A.J. Maguire

Tag: Books

  • Happy Holidays 2024 & The Yearly Wrap-Up

    We’ve made it to the end of 2024!

    It was a rough ride, but we’re here and we’re still kicking.

    What did I get done in 2024?

    Available Now!

    Well, first we had Nora and the Duke of Autumn come out for sale. It came out staggered, with the paperback in April and the digital rights in August, and I learned valuable lessons in this. Basically, you won’t see me do that again. There’s a weirdness in how the publishing dates work with the platform I use, but I’ve adapted and I know how to do it better in 2025.

    Second, I completed Nora and the Siren Song. It is scheduled for release in April 2025 (both paperback & digital) and is already generating reviews with advanced readers.

    Third, I began drafting Nora and the Vampire Court. This book is also scheduled for a 2025 release, but you won’t be seeing it until October. It has several drafts yet to go, and I am nervous as a cat in a tree about making sure all the little plotlines come together in the end.

    Fourth, I began edits for a re-release of previously titled Witch-Born. I still quite love this book, but its publisher sold to another publisher and long story short, I’m getting publishing rights back to it. This is also in the running for 2025 publishing release sometime over the summer. When I know more, you’ll know more.

    Fifth, The Last Child of Winter saw its final revision pass and has been on query for some time now. The querying trenches are brutal and frightening, with long stretches of nothing as you await word from various agents and sudden barrages of rejections that seem to come in rapid succession. I still have hope for this one, but if my next attempt at querying is unsuccessful, I may bring it back to the drafting table.

    All in all, not a bad year.

    I’m excited to say that insofar as orders go for my books, there have been over 500 more orders this year than what I managed to do last year. Which is exciting. Especially since my holiday sale of Nora’s current books won’t hit virtual shelves until the 9th, so that number is bound to go up before the end of the year.

    I am sincerely grateful to everyone who has picked up my books. Whether you liked them or not, I appreciate the time it took. I hope every Reader has a book fort made of their TBR piles, the cozy drink of their choice, and maybe a fuzzy pet to curl up with them as they read.

    Most of all, I hope everyone has a warm, safe holiday and I will see you all in January.

  • Thoughts on Indie Publishing – 2024 Edition

    We are preparing to close out the year on 2024. I am preparing my end-of-year summary and planning ahead for 2025, but in the midst of this preparation comes some larger conversations going on in the publishing world right now.

    I already touched on a couple of the BookTok controversies that I spotted in a previous post but some other aspects of the conversation have been nagging at me and I am going to take my, admittedly quite small, blog here and unpack them a bit.

    First, let us admit that Indie Publishing has become a massive money-maker for quite a few people, and quite often these are NOT the writer. And no, I am not talking about Vanity Presses. Those still exist, of course, and you should avoid them. Suffice, if the publishing house requires you to pay money to get that book onto shelves, then you should walk away.

    You can quite literally go into debt to publish a book and never see that money fully returned. From editors to cover artists to marketing, we funnel money out to see this work put into the world because – for me anyway – it is my craft and I love telling stories.

    I mention this because I have seen an alarming influx of emails and DM’s on various social media sites targeting me for services. I am promised X amount of people will see their marketing posts if I pay them Y amount of dollars. I am guaranteed reviews on Amazon. I am told, for the low price of five-hundred-bucks, I can get my manuscript edited and professionally formatted.

    Given that five-hundred-dollars is actually on the extreme low-end for a professional editor, please hear me when I say that it feels like we have come to a place where only the extremely privileged can truly move forward in this business. Sure, anybody can make a social media account of their choice and start throwing themselves out there, but the chances of that truly making an impact are so slim it’s painful. AND, let us be honest, if that person hasn’t edited their work a dozen times over and hired an editor… Well. It’s dead on arrival, really.

    So where does this leave us?

    I promise I am not all doom and gloom here. I’m not throwing in the towel or anything like that. I am merely expressing some displeasure at all the noise, really. For those of you professional editors/ cover artists/ vocal artists out there trying to make a living in this business too, I’m afraid your voices are being swallowed up. My kneejerk reaction any time I get a new email or DM is to cast some serious salt and ignore it, which isn’t terribly fair to all of you and I know it.

