my own books. I'm looking for mature iUniverse authors who are serious about their work. I ask that you question your own motives and abilities before you contact me. This is probably the reason I have not waded through the incompetent muck submitted by hordes of I-want-to-quit-my-day-job tomorrow daydreamers. I don't even wear my hip boots at my computer because I know that I don't have to do so. I know there are many authors out there who did not compose a novel for the instant-sales at Amazon marketing model. Some of us write because we are on a mission from God, and we care deeply about our readers and how they spend their dollars.

I asked in the beginning for werewolves and vampires, but I have just added a new link to a new reviewer of Fantasy POD. Here is a little clarification. 2001 and Dracula (1992) are my two favorite movies of all time, but I don't give a gnome's butt about most fantasy and/or science fiction. Yes, I wanted to see the movies, Underworld and Van Helsing, at least once, but once was quite enough. Although these two are crammed to the gunwales with computer-generated werewolves, give me The Howling anyday! I want to see actors in ugly suits. I want to go to Transylvania in an old-style gothic mode, not a pseudo-gothic mode. I shall gladly consider reviewing any iU book, and if you send a copy to me, you will get four original reviews, as always, but I do want to support other reviewers who are also trying to lift deserving POD authors up out of the muck. By the way, I've read all of The Howling books. Gary Brandner just plain got lucky that John Sayles wanted to rewrite his slightly interesting book into the best werewolf screenplay in history.

Each of the new bloggers presenting free reviews of POD books is offering something a little special and different from all the rest. You can easily discover precisely what I do by reading through the posts here and reading my reviews. You will find them here and at Authors Den, Amazon, and B&N. Let's all retire our hip boots, shall we?

Open for Submissions

Is this it? Are there no more iUniverse authors who want legitimate reviews of their books? Does no one else desire an honest review that can be used in any promotional manner? I am shocked, appalled, and flabbergasted! Ya'll just go on paying for reviews if you want, and I'll get back to reading stuff by Thomas Frank and Al Franken. There's one of those businesses literally right down the street from me. I'm sure they will be glad to tell you whatever you want to hear, as soon as your credit card clears, that is. I'm sure you have at least a few friends who will blow smoke up your derriere at Amazon, too! The good part of that deal is that they don't even have to read the book! As for the rest of you brave souls, read the earlier posts about submissions and post a comment. All it will cost you is the author's price of your book and a small payment to your local post office. I'll do the rest. I can promise you that no smoke will be blown. While you're here, feel free to take the poll at the top of the Links column.

The Missing Peace of a Heritage Puzzle

The Missing Peace of a Heritage Puzzle:  
A Memoir Uniquely Set in a Vanished Sudetenland  
by Frank Koerner
(iUniverse / 0-595-33344-3 / March 2005 / 196 pages / $16.95)I was very pleasantly surprised to find another iU book that shares certain rare qualities with my first book, Plastic Ozone Daydream. Both books are compilations of previously published articles and both have a number of b&w photos scattered throughout the text! These are the only two iUniverse books I have seen that include photos.

Missing Peace cannot be discussed without mentioning Schindler's List, since it is the work most familiar to readers seeking knowledge of a similar subject. Although everyone knows about The Holocaust, few are aware that over three million ethnic Germans were thrown out of their homeland when the nation of Czechoslovakia was formed after World War II. These displaced people once lived in the area then called Moravia. Most were deported to Germany and other areas. The author's parents left Moravia for a new life in the U.S. Frank Koerner and his two older sisters grew up in New Jersey in the '40's and '50's with all the attendant influences of American life. Mr. Koerner's first language is English. He also speaks German and a very little Czech. He long ago envisioned himself as a future pro baseball player, but as he matured, he became increasingly fascinated with the tragic history of his parents in the Moravia they so grudgingly left behind. They had had no choice except to see their homeland disappear. Frank takes the few ancient b&w photos he owns of his parents and their lives in the old country, and goes with his wife to Sudetenland, another name for the area in which his parents lived, to discover as many details of his family history as he can in a short vacation period.

