Win a Glenda Larke book set worth over $150!

 

Win a prize pack!

Voyager is giving you the chance to win the complete Glenda Larke pack including The Mirage Makers and Isles of Glory series, a finished copy of The Last Stormlord and the next two books in the Stormlord series as soon as they are released! 

To win send your review of The Last Stormlord to voyager@harpercollins.com.au

And to sweeten the deal we will give FIVE runners up a Glenda Larke backlist pack with the Mirage Makers & Isles of Glory books. So your chances of winning are 5 times greater!

Read & Review The Last Stormlord  here

This competition is for Australian residents only.

Read The Last Stormlord Online Now!!

We here at Voyager are super excited about the release of The Last Stormlord.

The praise for Glenda Larke’s latest adventure is already rolling in. Aurealis Express said “I am in awe of the sheer virtuosity with which Larke has created her world. What a tale! Can’t wait for the next instalment. This is a GREAT book. I was so sad when I finished it; luckily it’s going to be a trilogy.” Australian Bookseller + Publisher agrees ‘The only thing I didn’t like about this book was not having the next one ready to go when I finished it.’

We wanted to let you in on the excitement so for a limited time you can read The Last Stormlord in its entirety here.

Read the book and see for yourselves why Glenda Larke is one of our most critically acclaimed Voyager stars.

We asked Glenda to tell us about her inspiration for The Last Stormlord:

Imagine a land where it never rains – unless a stormlord uses magic to bring water from a distant sea. Imagine what might happen if the stormlords are murdered one by one, leaving only a decrepit, dying Cloudmaster. The rainlords of the Quartern begin a desperate search to find a replacement, but they don’t understand the forces working against them, or believe that one of their number can be a traitor.

It’s a story that is close to my heart, because I started life on an Australian farm where the only water we had was whatever we garnered ourselves. One of my earliest memories is of my father tapping the rungs of the rainwater tank, wondering if the water would last until the first winter storms. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that water was precious! My childhood is probably where the idea for the Watergivers trilogy was unknowingly first nurtured.

The story matured, though, in many different places: Algeria and Tunisia and the Sahara; on camping trips into the heart of Western Australia’s gibber plains and salt pans; on a plane flight over some ancient Iranian villages; in the rainforests of Borneo observing millipedes and carnivorous insects; via the discovery that sand dunes can sing and some people know how to paint on the surface of water. Magic, it seems, is everywhere, all you have to do is look …

Those are some of the influences that helped me build the background, the stage for the epic. In the foreground, though, The Last Stormlord is more personal – it’s a tale of high adventure, of war and treachery and love. It’s the story of four people, two rainlords forced into a marriage neither of them wants, and two children born into poverty yet leading vastly different lives, struggling just to survive as the world changes for the worse around them. Sometime in the future, their paths may cross – if they can stay alive long enough.

But believe me, in a thirsty world on the verge of a war where control of water will be lethal weapon, staying alive is far from certain.

You can now take a peek at the book online. Enjoy the read and feel free to tell me what you think!

You will find me at http://www.glendalarke.blogspot.com . There is more about the writing of the book at http://www.glendalarke.com

Writers: do we really starve in a garret?

Pictured above: a 'get out of garret' card

I’m none too sure what a garret is, but it sounds small, cramped and unpleasant. And, of course, only frequented by starving artistic folk of some kind, striving to sell the product of their genius.

However, as soon as you mention authors and income, someone mentions you-know-who and those books about a boarding school. I hope you all know that 100% of writers don’t make half what she did, and 99.99% probably don’t make 1% of her take-home pay! (OK, so I don’t really know, but that sounds about right.)

So how do we make enough money to upgrade from garret to hovel?

Well, one way is to sell the rights to our books more than once. Sneaky, eh? We sell Australian versions, American versions, and British versions. Or we sell them to be translated into another language, anything from Hebrew to Japanese. The really great thing about selling for translation is that it often happens just when the sales are tapering off on the English versions. You agent suddenly pops up and out of the blue says, oh, by the way, I’ve had a French (or Czech or Spanish) offer for that book of yours we sold back in 2003…

That has just happened to me, twice in the last two months. My Isles of Glory trilogy, which was published by Harper Voyager Australia 2003-4, and later in Russian and French, has just been accepted for German translation by Blanvalet (Random House). And the Mirage Makers, first published in English 2006-7, is going to be translated into French for Pygmalion (Flammarion).

