A magnificent review of An Ominous Book 2, Separation

This is a new review of the second Ominous Book 2 Separation that is being featured by a prominent blogger/reviewer, Jeyran Main:

"Separation is an epic young adult fantasy novel. It is book two of the An Ominous Book. In the second book, the story focuses on Richard and Spaulding. Richard has to face the fact that all of his family have been deceased and he is only left with his sister and his cousin. Spaulding is imprisoned and is being tortured until he confesses what he knows about the Ayrtainian Family.

The second book certainly takes a darker turn, and more scenes turn the nature of the story into a tenser situation. The pace of the story was steady, and the quality of the storyline was just as good as the first book.

In case you wish to read what I thought of the first book, you can click on the link below.

An Ominous Book by Nancy Foster (Book Review #265)

The story was still fun to read, and the author once again uses her creativity in describing the plot in such a way that was very suitable for its genre. I found Spaulding’s situation to be very interesting and constantly wanted to know what is going to happen to him.

I believe the author has enough material to add more sequels to this story and consequently induce more depth to the descriptiveness of the world built. The fantasy nature of the storyline could then intensify, and that alone would be a standout novel to read.

I recommend this book for young adult readers.

Written by Jeyran Main"

The original review is featured HERE.

Are you curious to read the darkest of all of the novels of my fantasy book series?

Check it at Amazon HERE!

An interesting intake I'm getting from reviews

We all formulate something different after reading a book and what one person might consider to be a masterpiece, another review will call it rubbish. Just look at Tolkien novels and you will find plenty of 1 star reviews claiming the books wander around too much with flowery writing. I myself didn't like the filler Tom Bombadil chapter in The Fellowship of the Ring but I otherwise enjoyed the book.

While I loved reading Harry Potter (I chugged the 7th novel in less than 11 hours of binge reading which merely proves how good the book was), I detested the 5th novel and was overly generous by granting it a 3 star rating on Goodreads (mainly because I loved Dolores's character). The 5th novel suffered from too much filler, too much Harry's internal ramblings regarding Snape's private occlumency classes and a painfully slow pace. The book could have easily been a 4 star read if an editor had given J.K. a candid chat claiming that she needed to trim the fat a little bit.

I've reviewed a lot of books and some authors were surprised by some of the things I observed. It's also one of the reasons why authors really, really love getting reviews for their books. They not only get more visibility (Amazon starts granting you serious marketing power if your book has at least 50 legit reviews and the all mighty Bookbub site *might* accept your petition for a 1 day promo if you have a minimum of 100 Amazon reviews).

While getting a Bookbub deal is a huge (and a mightily worthwhile bang for your buck marketing feat), reviewers might see something else about the story that you haven't.

I have gotten some comparisons of my novel with Tolkien. And it's not because of the prose (I doubt I could ever reach Tolkien level), but more because of how they compare Spaulding to Frodo whose life turns upside down when they are dragged on an unwanted adventure that changes them due to something that shows up on their doorstep on the first chapter.

So far I have gotten two reviews that actually enjoy the breeze of fresh air that the child protagonists have no mystical prophecy or that they are innately special. For most of the first book, Richard and Nelida are just ordinary humans without any innate talent. Richard eventually learns how to summon his phantom beast but the endless hurdles thrown into the plot make it impossible for him to further his training. Nelida is on a separate realm of her own between being completely incompetant and the most terrifying mage in the entire story. Herb on the other hand shows enthusiasm but he never learns sorcery despite his best efforts.

The subsequent novels are vastly different in the sense that the children grow older and Spaulding becomes a more constant character in the story.

I also find it to be interesting that Froylan is universally detested. He's a main character that appears in every novel that is a mixture between awesome, terrifying, hateful and yet even funny at times.

Even though my book was killed off in the first round of the SPFBO contest and I currently don't have any other novels that could qualify for the 2018 contest (sequel novels don't qualify and I only have a few partially written novellas), I have found a lot of new books that I have attempted to read in my spare time, enjoyed hanging around in the sidelines of some discussion boards and surprisingly had my book chosen to be read and reviewed by a highly respected fantasy blogger. To get my book reviewed by two of the top fantasy blogs with mostly positive comments is thrilling.

