I am happy to announce that sometime close to the end of October, Fantasy Book Critic had its 1000 post in its 2 2/3 years since its first post in March 2007.
A quick estimate using the Index statistics from the front page and about 70% if not more of the posts are original content: reviews, interviews, essays, best of, monthly spotlights, author posts, with the rest mostly giveaways and news capsules.
We hope to continue posting lots of original content and keeping the pace of one such post per day at least in the weekdays, and hopefully then in the weekends, but we would like also to remind everyone that Fantasy Book Critic is something we do in our free time, while we receive arcs of many books, we also acquire a lot of books talked about here independently - mostly bought of course, with some from libraries or friends - and we are not paid by anyone otherwise, so if "real life" intervenes, it takes priority. Luckily, at least so far there was always someone to keep the site going and we hope this will be case for a long time to come. We (Cindy, Robert, Liviu, Mihir, Fabio) are here and we plan to keep talking about the books that interest us.
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Our friend Jeff from Fantasy Book News & Reviews wants help with an Amazon ebook experiment, namely requesting two books from Tad Williams to be available on the Kindle. Since this is a cause dear to me also and since on general principles I request any book of interest to me on the Kindle also, I think it is a good idea to participate. Unfortunately this is possible only from people based in the US since as opposed to print books, ebooks have geographical restrictions.
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Recently there have been some heated discussion (here, here, here just for a start with lots of comments from people involved too) about fantasy covers and in one case even about a change in title from UK to US publication. Some of the covers involved are presented below (all corresponding book editions are tbp 2010) :
mmpb edition of the superb Nights of Villjamur/Mark C. Newton
new and highly awaited Brent Weeks' novel Black Prism
very intriguing Pyr debut Shadow's Sun by Jon Sprunk
US edition with changed name of Robert Redick's excellent "Rats and the Ruling Sea"
highly anticipated Strahan/Anders anthology "Swords and Dark Magic"
I did a post on covers sometime ago discussing how they influenced or not my perception of the books in cause, with some concrete examples of books for which the cover was essential in finding them. Since the discussion which starts in the links above covers many points of view, the only thing I would add is that in discussing covers one thing that is sometimes forgotten is the sheer number of books published all the time, from new books, to new formats to reprints.
This huge number means that outside a (very) few "everyone has heard of" books, the rest have to fiercely compete for readers' attention, so if it means having a hooded figure, or a swordsman/woman in order to attract the people who love epic fantasy but are not "online hardcore readers" like us, so be it.
A quick estimate using the Index statistics from the front page and about 70% if not more of the posts are original content: reviews, interviews, essays, best of, monthly spotlights, author posts, with the rest mostly giveaways and news capsules.
We hope to continue posting lots of original content and keeping the pace of one such post per day at least in the weekdays, and hopefully then in the weekends, but we would like also to remind everyone that Fantasy Book Critic is something we do in our free time, while we receive arcs of many books, we also acquire a lot of books talked about here independently - mostly bought of course, with some from libraries or friends - and we are not paid by anyone otherwise, so if "real life" intervenes, it takes priority. Luckily, at least so far there was always someone to keep the site going and we hope this will be case for a long time to come. We (Cindy, Robert, Liviu, Mihir, Fabio) are here and we plan to keep talking about the books that interest us.
**************************************
Our friend Jeff from Fantasy Book News & Reviews wants help with an Amazon ebook experiment, namely requesting two books from Tad Williams to be available on the Kindle. Since this is a cause dear to me also and since on general principles I request any book of interest to me on the Kindle also, I think it is a good idea to participate. Unfortunately this is possible only from people based in the US since as opposed to print books, ebooks have geographical restrictions.
*************************************
Recently there have been some heated discussion (here, here, here just for a start with lots of comments from people involved too) about fantasy covers and in one case even about a change in title from UK to US publication. Some of the covers involved are presented below (all corresponding book editions are tbp 2010) :
mmpb edition of the superb Nights of Villjamur/Mark C. Newton
new and highly awaited Brent Weeks' novel Black Prism
very intriguing Pyr debut Shadow's Sun by Jon Sprunk
US edition with changed name of Robert Redick's excellent "Rats and the Ruling Sea"
highly anticipated Strahan/Anders anthology "Swords and Dark Magic"
I did a post on covers sometime ago discussing how they influenced or not my perception of the books in cause, with some concrete examples of books for which the cover was essential in finding them. Since the discussion which starts in the links above covers many points of view, the only thing I would add is that in discussing covers one thing that is sometimes forgotten is the sheer number of books published all the time, from new books, to new formats to reprints.
This huge number means that outside a (very) few "everyone has heard of" books, the rest have to fiercely compete for readers' attention, so if it means having a hooded figure, or a swordsman/woman in order to attract the people who love epic fantasy but are not "online hardcore readers" like us, so be it.
12:02 AM | 
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Liviu |
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7 comments:
Liviu,
you, Cindy, Robert, Mihir and Fabio do a great job! I think most of the blogger I follow and also myself do all the things in their free time. But I can tell you from my own experience - in May 2009 I switched from reader to blogger - most of the people do not know how much time you have to spend to keep a blog rolling with good content. You need to do research, keep contact with people, interviews, read books AND write reviews. Beside this the blog must be maintained. I'm just a contributor with one weekly post. Beside this I write other posts and of course reviews. I didn't expect how much time is necessary to do this on a certain level. But I really like what I do. I don't do it for any other profit. And that is the way most of the blogger are working.
Anyway all of you should keep up your good work. I appreciate what you all are doing. Even I don't read every post. It is like picking raisins :-)
Enjoy Reading!
Thanks for the plug, Liviu!
Wow, congrats on the milestone. Well deserved and here is to many more. Cheers.
Thank you all for your kind words.
...please where can I buy a unicorn?
Ty you all for the compliments. I have some stuff going on which I hope will start to ease up Monday this is certainly not the place to post it :)
Anon: Unicorns can usually be found in mystic woods or forests. I'd recommend contacting your local tourism branch and seeing where the local mystic forest is to find a unicorn. If you're a guy bring a girl because unicorns gravitate to girls more then boys :) (who ever you are thank you for the unique comment :P)
Congratulations! I consider you guys a must read!
Cheers,
Renai LeMay
Editor
Keeping the Door