Do we usually get as much advance for a translation as we did on the original sale? No. For a start some non-English markets may be considerably smaller. Secondly, an author usually ends up paying two agents, not just one. And thirdly, the publisher has to pay the translator as well as the author and the usual production expenses, so there is less money to go around.

So how to upgrade from hovel to mansion, then?

Keep writing. Even before the last book is published, we have already handed the next in for copy edit, and begun to work on the one after that. I reckon by the time I’m a hundred and fifty, I’ll be buying a castle in France.

And that is why in a few more days you should be able to buy a brand new book by me – not as yet published anywhere but in Australia: The Last Stormlord, available in September, first book in the Watergivers trilogy. Read it and let me know what you think!

You can follow me on Twitter @glendalarke;
read my blog at http://glendalarke.blogspot.com ;
join my facebook.com/group page at Glenda Larke;
or watch for updates at my webpage: http://glendalarke.com

Check out all Glenda’s books at www.harpercollins.com.au

What’s in a Name?

Francois Rabelais in the 16th Century cautioned against reading too much into a title. (A book’s) ‘title is usually received with mocking laughter and jokes. But it’s wrong to be so superficial when you’re weighing men’s work in the balance.’ Good advice, but now day titles sell books. It pays to consider them carefully.

The purpose of the title is to attract, intrigue and compel. It’s the headline, the very first sentence and its job is to hook the reader. It wants to sound good—to roll off the tongue—but not be overly predictable or clichéd. A good title can have double meanings, though it’s best to be careful there. For example, Mouse Work’s 1995 title, ‘Cooking with Pooh’ is questionable. Catchy can work, like Big Boom’s ‘If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs’ but that’s not quite the style speculative fiction readers are after.

Who wouldn't want to cook with ... er ... Pooh?

Titles have to fit on the book cover. I’m not sure how Crown got ‘Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam‘ squeezed together with the author, Pope Brock, and a billygoat (I’m serious) but they did. Short titles can be preferable. George Orwell first called his masterpiece The Last Man in Europe until changing it to 1984. Good move.

Apparently there are rules to follow for selecting titles. Some writers ignore them, to their great success: Rule one—don’t use a proper name in the title. (Harry Potter?) Rule two—don’t use words like Bane, Barbarian, Bard, Battle, Book, Chaos, Crown, Crystal. ( Jennifer Fallon’s bestselling The Chaos Crystal?) Rule three—don’t use adjective-noun titles. (Sara Douglass’ bestselling Twisted Citadel?) Rule four—don’t use needless complexity. (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (The bestselling SF by Philip K. Dick!)

Rules aside, there is a website where you can put your title to the test. This program generates the odds a title has of becoming a bestseller. If it’s accurate, my book #4 is going to sell a zillion copies! However The Da Vinci Code shows only a l4.6% chance, so maybe take it with a grain of salt. I didn’t use it in any case, only because I didn’t know about it!

My first two books were named organically, like pets. Book #1, The Spell of Rosette was just ‘Rosette’ for years. She got ‘The Spell’ as the story matured. Book #2, Arrows of Time was named for the narrative structure. It’s based on the theoretical notion that time is fully symmetrical—arrows going both ways and around in circles! I named Strange Attractors before I wrote a word of it. I had to write something in the proposal and the quantum theory concept of ‘strange attractors’—a pattern that appeared chaotic until seen from the right perspective—intrigued me. I didn’t know then how literal it would become!

Has anyone a good ‘title story’ to tell? Is there one that particularly compelled or repulsed? I’d love to hear about it. Comments welcome!

Kim Falconer is the author of The Spell of Rosette, Quantum Enchantment Book 1. She lives in Byron Bay in Australia with two black cats. As well as writing, she runs Falcon Astrology, The second book in the Quantum Enchantment series, Arrows in Time, is out now.

Exciting events in September

Don’t forget that from next week …

Maria Quinn will be talking about a future Sydney as part of the City of Sydney Events – go and see her speak on Thursday 3 September at 6pm in the Customs House Library

Duncan Lay will be signing copies of The Wounded Guardian at Angus and Robertson Erina from 1pm on Saturday September 5.