Although not particularly large, this is a very complete book. Frank Koerner's story is told in the form of articles previously published in the U.S., Canada, and Germany. Many reproductions of his original family photographs are included, as well as additional photos Frank took on his vacation to Sudetenland/Moravia/Czechoslovakia. Although the core of the story represents a bleak and depressing issue, Mr. Koerner tells the tale in a delightfully personal and pleasant manner. His eccentric use of humor and the English language keeps the subject matter of his 1992 European vacation bouncing along. Missing Peace is part autobiography, part history, and part genealogy, and all three components blend smoothly together. The seventeen separate sources in which the stories were originally published are listed in the back, along with a bibliography. The cover is nicely designed, and the aptly credited painting on the cover is significant to the story line. The author's research and dedication to his subject come shining through!

Portraits in the Dark

Portraits in the Dark  
by Nancy O. Greene  
(iUniverse / 0-595-39280-6 / August 2006 / 96 pages / $9.95)

Nancy O. Greene has released her first book, a collection of short stories mining the vein opened by Richard Matheson, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King. The cover has a classy design and the price won't break the bank, although the page count is skimpy, even at this price. Ms. Greene has assembled nine stories ranging in length from two to seventeen pages. Fortunately, the better stories are the longer ones. My favorites are A Guy Named Pierce and The Affair. Although The Descent of Man and Down the Rabbit Whole are the most original of the nine stories, I was somewhat left in a fog by the author's intent with these two; i.e., I am not sure that I got the point.

The author used a few big words that sent me to my dictionary, but she also used a few common words incorrectly, leaving me uncertain as to the real quality of Portraits in the Dark. A few of the characters displayed thoughts racing through their minds concerning crimes they may or may not have perpetrated, but they could have done so in sentences of normal length and structure. Even a long-distance swimmer could never take one breath deeply enough to read one of these marathons of racing rumination. Most of the technical discrepancies are displayed in the early parts of the book, so if you are tripping over one of these, take heart that the bumpy ride smooths out in the latter half of the journey. Perhaps the author has been just a bit too naive about story development and editing....

Portraits in the Dark is just the kind of book I liked to read back during my under-thirty years, when I was a little naive myself. I liked any sort of story of dark humor with a twist at the end. I have seen every episode of The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Night Stalker. I still have a paperback copy of Matheson's The Shrinking Man that cost fifty cents in 1962, and I have read numerous Hitchcock collections. Ms. Greene is seeking the high ground these classics inhabit. She just hasn't yet made it past the quicksand pit. If you are a fan of this genre, you will enjoy this book for the originality of some of the ideas. Maybe you are still young enough to get the point of each and every story.

More Info About Tabitha & This Blog

Tabitha was born in October of 1990. She is a Balinese, which means she has the coloration of a Himalayan and the musculature of a Siamese. In other words, she is slender with long fur....

That's enough about Tabitha. Let me tell you a few pertinent things about myself. The original version of my third book was written in 1966-74. I totally rewrote it in 2002 after I had gained a lot of experience with my first two books. Most of the content of my first book was published in a local newsletter as short articles and stories in 1985-95. I spent an enormous amount of time re-editing and organizing this material into Plastic Ozone Daydream. I am retired and I spend 4-12 hours a day at my computer. I am not writing. I am researching. I have spent more time than you would ever believe trying to learn about POD publishing and marketing. Without looking it up, I cannot remember how much I have spent on the marketing of my four books, but I can swear in court that it has been a lot more than you would ever believe. It would be the understatement of the century to say that I have learned a lot about the POD market.

The most important thing I have learned is that the #1 element that sells an iUniverse book is a title and subject matter with which a certain segment of the reading population is obsessed. People do not buy iU books because the writer is a genius or the material is the most carefully crafted in the world. They buy them because the title and genre indicate a subject that they want to read. The second element is subject matter that the reader cannot readily find anywhere else. Other than many nonfiction releases, the biggest sellers at iU in this category are male gay fiction. Look it up. The third issue, quite unfortunately, concerns what I call the slap-fighters. These are the same type of people as those who are feeding the social and political civil war the US has been engaged in throughout this millennium. On one side we have the innocent, naive iU authors who think their books should sell easily with very little effort. On the other side, we have a pack of smarmy fatheads who simply live to insult and crush the first group. All the second group can say is how the first group is incapable of writing or editing, and therefore, they deserve all the derision they get. The fatheads' mantra is all about typos in the text and fonts chosen for the covers.

