ONE SONG TO RULE THEM ALL...

Hello, Dear Readers! Happy Monday to you all, and thanks for joining me for today's post! What is our theme this fine morning, you might ask?

One Song to Rule them all, One Song to find them

One Song to bring them all and in the darkness bind them... 

OK, that sounds... a tiny bit sinister, but I promise it's not. What am I on about, you wonder? Well, the other day I was listening wistfully to my #BaBBook playlist (because it's probably the loveliest playlist I've ever made and I sort of miss it) and I tweeted a link to a particular track saying 'If you want to know what my Beauty & the Beast retelling feels like as a song, this is it.'

Then it occurred to me that actually, there's a song like that on the playlist for every book I've ever written, going right back to my very first YA novel that didn't even get published. One Song (if you will) that just summed up the atmosphere, the central character's struggle, the soul and feel of the thing for me. 

Sometimes I got this wrong in my initial playlist and then got stuck and had to re-think because that key track acts as a sort of story linchpin for me, drawing all the other songs, other moods, other characters in towards that unnameable, ineffable thing that I was trying to get at with this particular story.

This struck me as kind of cool. And once I'd realised that, I thought maybe it would be interesting for Dear Readers to able to listen to these One Songs and compare them? So I decided to do a post about it, and here we are.

First up is the One Song for BLOOD MAGIC, which was the very first YA novel I ever completed. I sent this to every single children's book publisher in the UK, and two in Australia, and was rejected by all of them - but it was this book which caught the attention of my first first editor when it landed on the slushpile of my current publisher Walker Books, and launched me on my publishing journey. So it served a very useful purpose in the end.

It was a high fantasy novel about a young noblewoman with a magical ability so terrifying that it would have led to her instant execution if she was found out (which of course, she eventually was). She ended up saving her country and her King's life with that talent, but the story had a bittersweet ending, with her and her lover spared their lives as a result of the King's gratitude, but at the cost of being banished from their beloved home country. Along the way the heroine - Rialenthe, Countess of Kefari (*snorfle*) - lost her father and her best friend. Really, it was quite dark and I think the One Song definitely reflects that! It's Elysium from the Gladiator soundtrack by Hans Zimmer:

The next book is my first published one THE SWAN KINGDOM, which was a retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale 'The Wild Swans'. The song is called Cumulus by Imogen Heap, but I always identified it so strong with my heroine's character and her journey through the story from tentative, unsure, and afraid, to strong, beautiful and confident, that in my head the song will always be called 'Alexandra'. There's so much in this song that links to the way I feel about the book, and when I listen to it I imagine clouds passing over the sun, ripples moving across the surface of deep green water, and tall rushes singing in the wind.

Next up is DAUGHTER OF THE FLAMES - the book where I took the 'lost heir' or 'lost prince' trope and tried to turn it on its head by having the lost conquering royal hero who must reclaim their throne and bring balance to the Kingdom be a biracial girl with facial disfigurement and an awesome, disabled husband. I used a lot of the Gladiator soundtrack for this as well, but when I think back to writing it, the song I know I listened to the most, and which summed up the epic, tense, high fantasy vibe I really wanted was The Host of Seraphim by Dead Can Dance:

I wrote all the fight scenes to that - I probably listened to it over a hundred times just writing the final confrontation between the heroine, Zahira and the antagonist alone. Incidentally, the singer, Lisa Gerrard, is the same one you hear singing on the track Elysium above.

My third book, SHADOWS ON THE MOON, is a Cinderella retelling set in a fairytale version of Feudal Japan, where the heroine witnesses her family murdered and discovers she has a talent for concealing herself with illusions when this talent is all that saves her own life. After the shocking discovery of whom was responsible for the attack that killed her father and adopted sister, she becomes ruthlessly fixated upon revenge and decides to try to win the Prince's favour in order to use his political power to destroy her enemy.

This book actually had two really significant linchpin pieces - I think because it's so long and took so long to write. The way the heroine exchanges identities throughout the book probably has something to do with it, too. I thought long and hard about which song to include, but eventually decided to go with the first one, because I think the second is more about the mask that the main character is wearing (playing the part of a beautiful courtesan named Yue) in the final part of the book than the person she really is inside (a frightened, bereaved young woman named Suzume). So you get The Meadow from the Twilight: New Moon score by Andre Desplat. It sums up Suzume's desperate search for a place to belong, an identity that feels like it's hers, a family that's worth of her. Weirdly this isn't on the soundtrack that's on Spotify - I had to link to YouTube instead:

The next one makes my dilemma over the One Song for Shadows look like cake, though. It's FROSTFIRE, the companion novel to Daughter of the Flames, another epic high fantasy, this time about a young woman named Frost who lives under a curse of berserker rage that can be triggered at any time and which has ruined her life. In her search for a cure she gets tangled up in the conflict left over after the events of the previous book, and comes to love two men whose lives hang in the balance of that battle.

Now, when I first began writing this book, Frost was a boy. Love interest #1 (Luca) was a girl, and the third person in their triangle was a boy called Arian. But then I realised Frost had tricked me. I knew Frost was a tall, very physically strong person with daddy issues who wielded their father's axe, so I assumed boy, but actually the character was a girl. But I didn't see why Luca should have to change. So I wrote a lesbian high fantasy. But that version just didn't work for my editor - not because of the sexuality of the protagonists, but because in my eagerness to get my first queer love story right I'd focused on that romance to the exclusion of everything else and the voice, pacing, plot, other characters... basically nothing else really worked. So I ended up making Luca a male character, threw out the entire first draft and started again from scratch (I still think of this book as a queer love story, btw, since my head canon is that Arian is bisexual).

Throughout this whole process of changing genders and writing new books with the same title and character names, I went through many, many, maaaaany tracks which I thought might be this novel's One Song. But I didn't find it until midway through writing that final, definitive version. You can imagine my relief! It's The Gravel Road from the score for The Village by James Newton Howard:

This song still makes me tear up a little - it speaks so poignantly about Frost's longing and loneliness, her romantic, loving heart. Plus, there's a certain series of notes within the piece (near the middle) that sounds like the distant call of a lone wolf to me, and that's a very important image in the book.

Now onto the NAME OF THE BLADE trilogy! This is my very first trilogy and also my very first urban fantasy story. It's set in contemporary Britain and is the story of a British-born Japanese teenager who 'borrows' a priceless ancestral katana (a Japanese longsword) from her family's attic and unwittingly unleashes the Gods and monsters of mythical Japan onto the streets of modern day London. The book has an all PoC cast and includes genderfluid and gay characters, plus unexpectedly badass parents, smexy fox spirits and all kinds of chaotic shenanigans.

