SB James

Another Instafreebie Giveaway Promotion (this one’s pretty big)!

Another Instafreebie Giveaway Promotion (this one’s pretty big)!

 

 

This may be one of the final Instafreebie promotions I participate in for a while.

For a limited time, you can grab a FREE copy of The Inventor’s Son, along with a LOAD of other free books, by entering the SFF Book Bonanza Portal!

You’re probably wondering why I mentioned that this might be my last Instafreebie Giveaway for a while. This is because I am considering putting The Inventor’s Son Series into Kindle Unlimited. This is a program that Amazon has for people to subscribe and read all they want from a selection of Kindle books for one set monthly price. It seems like a great way to get more people to read my books, because Amazon would have them available to these readers.

If I enroll the books, however, I will need to make them exclusively available at Amazon, and I would not be able to put a full book into Instafreebie Giveaway Promotions like this one if enrolled. I cannot have the books anywhere else, either, aside from the paperback book still being available at Barnes & Noble. The Kindle versions would still be available for purchase as well as for borrowing, but no other stores can have an eBook version available.

I will have the eBooks still widely available through May 2017, and I may only have them in Kindle Unlimited for the summer.

What do you think of Kindle Unlimited? Do you think you’d like to see my books available to borrow from the program?

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A Great Opportunity for FREE Books with Instafreebie!

A Great Opportunity for FREE Books with Instafreebie!

 

 

Book lovers might know about Instafreebie, where authors can post book previews or full length books for free. Readers just need to give their email address, and the books will be delivered right to them.

This is the first Instafreebie Promotion that I’m participating in, and it’s a great opportunity to pick up The Inventor’s Son, along with some other beautiful books. The giveaway runs from April 14th through May 14th. Enjoy!

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For the New Year, 2017…

For the New Year, 2017…

 

I wish you all a healthy, happy and prosperous New Year! 

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

I am grateful for all my readers, followers and fans! Thank you! 

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Working Furiously on the Paperback Version of The Inventor’s Son!

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Mock up provided by Covervault, and the real ones will be ready for the holidays!

These are a long time coming, I know! Pricing should be available soon, as well as links to Amazon. I believe they may only be available through Amazon for the short term, with wider availability coming by the end of the year, but we will see. One advantage you’ll have with buying a print version through Amazon will be the Kindle Match, which I think I’m going to be able to set to FREE. In other words, if you buy the print version and just can’t wait until it’s delivered to read it, the Kindle version will be available for free!

For now, I plan to have print versions of The Inventor’s Son, The Scientist’s Son, and The Explorer’s Son. I do not have immediate plans to create a print version of The Inventor’s Son: The Beginning. I think that book can remain an eBook only. But let me know if you think you might want that book in print; it’s only time spent on it, and there are other authors who have made print versions of novellas, so I’m flexible.

Stay tuned!

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Making a Few Changes at the Site

making a few changes

My website building is coming along slowly but surely. I got a lot of traffic last week with the blog post about the difference between Steampunk and Gaslamp Fantasy. It got me thinking that the post wasn’t as optimized as it could have been, so it led me to make a couple of changes.

  • You will now notice that I have installed Disqus for commenting on my blog. Previously I had WordPress’ commenting, which was fine if the person commenting was logged into WordPress. There are a lot of people however that are not, and Disqus makes logging in to comment a lot more flexible for would-be commenters, so yesterday I activated the plugin, so you should be seeing Disqus commenting enabled at the bottom of this and every blog post.
  • My super sale on The Inventor’s Son and The Inventor’s Son Collection is coming to an end as I write this. But do not despair! There will be opportunities going forward to get great deals on my books, along with a lot of other goodies and fun stuff, and the best way to find out about them is to join my mailing list! You will be getting The Inventor’s Son: The Beginning as a thank you for joining, and remember that this is the revised and expanded edition of the book that is only available in the Collection, not as an individual book at any of the retailers. While the original edition of the book is available for free at most retailers, this may not be the case for much longer…
  • I want to do more blog posts about subjects like the difference between Steampunk and Gaslamp. Perhaps some posts about the origins of Steampunk as a genre, an examination of magic systems of favorite series of books and movies, and most importantly, what significance does the octopus have to Steampunk?
  • I will be getting the new home page up…ASAP.

I hope to see you back here soon!

 

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What is the Difference Between Steampunk and Gasplamp Fantasy?

What is the Difference Between Steampunk and Gasplamp Fantasy?

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Recently I had come across the question of what the difference between Steampunk and Gaslamp Fantasy was. It started because I was telling people that I actually had written some Gaslamp Fantasy novels. It turns out that though people are actually familiar with what Gaslamp is, they aren’t aware of the name of the genre. So today, I’m going to outline the differences between Steampunk and Gaslamp.