 Kim Falconer, author of The Spell of Rosette and Arrows of Time, is going to be featured in OutThere, the national in-flight magazine for Australia’s largest regional airlines, Regional Express (REX), as well as New South Wales’ AeroPelican Air Services, as part of an Open Universities Australia campaign. She’ll also feature in the OUA handbook and on their website. This is throughout next month.

The 101 Greatest websites (you’ve never seen): Escape into other worlds

We made PC Authority’s list! Under the ‘Escape into Other Worlds’ tag.

Part of the appeal of science fiction is its ability to transport you to other places, something these web sites do to great effect with artwork, movies and more.

There’s also …

The 101 Greatest Websites (you’ve never seen): Retro games/tech
The 101 Greatest Websites (you’ve never seen): Great machines
The 101 Greatest Websites (you’ve never seen): The Great Beyond

Interview with Janny Wurts

Go to the podcast at Ghost In The Machine

The interview is with Gail Z Martin.

Janny Wurts is the author of the Empire trilogy co-written with Raymond E Feist, the Cycle of Shadow trilogy and the Wars of Light and Shadow series, plus a number of standalone books and short stories.

Tweet with us

Just a reminder that Voyager is on Twitter: http://twitter.com/VoyagerBooks

We run lots of spot prizes and post news updates on a daily basis – so if you’re on Twitter don’t forget to follow us – and we’ll follow you back!

The Reader is Always Right

Some months ago I did an interview with Astrid Cooper from The Specusphere. Her queries were thought provoking but the wording of one really stuck in my head.

AC: Perhaps I am reading more into this than I should, but . . .

KF: Astrid, I am so glad you brought this up . . . You can’t read too much or too little into the work because it is the act of reading that makes it meaningful. The story itself isn’t complete until read. Everyone will re-create the Spell of Rosette [and Arrows of Time] in their own minds in a slightly different (or radically different?) way, and that’s the magic. That’s the whole point! You complete the work. (Read entire interview here)

One reader recreating and making meaning ...

This notion of reader/listener participation is not new. The concept was developed by Roland Barthes, a 20th century French social and literary critic. He said, ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination …. the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.’

When I first heard this I was offended. Death of the author? Ridiculous. I knew the ‘correct’ meaning of MY stories. I wrote them, after all. It wasn’t until I started getting feedback and critique of my work that I began to understand the birth of the reader. What an epiphany! It is the act of reading that completes the work.

Barthes described a ‘writerly reader’ whose goal is to no longer be an end point of delivery but a participator in creation. I think Barthes loved the magic of writing so much he was able to vision it beyond the classical limitations of delivery/reception and into a realm of co-creation. Barthes ideal text enables the reader to engage in the ‘meaning making’ process because the story is not constrained by genre expectations, linearity, or author control. In other words, in the ideal text, storytelling becomes a conversation, not a lecture. The more I explore these concepts, the more in love with them I become.

With the ‘writerly text’ in mind, the Quantum Enchantment series blurs some conventional boundaries including genre classification (if anyone can nail it, please email me!) linear time structure and most important, reader participation. After centuries of being lulled into passive reception—end point ‘listening’—my readers can look forward to a ‘proliferation of meaning’, choices within the narrative structure, and creative conversations to which they can contribute, if they so wish.

... while another has her own interpretation

Of course, readers can relax and float down stream with the story as well. You can get swept up and swept away, but there is an underlining thread of ‘alternatives’ which encourages an active position—the question no longer what did I mean, but what does it mean to you?

What do you think? Is the reader always right? Is textual meaning a personal, individual interpretation—a co-creation? Or is authorial control definitive and final? I’d love to hear our Voyager readers, writers, authors, critics and reviewers weigh in. Comments welcome!

Kim Falconer is the author of the Quantum Enchantment series: The Spell of Rosette and Arrows of Time. She is currently working on the next book in the series. She lives in Byron Bay on the east coast of Australia and besides writing, she manages to fit many other things into her time – Falcon Astrology, being owned by black cats, practicing the way of the sword … and much more!

The launch of The Dark Griffin

Enter a world where griffins rule ...

Listen to the lovely speeches from the launch of THE DARK GRIFFIN by KJ Taylor:

Dr Tony Eaton launched the book in Canberra over last weekend.  

http://podifex.podbean.com/