For a while I was a bit stumped by how to pick a One Song for the trilogy, since each of the three books had a different playlist and a different One Song. And this post is already long enough! But then I whapped myself on the forehead for being so dense, because there's always been a single One Song that I've returned to again and again that just sums up everything I love about the trilogy, everything that makes it special to me - the fast pace, the Japanese influence, the modernity - and everything that makes the heroine Mio (who hangs onto her sense of humour grimly by her fingernails to the very end) a unique character. Long time blog readers have heard it before - it's Paprika from the Paprika score by Susumu Hirasawa (again, not available except on YouTube - whydo you hate me Spotify?):

Finally, it's the One Song that started it all, the track that sums up the essence of BAREFOOT ON THE WIND, my most recent fairytale retelling and the companion novel to Shadows, set in the same Japanese influenced fairytale world of Tsuki no Hikari no Kuni. 

This song sums up everything about my heroine, Hana. She's quiet and pragmatic, and just gets on with things - but underneath the matter-of-fact exterior there's such a painfully deep well of feelings which she's desperate to find a way to express. The narrative of the story and the deepening, changing relationships between her and the other central characters builds up inexorably towards a confrontation between Hana, a perfectly ordinary village girl who has only common sense, kindness, and determination on her side, and the monstrous magical forces aligned against her. This One Song really captures that sense of running out of control towards something that may be miraculous or fearful. It's Experience by Ludovico Einaudi and I love it:

I hope this has been as interesting for you to read and listen to as it was for me to write, Dear Readers! What a fun trip down memory lane. Read you later, honeys!

MERMAID MADNESS

Hello, hello, hello, Dear Readers! I hope you've had a great week since you read me last. Thank you so much to everyone who reached out to me after my appeal in that previous post; I appreciate every single person who got in contact. I know that it probably wasn't easy for many of you to email a stranger out of the blue, and even though I've told you this individually in private, I think you also deserve to have your generosity, courageousness, and beautiful creative spirit acknowledged collectively and publicly here too. You're all amazing.

I'm not replying to comments on that post anymore because frankly the discussion there ballooned out of control in a way that the Blogger comment function is simply not designed to handle. Please consider emailing me if you'd like to get involved as well. I have now completed a detailed synopsis for Codename: DtH incorporating the spirit of as much of the advice I was given as possible, and sent that off to Super Agent. I'm waiting for her to get back to me about it, and then we'll hopefully pitch it to my publisher.

In the meantime I've been writing deleted scenes for the Frail Human Heart blog tour that's going to start at the end of the month (more on that when the details are finalised) but this was interrupted for a little while by a spate of what I've mentally dubbed The Mermaid Madness online, when I noticed a certain post on US author Maggie Stiefvater's Tumblr, made my own version, and then fabulous fellow UKYA author Keris Stainton took it to Twitter.

To say it caught on would be a bit of an understatement. For a couple of days there everything was mermaids and nothing hurt. The delirium seems mostly to have passed off now, but I thought it would be nice to share the results anyway. So first of all here's Mermaid Me:

The only thing that actually resembles me here is the hair - bit that is 100% accurate

Then Alexandra from The Swan Kingdom:

Zira from Daughter of the Flames (this is after she's crowned queen and has let her hair grow out a bit):

And Suzume - or rather, Yue - from Shadows on the Moon:

But the biggest demand on Twitter was for Mermaid versions of the Name of the Blade crew. So here's Jack:

 Hikaru:

And Mio and Shinobu:

Annoying that only the male mermaid had a weapons option, yes - but let's pretend it's Mio's day off or something!

Plus Mio by herself:

Yes, Mermaid Mio has more than one outfit. I couldn't give her a sword - there were no swords - so she got glowy magic instead

And as I type this, I realise I never did a mermaid version of Rachel, which doesn't seem fair? So I'd better go and get on that, hadn't I? Purely, of course, or fairness' sake...

*Skips away, cackling*

PRETTY PRETTY PICTURE POST!

Hello, my angel delights! Happy Tuesday, and I hope you're having a lovely week so far.

Today I thought I'd share the contents of two beeeeautiful packages that I received late last week. Can you guess what was in them? Here's a hint: it was books. OK, that was just the answer, but honestly I'm impatient to get onto the pretty part. So first up, I want to share the Polish translation of The Swan Kingdom, published by Egmont Poland:

Now, I had to work to get my hands on this. Technically when translations are made I'm supposed to get two or three copies, but even though I'd chased this up several times, years had gone by and clearly it was just not happening. So I went online and searched around and found a single copy for sale through Amazon. I felt a bit silly ordering it (yes, that is my own name on the cover there, Amazon employees, keep moving on) but I'm so incredibly glad that I did because just as with the Egmont Poland version of Shadows on the Moon, this book is an object of transcendent loveliness.

It has the same unique supersoft velvet finish to the cover, the same flippy cream paper that makes it possible to bend the book completely in half, the delicate traceries of spot UV on the title and the details of leafy spiny branches (on Shadows, these were bamboo branches, here they seem to be hawthorn, if I'm any judge WHICH IS PERFECT) and my absolute favourite: French flaps. IT IS GORGEOUS.

So this is mine, my own, my precious, but something else came unexpectedly before the weekend and this bounty I'm willing to share, after a fashion. It was my Candlewick Press editions of THINGS I'LL NEVER SAY, the anthology to which I contributed my very first short story written as a professional writer:

It, too, is replete with loveliness. The colour hasn't come out brilliantly in these pictures, but writing on the spine is blue and the endpapers are leaf green. The cover itself is taken from a piece of vibrant collage artwork which was specifically created for the book - and it's incredibly gratifying to see my name there on the inside flap, and a quote from my story on the back, too (the third one down). 

My story in this anthology, 'Storm Clouds Fleeing from the Wind', is effectively a short prequel to Shadows on the Moon, and is the story of how Akira came to dance at the Shadow Ball years before she ever met Yue, and how she was chosen as Kage no Hime. I've talked before about how special this story is to me - it's not only the first short story I've ever had published, it's also a story that my father encouraged me to write, and which I completed shortly after his death in order to fulfil my promise to him to keep writing.

When my two author copies of this book arrived, the temptation to flick through and find my own story and reread it before doing anything else it was irresistible - and I was thrilled and surprised to find that it literally brought up the short hairs on the back of my neck and completely arrested my attention. I was spellbound by it. And I wrote it! I think it may be the best thing I've written to date, and I don't say that lightly.