    The question comes down to… how do we cut out all the noise?

    For me, I use Writer Beware a lot. Is there anyone who has something else they use? If so, I would love to learn of it.

  • Book Review – Ruthless Vows by Rebecca Ross

    A while back I read the first book in this duology – Divine Rivals – and I loved it. The magic was subtle, the war was tense, and the romance was sweet. I had to wait a bit to get to this second book because it was not on Kindle Unlimited (which is honestly the only way I can afford to read so many books) but once I spotted it on there I snagged it up.

    It should come as no surprised that I loved the second book too. We pick up a little bit after the first book left off, so the war is still in full swing and the newspapers for which Iris Winnow and Roman Kitt both work are still covering that war. Everything that I loved in that first book was present in this one.

    I don’t do spoilers but I will say that, while I loved this book, I loved the first one more. But I think that’s normal. It’s always a lot more fun to be actively engaged in the mystery and wonder than it is to have mysteries revealed.

    That said, it was a satisfying conclusion to a story I deeply enjoyed. I highly recommend this duology for any of my Fantasy lovers out there. For parents who may be checking, these books are rated SAFE for younger readers. There are no explicit scenes that are going to cause an uncomfortable conversation at the dinner table.

    Happy Reading!

    Purchase Link for Ruthless Vows by Rebecca Ross

  • Book Review – House of Beating Wings by Olivia Wildenstein

    This book was deeply creative and I enjoyed it. The world building was fun and the quest Fallon took was equally enjoyable, even if I had to sit back and shake my head at her hubris.

    I am not going to count this a spoiler since it’s in the blurb for the novel that if Fallon frees the crows she’ll be made queen, but I am going to say… I wish the character took ten seconds to really contemplate what being a queen would mean. This is where my head shaking started and I was torn between really liking Fallon and kind of… loathing her.

    Granted, the character is described as being 22 years old and it’s been a minute since I was that age, so I tried very, very hard to remember how self-absorbed I was back then. Try as I might, however, I cannot say I ever in my wildest dreams wished to be a queen. A princess, maybe, with the pretty gowns and the knight in shining armor where we equally saved one another (that equally bit has always been big on my priorities) but never the actual queen.

    You know, where you RULED people.

    And they were forced to do your will because QUEEN.

    The sheer hubris it took for the character to not only picture herself as queen, but actively begin pursuing the crows to see this matter come about, really irked me. To the point I put the book down twice to rant at my husband and son, both of whom deserve medals for their patience with me. I could have forgiven Fallon for this hubris if she had battled with the idea more, or if she had leaned harder on the whole loving Prince Dante thing, making her elevation to queen status more of a sacrifice she was willing to make to be with him than a personal goal.

    I am sure there are people out there who are going to decry this opinion because “Why shouldn’t a woman have ambitions and want to be a queen?”

    To them I say… because becoming a queen forces other people to bow. And any time you put yourself in a position to have power over other people, you ought to take at least five minutes to check yourself, which Fallon never did.

    Again, if she had done this I would have forgiven her, but she never does, which leaves me in a weird love-hate relationship with the character.

    Ahem.

    I digress.

    Despite my love-hate relationship with Fallon, I enjoyed the book. She makes mistakes in her love life that I can relate to, and you can clearly see where the narrative is heading for the second book in that regard. The world building is interesting, the characters are complicated with equally complicated motivations, and you feel like there’s real history with them.

    4 out of 5 stars.

    BOOK PURCHASE LINK – House of Beating Wings

  • Limbo Week – May 2024

    For those just joining us, I finished a manuscript at the end of April and have since been in what I like to call Limbo.

    Limbo is where I get to consume all the fiction I possibly can.

    Books. Movies. Video games. If it has a story, I’ll consume it.

    That’s not to say I’m not reading books during other weeks of the year. This is just the week where I get to spoil myself rotten with it.

    Reading and experiencing stories is so very important for writers. I know there are some out there who claim they are too busy writing to read, and I have to admit this makes me cringe. Because if you’re not reading then you have no idea what is being said out in society. Sure, you might get the highlights from the news, but there’s a deeper conversation happening in society and the only way you can access it is by reading.