I hope more readers that are into Young Adult will take a look at my work and see if the mostly positive feedback I've gotten so far is merited. ;)

My book on Goodreads

One easy way to promote your books

I'm lazy, I know.

Putting that aside, ever since I created a mailing list, I am quite surprised that I have subscribers in some rather unusual countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Indonesia, The Phillipines and even Botswana of all places!

Everytime I send a letter to my growing list, at least one of the South African subscribers find the time to read them.

Now, I seldom sell books outside of the US but I do have some Latin American readers that oddly enough prefer to read the original English version of my novel. I still don't regret spending a grueling month translating my own novel to Spanish. Getting a 97,000 word novel translated to another language costs quite a lot of money (it's a tiresome task) and then the translator rightfully has a voice in the royalty rights. Either you pay them a hefty sum for a one time offer or enter a multi year contract where the translator gets a cut of the royalties and then after the set amount of years, the royalties fully return to you. I also like the fact that the translated book was also copyrighted in Mexico. Better safe than sorry.

Believe it or not, I have the second novel with a rough translation, but I haven't finished that task so therefore it isn't copyrighted and much less published. I haven't really gotten to that task mainly due to time constraints.

Now, indie authors don't typically have a huge budget and you usually learn as you go while you stumble... a lot.

One thing that many indie authors don't know when they publish on Kindle Amazon is that they can get an Author webpage that shows a kitchy photo, a short bio and at least the US site allowed you to sync your blog. You can then glue all of your books in one place and make it easier for customers to locate you. The process only takes a few minutes and even if you don't know how many readers you'll reach with it, it doesn't hurt to do so either.

One thing I have been stalling for a long time and I have *finally* done is to open an Author Central for the other Amazon country stores that include the service: UK, Germany, France and Japan. I have some experience editing web search databases and being requested to help with foreign language categories so I didn't find the task of setting up my bio, books and photo on the German and French sites to be hard at all.

Amazon Japan asked me to create a new Amazon account. I had a few extra hurdles to jump, but at the end my novels finally have a little bit of a Japanese presence. I always find it curious that I don't have Japanese fans despite the fact that I initially got a lot of the ideas of my book when I visited Nara which is a 40 minute train trip from Osaka. Maybe pasting a face next to the novels will change that.

My Amazon Author Central site in Japanese

Now, I know that China is the second largest reading market in the world after the US. At 1 billion citizens, that's a huge untouched market. The issue of course is that most Chinese don't speak English and I don't speak Mandarin.

There is an interesting website that skips the book agent madia called Fiberead that offers a translation of your novel and pitches it to Chinese publishers. They retain 70% of the royalties but in exhcnage, they pitch your book to a market that more than likely you wouldn't have even bothered to tap anyways due to the cultural and language barrier. I haven't requested them to check my books to see if they are willing to give it a go (mainly because of the scant amount of Amazon reviews. If I had at least 20 reviews, that would give me some serious street cred to give this a shot).

However, if you are already an author that is starting to have a real following, you should give this website a shot. I haven't checked their site for over a year, but they commented once that they were thinking about offering someday a similar service for the Japanese market. Now, the idea of having my novels in Japanese sould sound really slick and definitely sweet.

If you are curious, just check the website below and give it a shot!

Click here to visit Fiberread

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Before I leave, I wonder if there is a similar service for other major languages such as German, French or Hindi...

Tameer, the ignored guard

I feel pleased today, I managed to finish a chapter that I began to write two days ago and logged a whopping 6000 words into the 7th novel.

I had wanted to write a chapter about Tameer for a long time and finally finished the job. It was fun to explore him from before he became a guard and how he quickly formed a strong friendship with Froylan despite being the reason why Froylan was arrested and forced to join the guard in the first place.

Unfortunately I can't upload the sneak peek of this chapter to Wattpad because I'm doing my usual antics of writing the chapters in disorder. However I'm certain that you'll enjoy reading this fun chapter just as much as how I felt when I wrote it.

Keep on supporting my work and if you have a chance, don't forget to review it on Amazon and Goodreads and spreading the word!