Before I do that though, let’s talk about the similarity between the two related genres and figure out why they sometimes get confused. Steampunk and Gaslamp often have a similar outward appearance, and if someone looks at a picture of a character in a Gaslamp tale, they would immediately think of Steampunk. The top hats, the goggles, the corsets, the Neo-Victorian or Neo-Edwardian settings, and of course the gadgets and tinkerings and dirigibles… These all remind people of Steampunk. And Gaslamp Fantasy has all these elements as well.

But where they differ is subtle sometimes. Some people even consider Gaslamp as an offshoot of Steampunk. But it is actually a branch of the Historical Fantasy family. This link to the website Goodreads has a good list of Gaslamp Fantasy books, and this link to Goodreads that shows a list of Steampunk genre books.

Let’s select two books, one from each category, and examine the differences.

aeronauts windlass

The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher: this book belongs in the Steampunk genre. Why? Look at the plot description:

Captain Grimm commands the merchant ship, Predator. Fiercely loyal to Spire Albion, he has taken their side in the cold war with Spire Aurora, disrupting the enemy’s shipping lines by attacking their cargo vessels. But when the Predator is severely damaged in combat, leaving captain and crew grounded, Grimm is offered a proposition from the Spirearch of Albion—to join a team of agents on a vital mission in exchange for fully restoring Predator to its fighting glory.

 

Soulless
Soulless by Gail Carriger: This book, though very well known as Steampunk, is quite frankly a Gaslamp Fantasy book:

Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she’s a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she was rudely attacked by a vampire, breaking all standards of social etiquette.

Where to go from there? From bad to worse apparently, for Alexia accidentally kills the vampire — and then the appalling Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous, and werewolf) is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate.

With unexpected vampires appearing and expected vampires disappearing, everyone seems to believe Alexia responsible. Can she figure out what is actually happening to London’s high society? Will her soulless ability to negate supernatural powers prove useful or just plain embarrassing? Finally, who is the real enemy, and do they have treacle tart?

Do you see the difference in the focus of the plot, just from the plot descriptions? In the case of Aeronaut’s Windlass, if you didn’t know that it was supposed to be a Steampunk book, you’d probably think the book was a space opera, with the focus being on a ship (dirigible airship in this case) that was damaged in battle (a space opera trope if ever there was one). The focus is on the technology, at least in this first volume of the series. Is there magic involved in this plot? Of course (this is Jim Butcher, after all), but as long as the scales tip in favor, plot-wise, on the technology and the gadgets, then it’s Steampunk.

In the case of Soulless, on the other hand, we see the words vampire, werewolf, supernatural, soul… If  you removed the name of Queen Victoria, you might think this was urban fantasy! We see nothing about gadgets in the book description (though in the book, the reader is shown various examples of more advanced Neo-Victorian technology). In this book, the focus is on the magic, and therefore this scale is tipped toward Gaslamp Fantasy.

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In the case of my own book, The Inventor’s Son, there are gadgets and tinkerings (and in the case of The Explorer’s Son, huge dirigibles). In the plot description, you can see there is some focus on those things:

The Inventor’s Son is the story of young Ethan Stanwood, whose father is a brilliant, but reclusive, inventor and scientist. Sickly and isolated, Ethan’s entire world revolves around his father and his work. He believes that this is all life has to offer him, in spite of the latent magical talents he’d inherited from his long-dead mother that are beginning to surface.

When his father flees London one Monday morning, Ethan’s quiet life is swiftly turned into a fight for his survival. His father tasks Ethan with bringing his most important prototype that he was forced to leave behind when he departed. Unfortunately, he has only left the vaguest of clues for Ethan to follow in order to find him. Ethan has to find his father, but he must also face his father’s foes who will stop at nothing to get Ethan and the prototype.

In my series, I have endeavored to make sure there was a fine balance between the focus on tech and the focus on magic, because Ethan is the child of an inventor and a witch. Because the focus seems to be on Marcus Stanwood’s prototype and the struggle to keep it out of enemy hands, you could almost call it Steampunk. But the books actually focus more on Ethan’s journey with the development of his magical abilities, especially in the later books. This is what puts my books in the Gaslamp Fantasy and Historical Fantasy categories more than Steampunk. For the sake of simplicity, readers have shelved my books as Steampunk, and that would not be incorrect, technically, but they do belong in Gaslamp Fantasy as well.

 

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Happy New Year

HappyNewYearGears
I wish you all a very happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

 

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The Holidays are Here!

happyholidayssteampunk
A very happy holiday season and new year to everyone!

 

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