    This is why I have been focused on bouncing Book Reviews up here lately. It’s not just because I enjoyed a book, it’s because I’m joining that deeper conversation.

    Even if that deeper conversation happens to be Romantasy novels with Vikings and Fae creatures running about.

    As I head into this next week, Limbo is officially over and work is beginning for Nora and the Winter King. I’m still hopeful that this is the final full length novel for Nora’s storyline, and that I will be able to deliver both Siren Song and Winter King within a couple months of each other.

    This is because Siren Song ends on a bit of a cliffhanger.

    My first ever cliffhanger, guys. I’m not sure if I’m excited or worried.

    Anyway, Limbo is closing out and I have some more reading to do.

    Happy Writing, everyone.

  • Book Review – Spark of the Everflame by Penn Cole

    This book took me a minute to get into, but I think that was my fault. I have been reading far too many Romantasy novels and needed a pallet cleanser. And I know some of you are going to gasp and be offended and say — There’s no such thing as too many Romantasy novels!

    To which I will say…

    There is if you are reading them one after another after another. Because the plotlines and characters really start to blend.

    SO.

    Yes, this book took me a minute.

    Because Diem (which, by the way, insofar as character names go is admittedly not my favorite, but I got over it) was so much like every other kick-butt female heroine from a Romantasy novel that my eyes were kind of glazing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we love tropes for a reason, so I put the book down and did something else for a while until I had enough distance from that trope that I could love it again.

    I enjoyed this book. While there were elements that were blaringly obvious and I wanted to reach into the pages and strangle the main character until she came around and paid better attention, there were other elements that I distinctly loved. The world and prejudices inside it were real. You could feel and understand the frustrations coming from the human element of society, even while you wanted desperately to see some sort of resolution that would not put innocent lives in danger.

    But most important.

    I loved that Diem made a mistake.

    Mild spoiler alert. Diem makes a choice that turns out to be a bad one. And it’s one that you know she is going to make. You see it coming. And you understand it. That in and of itself made me adore this book, but to top it off, the banter between Diem and the romantic interest is fun.

    I look forward to the next in the series.

    AMAZON LINK – Spark of the Everflame by Penn Cole

  • Release Shenanigans – Nora and the Duke of Autumn

    I try to alternate weeks between writing posts and book review posts buuuuuut….

    But this week the paperback edition of Nora and the Duke of Autumn was released and so I am going to steal today for shouting my excitement from the rooftops.

    Mood Board – Nora and the Duke of Autumn

    For those just joining us, Nora’s story sparked with a X (then Twitter) conversation about how I loved the concept of Lucifer having a therapist in the show of the same name. Another writer and I were chitchatting about how the characters in our novels all deserved some therapy after what we put them through, and I made the offhand comment about how a lot of the romance couples needed this too.

    Bam.

    Nora’s story was born.

    An empathic wizard living in Boston who provides counseling to the supernatural living amongst us? The possibilities were endless.

    Mood Board – Nora and the Werewolf Wedding

    In the first book, I had a lot of fun introducing the world(s) where Fairy and Earthside coexist and teasing at the deeper lore hidden behind Nora’s ignorance.

    I knew a couple of things walking in. First, I knew I wanted relationships to be highlighted. In Nora and the Werewolf Wedding, we saw several relationships throughout. We saw a bride and her mother, a bride and her groom, a son and his mother, and a grandson and his grandfather, all of which played significant roles in the story.

    In Nora and the Duke of Autumn, we see Nora struggling with her personal relationships, and we see a young son rebelling against his parents, as well as a broken mother and daughter relationship. I don’t want to spoil anything here, so I’m going to be purposefully vague. There are brothers and lovers and friendships throughout the book that Nora is able to influence in some way.

    The second thing I knew walking into this series was that I wanted magic to be hidden in plain sight of humanity. Don’t ask me why, but this story can only exist with the parallel between Earth and Fairy. In Nora and the Werewolf Wedding, we stuck real close to Earthside, but in Duke of Autumn we take that major plunge into the Fairy. Sixty percent of the novel is traipsing through my steampunk version of Fairy, and I had a blast writing it.