Have you noticed the disproportionate number of reviews of POD books at Amazon that are either five-star or one-star? How many of the five-star reviews are by the authors themselves or their friends? How many are by people who have not actually read the book cover-to-cover? How many are copied and pasted from paid review sites? If you want to see how out of control the reviews at Amazon can get, look up Solomon Tulbure's books. The bottom line is that when I see an Amazon review pattern of a large number of five-star and one-star reviews, with very few ratings between the extremes, I cannot help but think the one-star reviews must be saying at least one thing that is correct about the books, even though we know at least a few of these are simply posted by slap-fighters. Remember, I have been studying these patterns since 1999. I know that many of the Amazon reviews for iU books are not really legitimate in one way or another. I feel that by providing a little constructive criticism in my reviews, I provide credibility to my blog site, which of course, it desperately needs if I am to really provide any useful aid to the iU authors I am trying to help.

I cannot tell you how much I despise the slap-fighters. I feel the same way about our politicians. Instead of trying to do something honorable, they just want to stand there and slap each other in the face with insults. I do not feel that way at all. I think our corporations have destroyed us. I think iU is one of the best outlets we have for fighting back. As a wise person has said, POD books are like indie bands. Without either, the publishers and record companies would give us nothing but worthless trash to read or hear. We need to normalize the market for POD books. The slap-fighters will ruin the market for us if we let them, just as surely as our current music market is nothing but rap noise and country drivel. (Remember, I am a 58-year-old white man who has seen Jimi Hendix and The Allman Brothers live numerous times.) My goal is to be the voice of reason for deserving iU authors. I want to be the dim little lamp hidden in the nasty, murky swamp of POD denigration by fatheads who just want to proclaim themselves kings of the publishing world and declare all iUniverse authors misguided losers.

Lyda Phillips

Lyda Phillips has released a pair of short novels for young adult readers. Like many legendary Disney movies, these books should appeal to not-so-young adults, too. Since I am of that persuasion, I was not expecting to enjoy these two nearly as much as I did, but the author's sensitive handling of the mature subject matter easily won me over.

Mr. Touchdown by Lyda Phillips
(iUniverse / 0-595-35900-0 / July 2005 / 182 pages / $13.95)

Mr. Touchdown is the fictional recreation of a common type of event that took place throughout the Deep South in the Sixties as all-white schools were integrated. A small number of exceptional black students are transferred to Forrest High in Memphis in 1965. The lead character is an athlete who has lettered in several sports at his old school, but the football coach at Forrest won't let him off the bench, even though the team is good only at losing. The story takes us through the many conflicts these kids experience in their first year at an all-white school. The actions of the revolting rednecks are realistically described and the story has a pleasant ending. I do wish, though, that the book was much longer, with a lot more detail. The story is one that needs to be told.

If you want to further explore the subject matter, I recommend you watch the movies, Hairspray and Remember the Titans. These two examples are not better than Mr. Touchdown, but they are a little different in that they do not capture the deeply rooted essence of The South. This book shows how truly hardheaded people can be, even at the expense of their beloved football team. The poignant emotions described during the football action bring Mr. Touchdown up to the level of Remember the Titans, and for me at least, this is the best recommendation I can give. Since I lived very close to the action of the civil rights movement in that time period (I even spent the summer of '68 in Memphis), I can honestly say that Ms. Phillips has captured the era perfectly.