A lot of people want to know more about Akira and see more stories in the world of the Moonlit Lands (and I am working on that last one, too) but although US readers will be able to buy this book for themselves or borrow it from the library come the end of the month, there's no word yet on when or if Walker Books will bring out a UK version. And it doesn't seem fair that US readers can get more of the stuff everyone's asking for but UK ones can't.

I wish I could offer up one or both of my author copies, but my mother stole one when she dropped by to see me on Friday (curses!) and, you know, I do want one for myself.

Luckily, I've discovered that this book, too, can be had through Amazon for a reasonable-ish sort of price, although still not until the end of March. So I'm going to order two copies, sign 'em, and give them away to two UK readers when they're available. How does that sound? Good? More details when I have the books in my hot little hands.

Read you later my lovelies!

A QUESTION OF COUNTRIES

Hello, my ducky darlings! Welcome to Thursday, and another reader question which was left by Giora in the comments.

 "...my questions about your books are: Did any of your novel been translated to a foreign language and did you have a book event outside Great Britain?"

Let me take the last part of this question first. Sadly no, I've never done a book event outside the UK. Generally authors are too skint (that's poor, for non-Northerners) and lack the connections to set up book events for themselves, especially foreign ones, which are obviously more expensive because of the costs of travel and accomodation. Therefore almost all the events we do, with the exception of things like local school or library visits, or maybe local signings, are arranged between a publisher, who will pay the author's expenses, and a bookshop or conference or other venue which wants to invite the author to take part in a signing or reading or panel event in order to sell books and add value for their customers. The author doesn't really have any say in what events they do, or where those are, or even if they do events at all. It's all about demand from outside.

There are exceptions to this; some well off (usually bestselling) authors sometimes can afford to combine a research trip or holiday abroad with meeting fans in other countries, if large enough numbers of fans from those countries contact them to express an interest. Sadly, I am not one of these well-off authors, so my visits are confined to ones which are either arranged by my publisher, or very local.

If anyone ever contacts me to ask me to do an event in another country, and can afford to pay my expenses, I promise that I will be only too delighted to take them up on it. In fact, I keep my passport current in hopes that one day such a thing will happen to me. But I'll probably need to sell quite a few more copies of my books first.

Now, the first part of your question has a more cheerful answer, thankfully! Yes, several of my books have been bought by foreign publishers and translated into a couple of different languages. Shadows on the Moon and The Swan Kingdom, my two fairytale re-tellings, were both translated into Polish by Egmont Poland.

And my most recent high fantasy novel, FrostFire, has been translated into German by Carlsen Verlag and will be coming out in Germany at the beginning of October year.

Those are all the translations that my books have had so far, but I have fingers crossed that more will come in the future. If there are any non-English-language publishers are reading this, please feel very free to contact Walker Books!

I hope this all makes sense, Giora. Thank you for your question. See you all next week, honeys!

WRITERS, READERS, & PIRATES

Hello Dear Readers - welcome to Tuesday. Today I have some thinky thoughts to share about readers and book piracy. I strongly suspect that I am about to be controversial, or at least that some people will think I am, but you know me - when the train to crazytown pulls into the station, I can just never resist hopping aboard. Anyway, I'm not handing down pronouncements from on high or anything. I'm just working out what I think about stuff through writing about it. So here goes.

In the last week I've read a few of pieces that talked about this stuff from different viewpoints. First there was MaryJanice Davidson's defence of fellow author Charlaine Harris, who was apparently receiving an online battering from some fans for not giving them the ending that they wanted/expected/demanded in the final Sookie Stackhouse book. Then there was this post about how authors are increasingly being expected to happily offer their work for free (usually by people who are getting paid for *their* work - and apparently have no sense of irony). And this in turn made me think about Neil Gaiman's notorious post on entitlement in which he uses that now famous phrase: G.R.R. Martin is not your bitch (which is also referenced in the first post I've linked, by Mary Janice Davidson). Finally there was this post by Cassandra Clare in which she responded to a reader who was indignant at being asked to pay to read The Bane Chronicles.

There's a theme to these posts, and the theme seems to be... a lot of readers don't seem to like writers all that much these days. So what's up with that?

On every kind of social media now there's a level of interaction between readers and writers that would have been unthinkable ten or even five years ago. When I was a kid, if you screwed up the courage to write a letter to your favourite author (on paper, of course) you never expected in your wildest dreams that you would get a reply. And unless you were a mega-bestselling author you frankly didn't expect to ever get much in the way of response from readers about what you wrote, either. Today, readers have countless outlets which allow them to respond to and discuss books, and they contact writers all the time - on Twitter, Tumblr, on blogs and websites - in expectation of a response.

But the internet has wrought more changes than increased contact. I think it's fundamentally changed the way that readers - all people who consume entertainment, really - expect to access content that they enjoy. Entertainment downloads have gotten us used to instant gratification. If I want to own a book or a song or a TV show I expect to be able to have it NOW. And most of the time, I can. Which is why the times I *can't* surprise and frustrate me.

Then there's the rise of fanfic. I love fanfiction. Adore it. Some of the best stuff I've read over the last two or three years has been fanfiction, offered up freely online by its creators for no more reward than being able to share their love of writing with others who care about the same characters they do. And this, along with the two other factors above, has encouraged many traditionally and self-published writers to offer up free content that allows them to connect with and reward their readers - blogs like this one, Tumblrs, Pinterest boards for their books, deleted scenes and short stories, book trailers.

So now we have a literary scene - and this applies particularly to YA - where readers can generally expect discussion and interaction with writers (whether traditionally published, self-published or fanfic), where they expect to get stuff they want quickly - instantly in a lot of cases - and where a lot of that stuff is free. And all this is great.

Until it's not.

Like sometimes when I'm reading fanfic the writer will add an author's note responding to reviews. All too often they are begging forgiveness for the delay in an update and asking people not to get angry at them. Or they'll mention reviews which accuse them of 'hoarding' chapters or being a 'review whore'. Or they'll request people not to flame them for the twist that just happened, or apologise to those who are disappointed with the lack of a certain character in this scene, or respond to people who've told them their last chapter was sucky.

This makes me blink every time. These guys are writing amazing stuff for us in their spare time for free, and they also respond to reviews and make themselves available to us to discuss their work - and the response to that is to bitch them out if they didn't give out the free stuff exactly when people wanted it? Call them a review whore because they don't give *enough* free stuff? Abuse them because they wrote about character A when you wanted character B instead? How can anyone think THAT will encourage these writers to continue to update after a long hard day at school or work, when they just don't feel like writing? Many fanfiction writers do want constructive criticism, but apparently some readers are so blinded by their entitlement issues that they can't tell the difference between concrit and just being a jerk.

