Among the things I enjoy doing in my story worlds, blogging is not on the list, but detailing and profiling individual groups or characters is. (Weird, huh?) Fantasy is really an awesome genre because I get to make something up entirely without adhering to the confines of accuracy. (Also could mean I’m lazy but who cares?) I can make up whatever I want and make it sound plausible if I can. If I can’t, I can play it off really well.

That might work in a cartoon, but you just can’t start your story with backstory.

It seems like such a pity. The easiest solution is to start at the beginning and when we get to the end, stop.

And y’know, in the beginning, the gods created this really cool world, and it had magic, but only certain people could use it. And there’s this really great story to go with it, but before I can tell it to you, you have to understand all the magic rules and nifty creatures so you can enjoy it, too.

Snooze. And the silence of yet another reader not clicking on your buy link. (Trade publication would not be a likely possibility.)

I can hear the screams. But why?! Tolkien did it. Eddings did it. Insert-famous-author’s-name-here did it.

Yeah, okay, but chances are they didn’t do it in the last twenty years.

You’ve got…

Hans Christian Andersen by Anne Grahame Johnstone

There are a lot of articles and reports out there giving various and often conflicting figures about the Indie book market. All seem to agree, however, that the percentage of Indie writers and publishers is huge and growing. You only have to read a few Indie books to realise there is some seriously good stuff out there and marvel at the ingenuity and diversity of the imaginations from which they were born.

Yet there is still a stigma attached to independently published work. There are those, it is true, who see it only as a way to make a fast buck and churn out little more than rubbish. These are not writers in my opinion and it is not of their books I speak, they are little more than opportunists; marketeers who, seeing a potentially lucrative product churn out a cheap imitation that…