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This week on “Reviewer Time” I have invited one of the community’s most established and branched out reviewers namely Tia Nevitt from “Fantasy Debut”. Last week I decided to bring in some fresh blood with the fledgling “Only the Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy”, so now in order to counterbalance I’m featuring someone most blog commenters and lurkers have come to recognize as THE place to sample debut authors.
“Fantasy Debut ” raises an interesting topic about the mission of the creator and the blog’s function in the community. The number of publishers is growing, the number of books is growing as well, niches are created every year and the system of genres evolves in complexity and diversity. As a result more blogs spawn and try to cover as many titles as possible, but it often happens that content is repeated, since most bloggers have eclectic tastes and changing tastes and moods.
Defining oneself with just one movement or subgenre is nearly impossible and yet blogs about urban fantasy, shapeshifter romance and even geographically restricted fiction appear. Tia has managed to define her blog with one mission statement that does not overwhelm her completely and still stay true to her wide taste in fiction. Presenting debutants in a genre you are already well versed in not only gives you the opportunity to observe the shift in movements and usage of tropes and stories, but also allows you to compare them with what came before these debutants and search for the familiarities as well. I speak this as a reviewer seeing the merits, while as a reader it’s great to come to one sole place to learn about new names from across the wide spectrum of speculative fiction.
Apart from its function and mission statement “Fantasy Debut” continues to surprise with diverse content outside the multiple genres presented. Reviews from Tia and her contributors are in moderate length, written in conversational stream on consciousness that can easily relay the experience and general vibe around a novel. Tia is quite responsive to comments and acts a certain information bank with ready opinions for whatever you want to ask and she supplies interesting tidbits from the publishing scene.
“Fantasy Debut” is a mix from multiple elements that can be traced to many blogs, but the true uniqueness comes with her special Wednesdays dedicated to discussing writing and its aspects in order to take her readers behind the curtains of how a book is made. As a writer myself I also find it quite informative and productive to read published authors discuss topics that can affect my writing for the better. Another nailer in how awesome this site is the very humanitarian effort to help unpublished writers and self-published authors find a publishing house or at least receive a general feedback from a wide variety of readers, which is a valuable testing for potential buyers. “Discovery Showcases” try to break the myth that all self-published work is unbearable and un-publishable in a traditional manner and as such are second-hand works, if not third.
1 comments:
insightful as always Harry.
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