I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that if there are people who are willing to be this mean and unappreciative of writers who are giving them stuff for free, there will also be those who are just as unpleasant - if not more so! - to writers who are actually asking to be paid for their work. For instance, not long ago a certain writer's new book was shipped early from some retailers, but the ebook version wasn't available until the official release date. The response to this from some readers was to send this author messages in which they not only swore at, insulted and abused this author for the fact that they couldn't get her ebook RIGHT NOW... they threatened her with physical harm.

All of this leads into my thoughts about the piracy problem the publishing industry is facing right now. Clearly, people who will send an email to an author threatening to do unspeakable things to her just because they have to wait for a week to read her book will not care about fairly compensating her for her work. In fact, if I remember correctly, the author mentioned that several of the threatening messages made it clear that they would be illegally downloading the book as another way of punishing her for (in their eyes) daring to thwart them.

But it's not just those extreme types who think that it is OK to take an author's work without their consent and without paying. It's just so goshdarned easy to get books (or music or TV shows) for free now that among quite a lot of people it's considered gauche and naive to actually pay for stuff. Like, why would you do such a quaint, backward thing?

I've heard the argument that piracy doesn't harm professional writers. In a polite debate on Twitter, Neil Gaiman himself told me that he was certain that his publisher giving away copies of his books for free online had only helped his sales. I'm sure he's right. But a publisher giving away books for free is entirely different from people pirating those books, because a) the publisher could track the downloads and get an idea of how popular the book was was and b) Mr Gaiman and publisher had agreed to give the books away for free. The income from sales had not been stolen from him without his consent and in such a way that it would damage his standing with his publisher.

My first book, The Swan Kingdom, sold around 20,000 copies. It hasn't, as far as I can tell, been pirated at all. Perhaps because it tends towards the younger end of the YA market. Perhaps because it came out in 2007 and didn't have an ebook version until 2011. But in any case, because my advance was small, this level of sales was considered quite a success by my publisher. However, almost immediately after my second book Daughter of the Flames, was released, I started getting Google alerts from websites where the book was available for illegal download.

When I investigated those sites, I was able to work out that my second novel had been downloaded approximately 30,000 times (this was in 2008-2009 - it's probably been downloaded a lot more by now). 30,000 sales would have earned me back my advance AND considerably impressed my publisher. In fact, if even half those people had paid for the book, I would have gotten my very first royalty check. But they didn't. And because they didn't, that book was and is considered a sales failure by my publisher even though apparently more people read it than my first book.

I've got to tell you, guys - that doesn't feel good.

Very successful mainstream authors can look upon 30,000 illegal downloads as a drop in the bucket. But for newbies and midlisters like me, that many lost sales makes the difference between being seen as a good risk for a new contract and getting dropped by the publisher (it can also make the difference between a royalty check that would pay the electricity bill, and never earning the advance back at all). There are a lot of newbies and midlisters out there who will probably never sell more than a few thousand copies of their books - but their books deserve to be published nonetheless. They deserve a chance. If those books - books with fresh new voices, unconventional stories, different and diverse characters - stop being viable for publishers because illegal downloads are so rife that only mega-bestselling books now make a profit for them, then our bookshelves will be a barren - and boring - place indeed, in a few years time.

A blogger that I otherwise respect once made the argument that illegally downloading things (music or books or whatever) wasn't stealing because you weren't actually taking anything away from anyone. He compared it to taking a Mars Bar from a shop in which there was an infinite supply of Mars Bars which could never run out. This couldn't possibly harm the shopkeeper, right? But the very impossibility of that scenario - neverending Mars Bars that constantly replicate no matter how many you take - ought to have made it clear that his analogy was flawed. Let's follow this flawed analogy to the end, shall we?

Because now that you have a your Mars Bar, no one ever needs to go to the shop again. Your stolen Mars Bar keeps replicating infinitely, allowing everyone that you know to eat Mars Bars forever more without ever compensating the shopkeeper or the Mars Bar factory. The shop closes and the shopkeeper is out of a job, the Mars Bar factory closes, all the Mars Bars workers are out of a job, and no new Mars Bars are ever manufactored, meaning that the copies of your stolen Mars Bar are all that's available to anyone now. Does that sound like a good outcome?

Illegally downloading a piece of entertainment is not like taking a Mars Bar from a shop. It's like going to the cash register and taking the price of that Mars Bar out of the til. And every copy that is made from your copy takes more and more money from the til, until the til is empty.

Does this sound drastic? Well, it is - but that's what happens when an industry collapses from the bottom down. Imagine how the furniture business or the stationary business or the fashion business would work if people simply stopped paying for their sofas, pens and trousers. Publishing is no different than those industries.

When you pirate books or other media, you *are* taking something away from someone. At the very base level, you are depriving a creative person of the income that they are legally and morally entitled to from their work, and you are depriving them of the ability to show their publisher/record company/production company that there is a demand for their work.

But you're not stealing from the creative person! You're stealing from faceless corporations that are only taking advantage of the creative people AND the customers anyway! It's all their fault for making it hard or expensive to get hold of the stuff that you want! If it weren't for those darn corporations we could come up with new - cost free! better! - ways of sharing entertainment and everyone would be happy and singing and dancing through fields of daisies!

Um, no. There may indeed be issues with those faceless corporations, but nevertheless they are still acting on behalf of the creative person. Regardless of what kind of artistic product is being produced - paintings, TV shows, sculpture, music, art - it is always the perogative of the person who does the work to decide how they want to distribute it and what they want to charge for it. In the case of traditionally published writers, they appoint a body (the publisher) who does so on their behalf, but this is still THEIR choice. Not the customer's. The customer doesn't get to decide the price for someone else's work. They don't get to decide how the work should be distributed or when. It's not their work.

The customer has the right to refuse to pay for books, TV shows and music if they don't want to, or if they disapprove of the distribution method. But they don't have the right to refuse to pay for these things and still get them anyway.

This isn't groundbreaking stuff, right? I mean, if you really want the latest iPod but can't afford it and think it's overpriced, as well as disapproving of Apple's business practises, you don't expect to register your protest at this state of affairs by walking out of the shop with it without paying.