    Everything else about the books has grown over time and will likely continue to grow as I delve deeper into the series.

    Mood Board – Nora and the Siren Song

    SPEAKING OF WHICH…

    I am excited to announce that by the end of April, I will have a completed draft of Nora and the Siren Song. (Yes, that’s only a couple of days away. Yes, I am THAT close. Currently I am sitting on the final chapter and the epilogue.)

    So here is me, throwing confetti for the paperback release of Nora and the Duke of Autumn AND finishing the draft of Nora and the Siren Song.

    Come on, 2024, let’s see what else we can get done.

    PURCHASE LINK – Nora and the Duke of Autumn

    PURCHASE LINK – Nora and the Werewolf Wedding

  • Paperback Release! Nora and the Duke of Autumn

    Woo! Today is the day!

    You can get Nora and the Duke of Autumn in both Paperback and Hardback from Amazon. Here are the links!

    PAPERBACK LINK

    HARDBACK LINK

    A couple of things to note…

    #1 – This is only the physical copy release date. The KINDLE version is still up for preorder until its official release in August. Don’t ask me why, but Amazon would not let me schedule them at the same time. It seems weird to me, but hey, it is what it is. Just means those of you who like physical copies get to enjoy the book first.

    #2 – Major thanks to those on my ARC team who have left reviews/ratings. You are all super stars.

    Don’t know where to leave a review?

    I can help with that!

    Goodreads and Amazon are still both the best spots for this. Here’s the GOODREADS link for this book in particular. And here’s the spot Amazon.

    Don’t have time to leave a full review? No problem! You can just hit the stars and I promise that’s just as good. Even if you give it 1 star because you hated it (please always be honest) the ratings are there to help people see if it’s something they’d be interested in reading.

    FROM THE BACK COVER::

    We call ourselves the Bright.

    Most of us look like you.

    We live next door and shop in the same stores. We laugh and cry and work, just like you.

    There’s only one difference between us…Magic.

    When Nora Grayson grudgingly took a premarital counseling job for a pair of socialite werewolves she never expected to unearth secrets about her own family. Her life in upheaval, Nora tries to piece together the truth after her so-called caretakers have gone on the run, stealing not only answers, but every cent Nora had saved. To make matters worse, Derrick King has been called to London to handle the werewolf clans there, putting a significant pause on their budding relationship.

    Clinging to the hope of his return, Nora must rely on Constable Elliot Cade and the rest of his team as they continue to sort through the shattered pieces of Nora’s life. When evidence of murder is discovered in her Uncle Martin’s pawn shop, Nora and the team must reopen a decade old cold case in their hunt for answers. As the team narrows down their investigation, Nora must prepare for a trip to Fairy, where Bright politics prove to be as unforgiving as they are deadly.

    Nora and the Duke of Autumn Moodboard!

  • Ventures Into Fairy – Nora Grayson Edition

    When I set out to write Nora’s story I did not know what I was getting into. I had a vague premise – marital counselor for supernatural creatures – and a sort of Clue setting for Werewolf Wedding. I quite like the game Clue, and massive old houses with loads of history, and since my other books were feeling a bit too heavy, I wanted to have some fun with this one.

    It did not take long for me to realize I had a lot more here than Clue meets Fairy Creatures, but I fought the desire to dig further because I didn’t want to write a series. I wanted a standalone novel and I struggled mightily to force this narrative into submission.

    (Insert manic laughter here.)

    The fact is, I had too much fun with Nora and her world. I’m still having boat loads of fun, in fact, and I sincerely hope I continue in this vein.

    For those who haven’t read Nora and the Werewolf Wedding, the basic summary is that Fairy was created so that Bright folk (aka Fae creatures) could hide from humanity, who were hunting them for their magic. Bright creatures can access the way to Fairy through any body of water, and make frequent crossings between Fairy and Earthside.

    With Nora and the Duke of Autumn being released in paperback next month, it seemed prudent to mention that we dive heavily into Fairy in this book.

    Nora has not been to Fairy, for reasons you’ll have to explore in the books, and her brief forays into Fairy in Werewolf Wedding leave a whole wide world out there unexplored. Happily, this gets remedied with Duke of Autumn. Nora not only gets to see more of Fairy, she gets to meet — you guessed it — Fae nobility.

