Michael J. Sullivan continues to be awesome.

Fictiongarden.com Hall of Famer Michael J. Sullivan proved a few years ago that the transition from self-published author to traditionally published brick and mortar author was not only possible, but realistic if you had the talent.

Now he's extending the opportunity to anyone with the chops to write a suitable short story!

Go to http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2015/05/extending-helping-hand/ for full details. A summary from the great man himself is provided below:

For my next Riyria novel, I'm going to bundle someone's short story with it to give exposure to a new or aspiring author. You can read the full details in the link but the bottom line is this:

• I'm going to hold a contest and I've provided a sign-up sheet to be notified when submissions open.
• Winner will receive $0.15 a word (more than 2x pro rate for anthologies) for up to 5,000 words - story can go up to 7,500 words but the payout is maxed at $750.
• Any genre is acceptable - although the audience will be my readers so take that into account when when writing your shorts
• If you aren't familiar with my work, you can get a free sample when you sign-up.

The reason for the pre-posting and sign-up is the window will be really small, and I can't have it delay the release date of the novel it will be bundled with. So, by announcing early people can start working on their query and short now and be ready when submissions open up.
I'm hoping to get some good stories, and everyone who enters will, at a minimum, get their query critiqued - an added benefit.

Now back to J.R. typing.

For those who don't already know, Riyria is a best-selling series, so if you've got a story that fits into that kind of thing then you're going to get a LOT of eyes on your short-form work. You don't need me to tell you that's a big deal and can translate to a lot of eyes on your long-form stuff, if you do that kinda thing.

So what are you waiting for? Get writing!

Grinding through the pile.

While not exactly a site update, I figured I should inform you as to why there haven't been any recent additions to the Recommended Reading section.

I read a lot of books, and it's honestly not the terrible ones that make this task difficult. Rather, it's the books that are solid and enjoyable that cause the struggle.

If a book is bad, I can dismiss it fairly easily. If a book is unsuitable for this site, that soon emerges upon reading it. I can make my way through any number of these titles with ease.

The books that are reaching for the proverbial brass ring and just slip short are the type that are causing the holdup. They flatter to deceive, with parts of them which are great followed by elements that cause problems. As a reader, I am engaged and entertained by the book, and I have to read to the end in order to determine whether it can do enough to merit a place on the site. This determination takes a lot more of my time, as these are the books that merit a review but not a position on my site.

What's 3 star to me may well be 4 or 5 star to other readers, and I feel it'd be disingenuous of me to only review books on Amazon/Goodreads that merited a 4/5 star rating. As I've stressed in the past, 3 stars from someone as stringent as I am is a good score to attain and it means that you've kept me interested throughout the whole work. Not to mention the fact that a balanced but favourable review is like gold dust to the modern independent author.

I've given 3 stars to some absolutely excellent authors, people like M. Todd Gallowglas, Patrick J. Loller and Claire Frank. All of whom are going from strength to strength with their respective series.

So while I may have gone into double figures without finding anything worth publishing on the site, I will continue reading away in the hopes that some of the upcoming titles on my vast list will result in a hidden gem.

Thank you for your patience.

A minor update to the site.

No new recommended reads, no brand spanking new section (still working on that). Instead, today's news item will be a small addition to the site in general.

When I started this site but a few years ago it exclusively sold an anthology for business purposes. From there it blossomed into what it is now becoming, a fully-fledged hub for self-published fantasy.

The anthologies will always be free, as will my own works. Having said that, you now have a second button underneath that download one. If you have the money but don't feel like searching for the work on Amazon, you can now click the 'buy' button and be linked to the purchase page. This also applies to my own works of fiction in the J.R. Karlsson section of the site.

Due to not being a United States citizen, a chunk of the royalties I receive from my own works will be held indefinitely for tax reasons. This does not apply to the United Kingdom version of the site, so if you hail from there I urge you to use that instead.