But the fact that huge numbers of people are willing to steal income from writers whose work they actually enjoy isn't as shocking to me as the fact that the people who do the stealing act as if they're on some moral high ground. As if the writers are backwards barbarians who haven't caught onto 'the new paradigm' and who ought to be ashamed - yes, ashamed! - of themselves for expecting to actually get paid for their work. They should want to give their stories to the world for FREE like the fanfic authors do! Authors who try to make a living from writing deserve to be stolen from and get dropped by their publisher. So there.

That is not only a self-serving argument, it's a cruel one.

As readers we invest a huge amount of ourselves - our feelings, thoughts and time - in the books we love. Those characters can sometimes feel more real to us than people we actually know. But though we cringe and cry and laugh and fall in love with them throughout the pages of a book, those people aren't actually real. The only person in that book who is real? Is the writer. The one who put their own feelings and thoughts and time into making it something that touches you. If you would despise a character who brought harm to the fictional people in the story, then you should think twice about harming the REAL person who brought those characters to life.

Writers are not faceless word machines cranking out pages to meet demand. Try to remember that. Try to remember that writers are people. People who can be damaged, by your actions. I know it's hard to wait for the books you want, to have to save up or ask for them at the library and hope they come into stock. I know because I have to do all that stuff myself. But the feeling of having to wait for that book isn't nearly as bad as the feeling that a writer gets when they realise half the people who have read their book stole it from them without remorse, and that this has probably damaged their career. Trust me on that, too.

I hope that readers and writers will continue to find new ways to connect and develop relationships online as my career goes on. But my most fervent hope is that by the time I pass on to the great Writing Cave in the sky, we've passed into a place where readers and writers like each other a bit more.

(With thanks, smooches and snuggles to my own beloved Dear Readers, of course, whom I adore and respect more than words can say).

P.S. For my thoughts on the relationship between writers and bloggers/reviewers, you can click here. In fact, you might want to before you start flaming me for hating readers, or you'll just end up looking silly.

HEY POLAND, WE LOVE YOU!

Hello, my duckies! Welcome to Tuesday and a lovely piece of news from Poland.

Remember that beautiful translated edition of Shadows on the Moon that I went on and on about last year? It came from Egmont Polska and it's still one of my favourite things, like, ever. I was told that the acquiring editor there in Poland really loved the book, and if the steady trickle of nice reviews (in Polish) that I've been getting through Google Alerts is anything to go by the readers liked it a lot too.

However, I was a bit surprised last week to get a Google Alert for my name from Poland which didn't seem to be linked to Shadows on the Moon at all. In fact, I noticed the word Aleksandra in the text, which seemed awfully close to Alexandra - the name of the protagonist of The Swan Kingdom (my first book, a retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson tale of 'The Wild Swans').

When I used the Google Translate feature, nothing was really made clear: it was a blurb for The Swan Kingdom looking back at me, and what seemed to be a release date for later this year. In Polish? But there was no Polish translation of the book! Confused, I emailed my editor, who had no idea what was going on either, but who promised to find out.

Well, it turned out that there was, in fact, a negotiation going on between the rights departments of Egmont Polska and Walker Books. The Polish publisher were so enthusiastic about the book that they had slightly jumped the gun and put the blurb up - but that was OK, because within a couple of days a lovely lady at Walker was able to confirm that the deal had been finalised. So, soon - in March, if one website I've seen is to be believed, although I'm not sure how solid that is! - there will be a Polish translation of my very first book! It seems the discerning Polish readers really love fairytale retellings. Perhaps as much as I love them right now? No, no, not possible :)

The Polish version of the story will be called The Kingdom of Swans. And even better, there's already a lovely cover which is online at Polish e-tailers and which I shall now share with you (I didn't mention that earlier because I knew you'd scroll past my story, ha ha!).

Here it is:

Looks spooky, doesn't it? I like these unusual muted colours a lot - and the girl's steadfast, determined expression is very Alexandra too. I hope I'll end up with a couple of copies of this on my shelf in due course.

HEROINE ART

Hello, everyone! Today's post comes to you via Diana Peterfreund's latest blog. I defy anyone who has EVER written a story with a heroine to resist the procrastinatory delights of the Heroine Generator game. YOU CAN'T DO IT. Copyedits? Deadlines? Pffft. LOOK AT THE ADORABLE SELECTION OF ACCESSORIES!!!11eleventy.

Ahem.

So I used the website to generate art for each of my heroines. Guys, this is possibly the most fun I've ever *had* picking out clothes. It's insane. Anyway, I present to you... My heroines!

Alexandra of The Swan Kingdom! Note her fancy dress with lacy bits, which has been patched up due to living in the forest with all those cute little animals, plus the rolled up sleeves to allow her to forage for food. I think her hair was probably a bit wilder than this, but I didn't want to end up with her looking like Merida from BRAVE.

Zira from Daughter of the Flames! Again, hair is a bit tidy - plus they wouldn't let me scar up her face. BUT BUT! Doesn't she look like she could kick your butt so comfortably in this outfit? I *want* this outfit. Yeeees.

Suzume of Shadows on the Moon - or rather Yue, in her fancy incarnation. She's all dressed up for an important do and looking forward to it about as much as I look forward to extensive dental treatment, as you can tell from her expression. Poor Yue! This outfit isn't the slightest bit historically accurate, or even accurate to the book, but it sure was fun to play with.

Frost! The heroine of FrostFire. She's in her mountain travelling get-up, here. She's a bit clean and tidy (this is a recurring theme for me, isn't it? I do torture my poor creations rather a lot) but I think her wary expression is spot on.

My final piece of artwork - Mio, heroine of The Night Itself and the best of The Name of the Blade trilogy. Isn't she CUTE? You'd never realise that she's hiding a deadly weapon somewhere on her person, would you? I totally have a crush on my girl after working on this. I can also tell that her best friend Jack helped her pick out everything she's wearing here, because black and purple are Jack's favourite colours. I wish Jack was my best friend, too...

And now, I bid you farewell, although I'm pretty sure that you're all already rushing off to generate your own artwork anyway. In the meantime I'll go back to my copyedits. In about five minutes, once I've finished this last piece of heroine art...

A QUESTION OF BROTHERS

Hello, Dear Readers! Happy Tuesday to all, and I hope you've had a lovely weekend, most especially those of you who are going back to school today, or will be in the next day or so. Hang in there, my peeps. I survived it: you can too.

Today I'm answering a question about The Swan Kingdom from a young writer who asks to be referred to by her FanFiction handle, The Imaginatrix. She says:

What made you decide to reduce the number of brothers involved to three? One of the things I loved about "The Wild Swans" was the number of brothers...