    Why did I choose Autumn for the setting?

    Uh… because it’s my favorite.

    I also revisited one of my favorite steampunk settings with a dirigible. However, fans of Witch-Born will notice this dirigible is a bit different, particularly with the amount of fairy creatures and the heavier focus on steam powered items on board.

    Among the more challenging aspects of writing Fairy has been the need to show a kind of mish-mash of cultures. Having Fairy lean on steampunk has been a fun physical means of differentiating between it and Earthside, however, and I look forward to continuing in this vein. It shows that humans have still left their fingerprints on Fairy, and while they have many traditions they call The Fairy Way, there are still some bits of technology that have been fused with magic to make their way of life a little easier.

    I could go into a deep dive in the books, but I have chosen not to. The books already edge toward the super high end of the word count spectrum and while it’s fun for me to know Nicola Tesla was a wizard in my world setting, it might bog down the pacing.

    But hey, the series has at least one more book for me to write. Maybe it’ll come to light in the narrative naturally.

  • Book Review – House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J Maas

    So there has been a lot of conversation around this book. Some people hating it, some people loving it. Most people falling somewhere in between.

    I fear I fall “somewhere in between” loving and hating it.

    I’ve followed some of the arguments about how this is Bryce’s story and while many people may have wanted to see a larger gathering of talents and minds for this war, I’m afraid that’s not where I felt the most disappointed. I fully accepted that these people did not know one another and that a crossover beyond what we saw was unlikely to occur.

    The things that bothered me were not that Bryce was a turd to Azriel and Nesta, but rather that Bryce never seems to grow.

    Like… ever.

    The reason I loved the original Crescent City novel, and what had me picking up the second novel, was that Bryce grew an incredible amount in that first book. She underwent some horrifying things and she as a character grew from them. She is precisely the same person at the end of House of Flame and Shadow as she was at the beginning, and she really should not be.

    Enter the Spoiler Zone.

    I do hate giving spoilers, but the things that bother me about this book require some details, so here it goes.

    #1 – At no point did I fear Bryce would lose.

    Someone should have perished. Someone we cared about. They needed to LOSE somewhere in this novel, and in a big way. But even when they kind of-sort-of lost, that person was brought back from the brink of death and still played a major role in the end scenes. The book falls flat because nothing was really at stake.

    #2 – The… info-dump magic video-montage.

    This lasted… uh… for ages. And it gave way too much away. Sure, it was interesting at first, but I remember that every time we flashed back to Bryce in the cave listening/watching to the history that I started to groan and asked, out loud to my very confused husband; “We’re really just going to spoon feed me everything right here?”

    The book would have been far more interesting if some of this magic-montage-history-lesson had been corrupted somehow. Say, maybe, at the water parasites… and instead of just having Bryce show up and mention they have a water problem, the Ocean Queen could maybe have been investigating this all along since… you know… she’s an OCEAN QUEEN and innately tied to the water.

    But that’s just my gripe here. The big mysteries were explained and unveiled too early on.

    #3 – Hunt got sacrificed to Bryce’s awesomeness too much.

    My lord, if she mentioned Bryce doing all this amazing stuff in her pink shoes one more time I was going to lose my mind. What little Hunt was allowed to do never eclipsed or matched what Bryce did. Ever. It made him the weaker of the two, rather than her equal in the relationship, and this… This frustrated me the most. Relationships are built on give and take, and we read Romance and Romantic Fantasy to see two people come together and work out how this looks for them specifically.

    Hunt was constantly on his back foot and I kept waiting for him to have a moment where he got to do some of the giving, or even have his own idea that surprises us all where he narrowly skates through danger, but he was never given this opportunity.

    Now…

    All that said, I gave the book 4 stars. The series is a worthwhile read for worldbuilding alone, and the Ruhn and Lidia plotline had me invested through this book. In fact, Ruhn seemed to carry the novel the most as he and Lidia had the stakes I was looking for and seemed to struggle the most to overcome the circumstances and problems surrounding them.

    Happy Reading!

    PURCHASE LINK!