Peace I Ask of Thee, Oh River by Lyda Phillips
(iUniverse / 0-595-36172-2 / August 2005 / 120 pages / $10.95)

Ms. Phillips takes us to a girls' summer camp in this misleading title that sounds like something a neocon soccer mom would like her daughter to read. Fortunately for us all, this summer camp is full of teenage angst and realism. The characters are more akin to the kids at Ridgemont High than those at church camp. The title is derived from a campfire song the girls sing. The action is focused on the camp counselors more than the girls, with the exception of one particular problem child upon whom the whole plot hinges. As in the movie, Little Darlings, the lead characters are busy trying to get laid while the campfire patrols are up to the usual summer shenanigans. The author has crafted an engrossing short novel about the way teenagers really feel, think and behave. You will be wishing the story went on much longer. Ignore the blah cover and the holy-moly-difficult-to-remember title and you will discover a story with the depth of Stephen King's movie, Stand By Me.

Interview with Tabitha

Interviewer: Is your name really Tabitha? From looking at your website, I thought you were someone else.

Tabitha: That is correct. I have published four books for iUniverse and contributed stories to a pair of traditionally published coffee table books, all under my real name. Tabitha is my sixteen-year-old Balinese cat. I am much older than Tabitha.

Interviewer: How did you choose iUniverse to publish your books?

Tabitha: I completed my first manuscript in about 1972, but I felt it was practically unpublishable due to its obtuse eccentricity. The Corvette Chronicles began as a long series of stories in The Longhorn Corvette Club Newsletter in 1985. I had planned from the beginning to edit the whole series into a book called Plastic Ozone Daydream. By 1999, iU had been established, and I had learned enough about computers to begin my publishing journey. I had always had in mind the complete package of Daydream. I wanted the cover to look a certain way; I wanted the order and structure of the stories to be a certain way; and I wanted to market the book in a particular manner. iU offered me the freedom to do things my own way, and the company seemed far ahead of its competition in most every facet of the business.

Interviewer: How did you get published in those coffee table books?

Tabitha: A publisher of that type of book for car enthusiasts read Daydream and wanted to buy a particular story from it for his next project. I don't know exactly how he came to discover Daydream. I followed that project with a pair of stories written exclusively for Mustang Legends. That release was very convenient for me because it gave me a small publishing project during an extended period (2002-06) when I was not planning another iU book. This was a clear case of bringing a POD author to the attention of a traditional publisher.

Interviewer: What became of your first manuscript?

Tabitha: After a total rewrite in 2002, that manuscript became The Last Horizon.

Interviewer: What is the single most important thing you have learned about POD publishing and marketing?

Tabitha: The #1 element that sells books is the fact of the title and description of the book fitting within a genre that a particular consumer audience is obsessed with reading. Nothing sells like a celebrity scandal or a get-rich-quick scheme. Starting a good slap-fight over religious issues will do the job, too. From the online retailers, what I think is by far my weakest book has been consistently my best seller. I think that is because I wrote Ker-Splash! to fill an open niche in the market. There are a zillion books about fishing, sailing, and classic wooden boats, but there are almost none about common, recreational runabouts and ski boats. Ker-Splash! docks right in that slip! My other three books are more esoteric, to say the least.

Interviewer: How much do you think a bad review hurts the sales of a book?

Tabitha: As long as the one bad review is not alone on the page, I think it matters very little. I think it matters more when your review space is empty. (Look at my books!) That is why I began this blog. A wise person has said there is no such thing as bad publicity, and I generally agree with that. For the thousands of POD books listed on Amazon, I am far more skeptical of those with a long list of five-star reviews than of those with only a few, or with a range of stars in their review list. Even with all these generalities stated, I do not intend to ever post a really bad review for someone unless they sign off on it first. After all, my goal is to help iU authors and enhance the reputations of all of us.

Interviewer: What is the most common editing mistake you have found in iU books?

Tabitha: The repetition, deletion, misplacement, or otherwise misuse of the most common words in the English language is far and away the most common mistake. We seem to get the punctuation and sentence structure right just about every time. It's the the's, an's, and's, a's, and other common words that trip us up. We tend to read right over the mistakes when we are proofreading. We also tend to make more mistakes toward the end of the book, as opposed to the beginning or middle. I suppose the proofing is getting overly monotonous by the end of the process.

Interviewer: Why are you writing these reviews when so many other online sources are doing the same thing?