This is a really great question because it not only gives me the chance to offer you some information about my writing process, it also allows me to go back and dig into my own motivations, and quite often when I do that I discover stuff about the instinctive choices I've made that's very useful to me moving forward. *Airpunch*

So! The Imaginatrix is right. The number of siblings included in my version of 'The Wild Swans' is vastly reduced from either the eleven brothers you see in Hans Christian Andersen's tale or the seven that you sometimes see in other variations of it (for example, in the version where the brothers are ravens, rather than swans).

There were several factors included in this decision, although at the time it didn't really feel like a decision at all; it just felt like the only way things could or should be. It must have been one of the most basic things I 'knew' about The Swan Kingdom, before I even started work on it - that there would be four children in the doomed family rather than twelve or eight.

Why? Well firstly let's go back to 2004-2005 when I was planning and writing Wild Swans, as it was titled then. Harry Potter was at the zenith of its fame and success, so there was a real demand from publishers for exciting fiction aimed at 8-12 year olds, and as a result of the ever-expanding wordcount of JKR's books, those novels were starting to get a bit fatter even for regular, non-bestselling writers.

But I was writing YA, and at that point the category hadn't experienced any kind of similar boom. Twilight wasn't yet a sparkle in Smeyer's eye, and Suzanne Collins was still writing middle grade fiction herself. In fact, many publishers during this period saw YA novels from anyone other than established big names as problematic, a bit of a hard sell, and - having seen legendary YA author and personal icon Tamora Pierce dropped by UK Random House due to disappointing sales in GB - I was well aware of this. Debut YA novels didn't get any latitude in word count. They were generally expected to be somewhere in the region of 45,000 to 65,000 words long.

Now, a published author with a good relationship with their editor might be able to get around this a bit, but I was a complete newbie. I didn't have an agent and I didn't have any connections in the publishing industry. I knew that if I sent a query for a YA novel to any publisher, and mentioned a wordcount much over 65,000 words, I would just be asking to be rejected out of hand. So I was determined to bring the book in under that.

But at the same time, a huge part of my motivation in writing a re-telling of the fairytale was to thoroughly explore who these people really were. In fairytales you're told what people did and said, where they went, the great and terrible deeds they perform - but you're never told why. Why is the wicked stepmother so evil? Why is her husband the King so easily duped? Just who are these children, and how do they survive the suffering they go through in the story with their sanity intact? Where does the princess get her towering silent strength and determination to save her brothers? I wanted to take the fairytale stereotypes and turn them into PEOPLE. People with fully realised personalities and  complex motivations. If I couldn't do that then I didn't want to write the book at all.

You can immediately see the conflict here. In a book of 65,000 words or less how could I possibly fully characterise eleven brothers - as individuals - rather than a homogenous mass of Brother? How could I possibly make each of these young men a human with unique, memorable traits? Especially since the fairy tale has these boys losing their human form practically at the beginning? There was no way! I couldn't do it now, with four published books under my belt, and I certainly couldn't do it then. So the number had to be reduced in some way.

Now, throughout all the years of my childhood I had this poster on my bedroom wall:

It's a piece of art called The Children of Lir and it's inspired by a Celtic Myth of the same name - a story in which a wicked stepmother transforms the children of her husband (the god Lugh) into swans and dooms them to spend hundreds of years living on each of Ireland's great lakes. It's a ridiculously beautiful painting, as you can see, and it's also a very vivid, striking image - of three brothers and one sister.

During the early planning stages of writing The Swan Kingdom, when I was still working out the setting and how the world and its magic would work, I saw a documentary on the BBC about pre-historic, pre-Roman civilisations in the UK, and I found it fascinating. Not much is known about the indigenous British people who created Stonehenge and Avebury and all the other great Paleolithic monuments of Great Britain, or why their beliefs caused them to sink such massive amounts of time and effort into building these temples of stone, into recreating the natural landscape in such a way. And when we don't know much? We can *invent*.

Something clicked in my head. The Celtic myth of The Children of Lir, the pre-historic people of Britain and their possessive reverence for their land which caused them to attempt to reshape it permanently, lost Celtic and ancient British beliefs, cave paintings that showed man and animal spirits melting together, traditions of oral storytelling passed down through the matriarchal line... all these things seemed to fit perfectly into the story I wanted to tell. And that made it feel natural and right to use the family structure from that Celtic myth, the structure of one sister and three brothers.

Chosing to give my heroine Alexandra three brothers - David, Hugh and Robin - whom she knew as well as knew herself, whom she relied on and was incredibly close to, was, in my opinion, one of the best decisions that I made in writing the story. It meant that each of them got to be a distinct person, special to Alexandra - and special to me! - in their own way.

Reliable, quiet, intelligent David, quicksilver, charming, funny Hugh, studious, sweet, kind Robin... they're the big brothers I wish were mine (I don't have an older brother - just a younger one, who isn't anything like any of the boys in the story). And hopefully when Alex loses them in The Swan Kingdom the reader is able to fully understand her anguish and her desperation to get them back - not as a Fairytale Princess With A Quest but as a sister who has lost all the family she loved and can never mend her broken heart until she is reunited with the brothers she adores.

I hope that answers your question Imaginatrix! If anyone else has any questions about my books, or writing, or anything else for that matter, just pop them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them here in future posts. See you on Thursday, Dear Readers!

I SUCK

Hello, Dear Readers! Thursday again and time for me to ramble on at you for a bit. Again, this is more like a series of random thoughts than a real essay, so apologies in advance.

Lately I've been thinking about the fact that I was published really young. Meeting Karen Mahoney and Lee Weatherly at the Foyles event made me realise how unusual it is for someone to get attention from a mainstream, respected publisher at the age of twenty-one with their very first completed YA novel, and to get a publishing contract at twenty-two with their second completed YA manuscript. I was incredibly lucky to have crossed the desk of my first editor, who encouraged me and offered me so much support, and incredibly lucky that he worked at Walker Books, who have a fine tradition of nurturing new talent and developing close relationships with their authors.

But it wasn't just luck. A lot of it was me; me wanting it so, so badly because the dream of being a published author felt like all I had. It was the only thing that would make everything I had gone through as a bullied outsider worthwhile, the only thing that would show everyone who'd ever picked on or mistreated me that I was a valid person, that they were wrong and I was right the whole time. The full force of my determination went into writing and trying to get published, and it left room for nothing else - not college, not looking for a satisfying job, not even much in the way of a social life. And that single-mindedness did pay off. Even though my first book (The Swan Kingdom) wasn't actually released until I was twenty-four, I had a publishing contract by the age of twenty-two. I had, I felt at the time, WON.

Here's a hint to my past self: You really haven't. Sorry.

