Saturday, March 12, 2016

If you were expecting swords and sorcery...



My book, I WISH, is YA magical realism. When I uploaded it to Amazon, they didn’t have a tag for magical realism, so I just left it at Fantasy&Magic.

I Wish is next to JKR!

Amazon has the book listed as Swords and Sorcery. There are no swords and no sorcery in I WISH. Anywhere.

The book was on sale last week, a lot of people downloaded it, but it may not have the kind of magic readers are expecting.

I think they’ll like the book when they read it. But if they were hoping to be introduced to a new author of Swords and Sorcery, that’s not what they’ll find. So I asked my friend Laura for her advice on s&s, and here’s what she recommended:

1) anything by Tamora Pierce (like her Song of the Lioness quartet or her Trickster's Choice duet )

2) Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown - “ long, sweeping training montages and stubborn independence and fighting dragons”

3) Sabriel by Garth Nix - “a perfectly-paced dark adventure involving several flavors of magic, enchanted swords, a menacing talking cat, and ‘two worlds side by side’ worldbuilding”

4) Sherwood Smith’s duet Crown Duel / Court Duel - “starts out as a straightforward rebellion but gets into the doubts and nuance of questioning the story that you tell yourself. Book two is a great piece of court drama with misunderstandings, romance through letters, and magic so subtle that most people in the kingdom don’t even know how it works.”

5) The Oathbound books by Mercedes Lackey - readers of any age will love them for their “most literal sword-and-sorcery pair: Tarma is a warrior priestess with a normal sword and Kethry is a mage with a really inconvenient magic sword.”

[Originally posted on juliaday.tumblr.com]

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My first YA contemporary romance, The Possibility of Somewhere, will release in September.  I'll use a new pen name for my YA contemporaries--Julia Day. As I move closer to September, I'll begin to use my Julia Day social media accounts more and phase out this blog.  Please consider following me on Julia Day's:


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