First Submission

I got my first submission today for review. That's good! I've also hooked up Google Analytics to the blog so I can see if people are actually visiting or if I am merely talking (writing) out loud to no one in particular. I can see now that in one sense, most blogs are only talking into the ether, but if they gather enough people who are interested then they can become a niche blog. One person conversing with a small group of others.

It is much like self-publishing. Merely publishing your own book is like an unannounced blog. No one will know what you are doing until you advertise yourself. As a self-published author you have to get out and sell yourself and your book. Take a look at JA Konrath's blog. He has many helpful tips on how to get out in front of the public. That is what most authors want in the end. A bit of immortality.

Fantasy POD: A Beginning

Currently at lulu.com there are 2782 books listed under the Science Fiction & Fantasy. 1602 of them are tagged with fantasy, 119 are tagged with magic. At xlibris.com, the General Fantasy category has 248 books listed and Epic Fantasy has 17. The iuniverse.com General Fantasy category has 664 titles and the Epic Fantasy category has 133 titles. That totals to 2783 not counting any duplicates.

So with well over 2500 titles surely there must be some gems, precious and semi-precious, amongst them. Surely, there has to be a few original self-published Fantasy works out there. I aim to find out and review them on this blog.

With Ms. Poddy Mouth reviewing more general POD books (no fantasy and easy on the sci-fi), A Betterment Worker tackling Science Fiction POD books, I've decided that I can help out the ever growing world of POD and take on the reviewing of Fantasy POD. So to begin with, send me your manuscripts. I probably won't spend a whole lot of time discussing the POD industry as I feel that Ms. Mouth and Mr. Worker as well as Miss Snark (when she comments on POD) and others can probably handle it better than I. I'll concentrate on reviews and probably things that I see in manuscript that can and can't be improved.

So, onward. Your first adventure is to figure out where to send the manuscript. I won't post the email here directly. I'll accept any format except Word for now.