I'm proud of The Swan Kingdom. In fact, I'm proud of all the books I've written, in different ways and for different reasons. Each story and each set of characters represents something important to me, challenges that I set for myself, whether I was entirely successful in meeting them or not.

But there's no escaping the fact that being published young - and having spent so much of my life up until that point focusing exclusively on writing - had a huge effect on the quality of my debut and my early work. I'm not like Veronica Roth or Sarah Rees Brennan or Rae Carson. My first book wasn't a storming, ground-breaking piece of fiction that astonished commentors could hardly believe was a debut. It was a quiet, sweet little story that a lot of people liked, but which didn't give much of a hint as to the stories I would be producing in the future.

My courage, my craft, my perspective on humans and their relationships, my awareness of diversity... these things have gotten better with each book I've published. And as a result, each book I've written has been just a bit better than the one before. I know this. I know it in my heart and I know it because everyone tells me so. It's one of the comments that I see all the time - on Goodreads or on review blogs. 'This author just keeps getting better and better'. When reviewers, your editor, even your mum agrees, you get the message. And I'm really happy this is the case.

But developing like this - in public, with every reader as a witness to your progress - is tough. Sometimes looking back at decisions made in previous books makes me cringe. When I see reviewers pointing out the same old problems with my earlier books that I've seen mentioned in a dozen reviews before, sometimes I want to crawl into a hole. How could I have let the book go out like that? Why didn't I see those problems at the time it went out? Am I going to have to regret that for the rest of my career? I'm not going to list all the flaws that I (and everyone) can see in my own work here, but suffice it to say that if I could write The Swan Kingdom and Daughter of the Flames all over again *now* they would be vastly different books.

In fact, they wouldn't be The Swan Kingdom and Daughter of the Flames at all.

Because I couldn't write The Swan Kingdom now. I couldn't write Daughter of the Flames. I'm a different person and a different writer. The books might have the same titles (or maybe not even that!) and be based on the same fairytale or original ideas, but they would not be the same books. Those characters and their choices would be, most probably, unrecognisable. The way I would write them would be unrecognisable.

Would I feel better about them right now if they were in that form? Most probably.

But what about in ten years time?

In ten years time maybe I'd be cringing over them in exactly the same way. Just because they'd be more acceptable to the current me, that doesn't mean that the me five or ten years from now wouldn't find loads of mistakes and flaws there. Just because I'm a better writer now, that doesn't mean I'm the best I'll ever be. What a horrible thought!

And what's more, if The Swan Kingdom - with all its many flaws - hadn't been written, and accepted, and come out when it did back in 2007, would I have ever have written Daughter of the Flames at all? Without the mistakes I made writing Daughter of the Flames (which haunted me, and haunt me still ) would I really have had the courage and maturity to write Shadows on the Moon, the book that ripped me to pieces and left me a totally different writer then I was before? Without the new confidence that came from writing Shadows on the Moon, would I have been able to produce FrostFire, the book which my editor (and my mum!) tells me is my best work to date?

No.

We all suck now in comparison to our future selves. Of course we do. I thought I was pretty hot stuff when I first managed to create a shortcut on my desktop without messing up, or the first time I successfully boiled dried pasta without it sticking to the bottom of the pan. Those achievements were vital at the time. I couldn't get anywhere until I'd managed them. They pushed me onto more ambitious next steps. But looking back NOW, of course they seem simple and small in comparison to making and maintaining my own website, or cooking a five course Christmas dinner for my family.

The trick is to realise that the mistakes you made in the past are equally small in comparison to the things you can achieve right now. That the mistakes you make now are small compared you what you will be able to do in the future.

So yes, I sucked in the past. I suck now. And I will suck in the future. But who cares? Because I also did amazing - really amazing! - things in the past too. I got published before I was twenty-five! And I'm doing exciting, challenging things now; I've only just turned thirty and I already have four books out! And I will carry on doing great things in the future. No matter what mistakes I've made and am making and will make.

No matter what.

Spending time regretting the past? Wishing things had been different? Asking 'What if'? Well, it might be irresistable. But the very best way to make sure that you don't spend your entire life looking back over your shoulder wishing the past had been different is to do the best you can - the most courageous, scary, strange and YOU that you can - right now. None of us will ever be flawless or produce anything flawless, and accepting that is the only way to keep moving forward.

I suck. You suck. Everyone sucks. And that is a wonderful thing.

Carry on.

THE ENAID

Hi everyone! As Wednesday rolls around again (and after the seriousness of Monday's post) I'd like to share something fun and rather beautiful - this video made by long-time blog commentor Alex, which she calls The Enaid.

The Enaid, for anyone who hasn't read the book, is the name of the magical earth energy or spirit of the land which features in my first novel The Swan Kingdom. In the video Alex uses quotes from The Swan Kingdom to highlight the loveliness of shots of one of her favourite places, which happens to remind me very much of the marsh/meadowlands where I live. Since the countryside surrounding my home was a partial inspiration for the book, I find what Alex has done here very effective.

Enjoy!

A QUESTION OF UPSTAGING

Hello, Dear Readers. I'm not sure I can quite squeeze out a 'Happy Monday' this morning, as today I was woken at 6am by a panicked call from my mum. She'd gone to check her emails before leaving for work, and found that her laptop wouldn't start up. At all. Black screen of death. Horror.

I couldn't fix it before she had to leave, but two and a half hours later I was able to boot the thing up and now I'm back at my own computer guzzling coffee and trying to stuff my brains back in my ears.

So! Onto a question that came to me via email from a reader called Rachel. She asks:

"What do you do if two of your characters want to be the main character? I have a 10 year old boy and a 20 year old woman, and the boy should be the main character, since it's technically his story, but I feel like the woman has a story to tell as well, and I don't want to give her too much voice in case she just floods the actual story. What can I do?"

I call this upstaging, and it's a surprisingly common problem. In fact, looking back, I'd say I've had this problem in every single book that I've ever written. Just to make it a bit clearer: upstaging is where a character who was originally supposed to be minor or secondary turns out to have such life and magnetism that every scene they're in warps around them, pulling attention away from the main character and the main story.

When it happened to me while writing The Swan Kingdom and Daughter of the Flames, I dealt with it by panicking and cutting those upstaging characters down to mere shadows of their former selves. Being forced to do this left me with a nagging sense of guilt which I've never quite escaped, and which hasn't been helped by readers repeatedly mentioning that they wished they'd learned more about these characters, and asking me for their backstories. Readers can sense that strange magnetism pulsing away even though those characters are barely on the page anymore.