This decision hasn't been made out of necessity. Fictiongarden will continue to operate with or without financial aid of any sort. Everything on here will remain free.

There will be more updates in the coming months as I work on the new sections for the site and power through the backlog of material I have yet to read. Expect more updates in a timely fashion!

...famous last words, eh?

Congratulations are in order!

This is a short blog entry just to let everyone know that our own Graham Austin-King has been snapped up by Realmwalker Publishing Group. Congratulations, Graham!

Graham's Riven Wyrde Saga is exactly how a modern fantasy should be done, and a deal like this is long overdue. He joins the likes of Claire Frank and Lee Aarons in the ever-growing stable that is Realmwalker.

It'll be interesting to see both where Graham and Realmwalker go from here. One thing's for sure, there's exciting times ahead for both of them.

Once again, a big and hearty congratulations to Graham from everyone here at Fictiongarden.com!

The Recommended Reading section grows by one!

That's right, it's that time again! Thanks to innumerable recommendations from various bloggers, authors and fans I've finally made my way through a book that I should have read much sooner.

Century of Sand by Christopher Ruz is a fantastic desert-based fantasy chronicling the journey of a young mute girl and the soldier who protects her. It has been praised in many circles by many people and its inclusion in the Recommended Reading section is long overdue.

So well done Mr. Ruz, your vision and imagination were a pleasure to read through. Now if you don't mind I'll be ordering the sequel...

It's that time again: another Recommended Reading entry.

It has been a little while since we last had one of these, having plowed through a slew of books that didn't really catch me.

That's one of the downsides of doing this, for every readable book you uncover you have to submit yourself to several others that aren't up to scratch.

This book most certainly was up to scratch, and features an extremely interesting protagonist.

Nathan Fierro's The Demon of Cliffside is a first-person perspective 'Alchemypunk' tale told through the eyes of a protagonist with no name. A creature that is hundreds of years old and predates the humanity that has been built above them.

It's a fascinating read, and one that has been carefully crafted to give you a completely alien and detached feel as you experience the tale.

From 250 to 13.

Not that long ago I posted about Mark Lawrence's Great Self-published Fantasy Blog-off. A humorously titled take on the Great British Bake-off, presumably.

Well after making sure my cream had set correctly and my oven was at the right temperature and my sponge was correctly moistened with confiture, I went through all 250 entries that the 'short' list comprised of.

As previously noted, there were a lot of familiar faces, and in my own personal whittling down process I excluded works that I had read before and authors who were already in the Recommended Reading section.

After this, I cut out those authors whose covers didn't appeal to my artist's aesthetic sensibilities and those whose books clearly weren't aimed at me in the first place. This narrowed it down further, but the pile was still large.

Finally, I downloaded a sample of each work onto my kindle and read the opening chapters of every work that was left. The samples I was able to complete were bought outright and will be getting a review at some point in the next year.

As the title of this entry suggested, we went from 250 to 13. Here are those 13:

Pauline M Ross – The Plains of Kallanash
G. R. Matthews – The Stone Road
Melisa McPhail – Cephrael’s Hand
Michael Watson – Valkwitch
Michael McClung – The thief who pulled on trouble’s braids
Christian Freed – Hammers in the Wind
Jacob Cooper – Circle of Reign
James Islington – The shadow of what was lost
Davis Ashura – A Warrior's Path
Greg James – Under a colder sun
Christopher Ruz – Century of Sand
T.O Munro – Lady of the Helm
Barbara Webb – City of Burning Shadows

Note that this is a personal list, and there's a lot of very good fiction that has been omitted in order to compile it. I strongly suggest you check out the authors I mentioned in one of my previous entries about the contest.

You can find Watson, Ashura and Freed's short fiction in our latest anthology, and it was most gratifying to see that they had made the cut.

The others are more of an unknown quantity, but I've heard good things about a number of them.

I shall also be reading and reviewing the final 10 choices the bloggers make in the contest proper, and look forward to adding any additional titles I may have missed in my scouring.