Tabitha: Very few of those sources are actually reviewing in the same manner as I am. Review for hire sites are popping up like mushrooms in cow patties. How accurate can a supposedly unbiased, but paid, entity be? How many of you would buy a book based on a review if you were aware the review had been paid for by the author? Many of these reviews are purchased in an indirect manner, such as a part of a marketing package. How many of the unpaid reviews were written by friends and associates of the author? My research has shown to me that many of the reviews of iU books you find on the net fall into one of the above categories. Certainly some of these reviews are legitimate, but my guess is that number is a small fraction of the total, especially among the endless parade of five-star reviews on Amazon. My reviews are the real deal. This is not a business, and I am not a personal friend of any of the authors I review. You won't find me telling you about the horde of trashy POD books that caused me to barf on the first page, either. Those books, if they exist at all, do not exist on this website. I am not in this project to stuff my wallet or my fat head. Let's face it: we all know many who are. If you want an honest review, let me know.

Interviewer: How does an iU author secure one of your extensive, four-part reviews?

Tabitha: I invite any iU author to reply to this or any other post on the blog site. You can see examples of the previous reviews by visiting the same books found on this site at Amazon, B&N, and Authors Den. Please read the submission guidelines first. You can find them in the first post and in a later update. The early bird gets the juiciest worm.

Miss Stephanie: Eeeeeuuu!!!

Dead On

Dead On by Ann Kelly

(iUniverse / 0-595-32664-1 / August 2004 / 204 pages / $14.95)

Brian DePalma is one of my favorite directors, and the movies of his that I like best are in the same genre as Dead On. We don't know who the killer is until the end, but he seems to be a fascinating, psychopathic character. Ann Kelly has crafted a fine first novel with a plotline that is easily visualized as a movie thriller. Homage is also paid to William Petersen as both Gil Grissom and the Manhunter, a movie that I have always felt should have been a monster hit for both Petersen and Michael Mann. The former had to zip up his Quincy suit to become famous, and the latter was already famous for the coke and Scarab patrol on Miami Vice, but those are other stories. The plot of Dead On would seem like just another pyscho killer chase if Scully and Mulder had not let one of their spooky plots escape from the set of The X-Files.

Ann Yang is a new ME of Chinese descent who has just begun her new job in Doylestown, PA. She would really like to forget that butthead she had married in an immature moment of stupidity, and a mystery based in the history of her own century-old house was sufficient to drive out the rotten marriage demons. Although she is never really certain if the butthead has not returned to terrorize her, someone has insinuated his way into her life in a most disturbing manner. A serial killer is leaving buttons from a Civil War uniform at the scenes of his crimes. Ann has discovered an intriguing diary hidden in her new/old house, and the issues may or may not be related. She has a trusted friend to help her with the case, a retired FBI agent with loads of street sense and a devotion to both Ann and his own family. The two sleuths track the killer through both time and space. Don't ask me to explain it. The plot is a mystery, and the secrets are not revealed until the end. Is Dead On a supernatural story? To some degree, yes. Is it a mystery with convolutions that would make even Mr. DePalma dizzy? Yes.

Much of the plot surrounds a diary composed in 1903. Whenever the heroine reads this diary, the text is in italics. Multiple, whole pages of italics are annoying to read. This and the incredibly short chapters are easily the leading negatives of Dead On. A lot more description of the characters and the motives behind their actions would expand the length of these half-page chapters considerably. The text is so brief that the reader is sometimes left a bit confused. It is unclear if the author meant to impart an especially quick pacing to the story, intentionally lead the reader down blind alleys, or introduce characters and subplots that she is saving for a sequel. Whatever the case, this completes the actions of my Complaint Department.

Ann Kelly has crafted a highly rated first effort about a time-traveling psycho-killer and his CSI-type pursuer. She throws in the Civil War, schizophrenia, lesbian love, past-life regression, pre-Katrina New Orleans, and the kitchen sink. You wouldn't think all this would fit into 204 pages, but it does. You will like this little dose of escapist fiction if the genres of murder mystery and serial killers are two of your favorites. If you are an X-Files fan, too, you will probably love it to death.

Helpful Book Marketing Articles

This site has many free articles concerning the web marketing of books by unknown authors.