When I came to write Shadows on the Moon the same problem reared its head in the form of Akira. She was originally planned as a rather cold and emotionally distant character, lonely and cut-off, someone who would serve as a warning to the heroine about the perils of her chosen path. Instead, she immediately manifested as funny, charming and brilliantly, vividly ALIVE. And of course I panicked, just like normal. But by then it was too late, because I was so in love with her that I couldn't bear to cut her down. I just couldn't.

So...

I let her do what she wanted.

Which sounds completely mad. She wasn't the main character! How could I just let her go off and take over the story? She wanted to act in ways that completely messed up my plan for the plot! She made my main character a different person! She intruded into places she was never supposed to be!

And she made the story TEN TIMES BETTER.

You see, I don't think that your secondary character really wants to take over the story. She just wants to make it better. Your subconscious brain is telling you that you have a chance to make your main character more realistic and complex, and your main story deeper and more compelling. But you can't do that by working on that character and story directly - you're already doing the best there that you can. You need to do it indirectly by utilising the magnetism that this secondary character brings to the book and by using their story to reinforce the main one.

Look at this secondary character and her backstory. Look at what she wants. Where is she intruding? What is she changing? What does she want to say? Search for the ways that her story, her personality, parallel the main character and main plot. Search for the ways that they differ.

Just as Akira's story of transforming passion and love serve as a negative image of Suzume's feelings in Shadows on the Moon, I think you'll realise that if you give this character a bit more room to grow, her journey will complement and reinforce the journey of the main character and make the book richer, more complex and more moving than it ever could have been without her.

I hope this is helpful, Rachel!

Just a quick reminder today as well - I've had a few emails of the 'Please read my story and tell me what you think' variety lately. Here's a link to my website page where I address this, but in short - if you send me stories or samples of work, I can't and won't read them.

See you on Wednesday, folks!

ZOË MARRIOTT WEEK: Day #5

Hello all - happy Friday! It's the final day of Me Week over at The Book Memoirs and today is when I answer all the questions from readers which have been flooding in (OK, maybe trickling in) throughout the week.

And if that wasn't enough, there's a THIRD INTERNATIONAL giveaway, this time of a copy of Daughter of the Flames! You've also still got time to enter the giveaways for Shadows on the Moon and The Swan Kingdom so get over there and do it if you haven't already.

A massive thank you to Kate and Elle for organising such a smashing week of wonderfulness in my name. I never thought I'd have my very own theme week anywhere. But all good things must come to an end, and so next week we will return to our regularly scheduled programming here on the blog.

If you'd like a Reader Question post next week, feel free to drop your writing and reading and publishing related queries in the comments, or send me an email through my website.

Have a great weekend, all - see you on Monday :)

ZOË MARRIOTT WEEK: Day #4

What are you doing over here, Dear Readers? If you'd forgotten, it's Me Week on The Book Memoirs, and that means you've still got time to enter the INTERNATIONAL giveaway to win Shadows on the Moon and delightful swag, plus another day to enter questions for the Q&A.

Today's entry is a new review of The Swan Kingdom and some fascinating facts about fairytales - along with yet another INTERNATIONAL giveaway of a copy of the book, a signed bookplate and other swag.

Hasten thee hither!

ONE YEAR BLOGIVERSARY EXTRAVAGANZA

Hello, dear readers! Happy Friday and happy blogiversary! 

That's right, everyone - on Saturday it will be precisely one year since I started the Zoë-Trope. I can hardly believe it. It feels more like five minutes! 

I started blogging completely on impulse, as a way to stave off depression shortly after losing my job. When I first began, had an uneasy feeling that I'd struggle to find enough things to talk about even for a month, and an even more uneasy feeling that no one would care what I had to say about anything anyway. Instead of which, I've somehow managed to blog three times a week (and sometimes more!) every single week for a year (with your help, of course!) and I've met a whole raft of wonderful readers, become part of the wonderful UK book blogging community, had all kinds of crazy fun in the comments section, and enjoyed some really good rants too.

To mark this fairly momentous occasion - and thank all of you for being the best blog audience anyone ever had - I've decided to hold an extravagant giveaway, the likes of which the Zoë-Trope has never seen before (although it may have come close). 

First of all - the prizes:

Everything you see here is included, but let me break it down.  

The grand prize winner shall receive an ARC of Shadows on the Moon, signed and personalised for them. A sparkly UK paperback of The Swan Kingdom and a gorgeous US hardcover of Daughter of the Flames, both also signed and personalised. A one of a kind piece of artwork created by my own fair hand during the process of writing Shadows on the Moon (a sketch of the main male character's tattoo, actually).

In addition, there will be assorted pieces of swag, such as scented Japanese fans, postcards, magnets and signed bookplates. 

The second prize winner will receive an ARC of Shadows on the Moon, a one of a kind piece of artwork from my Shadows on the Moon sketches, and their own bag of swag, including signed bookplates, magnets, postcards and any other cool things I have on hand. 

The runner up will receive a one of a kind piece of artwork and another bag of swag, including signed bookplates, magnets, postcards, fans, and anything else I have on hand. 

The giveaway is open internationally.

To enter? Well, I really want to get the word out about this giveaway and maybe draw in some new followers (we all love to make new friends, right?). So what I'd love for people to do is spread the word. Tweet about this giveaway and link back to it, post it on Facebook, blog about it, share it anywhere - and then leave me a comment showing the link. For each place that you share, and each link, leave a NEW COMMENT. So if you Tweet, and share on Facebook, and blog about the giveaway, that should be THREE COMMENTS. This part is really important guys, to ensure the giveaway is fair, so don't forget. SEPARATE COMMENTS.

In addition, anyone who changes their Twitter avatar or their Facebook profile pic or their Goodreads avatar to the Shadows on the Moon cover, and provides a link to their profile, will receive an extra point. 

Again, in order to make sure the giveaway is fair, please don't leave ANY OTHER COMMENTS in the comment trail for this post. If you want to chat about this giveaway or ask questions, but you don't have a link to leave? Please just skip back and leave the comments on Wednesday's post. 

In order to give as many people as possible the chance to win, I'm going to leave this giveaway open a little longer than normal. The official Shadows on the Moon release date here in the UK is the 4th of July, so I'm going to give you until the 3RD OF JULY to enter. I will pick the winners using a random number generator on the morning of release day.

I hope this is all clear - if not, email me or leave a comment on Wednesdays's post. Good luck to everyone, and have a great weekend!

P.S. I won't be able to chat to you in the comments either, but never fear - I am reading them all, and I am tallying them all up!