Author Insider – Free marketing articles to help make your book a success

Securing a Book Review

The next review will be of Ann Kelly's Dead On. Look for it soon.

The way to secure a review of your book on this site is to reply with a website or direct email address where I can reach you. Due to the limitations of internet availability in my area, I cannot easily contact you through a third-party source on a large server. For instance, if you give me an email address such as joeblow@yahoo.com, I can quickly respond to your message. I can respond through Authors Den quite easily also, but I cannot go through Yahoo or Yahoo Groups or MySpace or another blog server very easily. I cannot put my direct email on the blog site or I would be spammed to death. If you do not want your email exposed, even within a comment, on the blog site, you can send me a message through Authors Den. This convoluted path is the only way I have been able to dodge the spammers. Please feel free to contact me about a review any time. Thank you.

The Traitor's Wife

The Traitor's Wife: A Novel of the Reign of Edward II by Susan Higginbotham
(iUniverse / 0-595-35959-0 / July 2005 / 492 pages / $25.95)

Susan Higginbotham's epic medieval soap opera is an engrossing tale of historical fiction surrounding the reign of King Edward II during the 1300's. This book has already been acquiring glowing reviews from many sources, and my two cents worth of opinion will hopefully add to the book's reputation. The Traitor's Wife is further proof that there are some marvelous iU authors out there, and I have proclaimed it my job to find them. This is a TV miniseries waiting to happen. Who's ready to write the screenplay?

One of my favorite fiction books of all time is Anne Rice's The Witching Hour, and strangely enough, I see many parallels between the two books, with two significant exceptions. The Witching Hour is a 1000+ page account of the fictional Mayfair Family of witches residing in New Orleans long before the devastation of Katrina. The Traitor's Wife is a lightly fictionalized account of the broadly extended royal family of England during the 1300's, centuries before the tragic ending of the reign of Princess Diana. The first difference between the two tales is that the witches flew out of Anne's imagination, but King Edward's court really did go through all those trials and tribulations. The second difference is that The Traitor's Wife is less than half as long as The Witching Hour. Most of the page count difference is the direct result of the many slowly simmering descriptions of places and events present in The Witching Hour; whereas, in contrast, The Traitor's Wife skips most of the narrative description and goes right to the conversation. Hence, The Traitor's Wife can easily be visualized as a screenplay in which the focus is totally upon the words and actions of the characters. Even a miniseries of The Witching Hour could never capture the intense depth of the Mayfairs and their control over the city of New Orleans that lasted for centuries. Most of the characters in The Traitor's Wife were married in their teens and lived relatively short lives. The Mayfair witches had spirits and vampires for companions, reflecting lifespans of an entirely different nature.

Americans have always been fascinated by both supernatural spirits that live forever and English royalty that live and die tragically. The New Orleans Garden District has always been one of my favorite places. On numerous occasions, I have visited the same streets haunted by The Mayfairs. I know there are many Americans, and I dare say that most of them are women, who have been equally as drawn to the lives of the many variations of the British royal family, culminating in the death of Diana. The story of Edward II is as appallingly shocking as anyone might want to discover, and the truth of its history adds to the reading pleasure of The Traitor's Wife. Although The Mayfairs were a matriarchal society and men ruled the kingdom in medieval England, the tale of The Traitor's Wife is told from the feminine perspective. The men do the dirty work and the women have to clean it up. The male spirit Lasher sets off an endless chain of tragic events by having sex with the female Mayfair witches, and King Edward sets the standard by having sex with another man, or two. Let the games begin....

Neither The Witching Hour nor The Traitor's Wife would ordinarily be a book I would select to read. They both look too much to me like books women would enjoy much more than men, and to some extent, this is certainly true. What makes me recommend The Traitor's Wife so strongly is how much I did like it, in spite of the fact that I am a lot more fascinated by Dracula than Diana. Of course I have read nearly all of Anne Rice's books (The Witching Hour twice). Susan Higginbotham has written only one book, and now Eleanor le Despenser resides on my bookshelf only inches away from the Mayfair witches. What higher recommendation can I offer?

See Also: Interview with Susan Higginbotham

Book Review Update

I want to update a few statements made in the first post on July 12, 2006. As the plot has thickened, a few concepts have solidified.All of these updates fall under the heading, Examine the Following Details Thoroughly.

Concerning the statement referring to the sites on which a review will be posted: I shall post a review on this site, Amazon, B&N, and Authors Den. Anyone who sends a book for review, should get an Authors Den page, if you do not already have one, otherwise the review will be on only three sites.

Concerning the complexity of the review: The longest review will probably be placed on this site, with shorter versions on the other sites. If I have the time and inclination, all four reviews will be individually written. If not, there will be some copying and pasting utilized. A lot of this will be determined by the number of requests for reviews that I get, so the authors that make their requests early in the process will probably get the most attention.

The authors I would most like to help are those who have created carefully researched and crafted works, and then spent significant time promoting them, only to see horrible (or worse, no) sales rankings at Amazon and B&N. I am looking for great writers, not books by opportunistic hacks that just happen to publish the hot subject of the moment. Since I read every book cover to cover that I am going to review, this project is a slow process. The earlier submissions will invariably receive more of my time in the creation of reviews.

Concerning the types of books I like: I do not favor either fiction or nonfiction. I read about equal numbers of both. My favorite author is Anne Rice, but I find Stephen King a bit too repetitive and predictable. I have read most of Robert Rimmer's work, and I certainly like his subject matter. In case you did not know, some of his books have been re-released by iU. I just finished a 750-page biography of Bob Dylan. I read Scaduto's version decades ago and wanted to read another perspective. Al Franken entertains me, and I think Thomas Frank offers scholarly research on his topics. Carlos Castaneda told a spellbinding tale in his Don Juan series, however unbelievable it might have been. Harold Robbins has always been my favorite of the trash novelists. I try to inject a spaciness into my own books that I hope approaches that of Kurt Vonnegut. Jean Shepherd is the king of nostalgia and Peter Egan is the best writer of stories about cars and motorcycles. The bottom line is that I am not seeking a particular genre to review on this blog.

I am looking for proof that iUniverse authors are capable of writing great books that deserve to be discovered and read. Bring on the submissions!

Convergence of Valor

Convergence of Valor:  

The Men of the H. L. Hunley 

by Guntis G. Goncarovs
(iUniverse / 0-595-37055-1 / December 2005 / 250 pages / $16.95)

 

Dive! Dive! Put some muscle into it, men! Historical Fiction author Guntis Goncarovs takes us to the bottom of Mobile Bay in the first submarine developed during the U.S. Civil War. The H. L. Hunley was manned and powered by a crew of eight non-Union men who were not exactly soldiers, either. Most of them had to be very strong men because the screw was turned manually by the crew using an elaborate system of cranks and gears. The torpedo was dragged behind the sub with a rope, and the only light inside the sub emitted from a candle at each end. The Hunley was designed, built, and tested in Mobile, AL, for a mission crucial to the Southern cause, the breaking of the Federal blockade of Charleston, SC. Union ships had cut off the shipment of supplies to Charleston and held their position for months. The Confederate Navy was willing to take desperate measures at the risk of many lives. Convergence of Valor is a fictionalized account of whatever actually happened to several crews of the Hunley during its development and deployment. The exact details of the story are unknown.Convergence of Valor takes us to a special place in American history. If you are a fan of this type of reading, this book belongs on your bookshelf between Bruce Catton's This Hallowed Ground and Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October. The author has done his research on the history of the Hunley. Don't let his Russian-sounding name throw you: he lives not far from the location of the actual events. You can put the words H. L. Hunley in any search engine and discover plenty of details about the true heroic events surrounding this primitive submarine. As in the two classics noted, the technical details surround the unknown variables in a manner that brings the historical events to life. Yes, it's a shorter book concerning a very specific event, but the quality and mood are very similar. Mr. Goncarovs puts the reader on that manually powered sub. He lets the reader experience how scary such a place would be. Dead men tell no tales... but this one does.

Gustis G. Goncarovs' website