A review I like!

19 April 2018

Queen’s Courier by Jen Black

AMAZON UK £1.20 £8.99

AMAZON US $1.66 $14.53

AMAZON CA $1.95

Fictional saga

1500s Tudor

Scotland

Jen Black’s novels are a delight to read, not merely because of the enjoyment of ‘romance’ but because she is adept at diversifying from one period to another with apparent ease. This one is set in that troubling Tudor era where England and Scotland do not see eye-to-eye. Here, the future Mary Queen of Scots has her life mapped out by her mother, Mary of Guise and the English monarch, Henry VIII. But not all maps are reliable or pre-ordained, nor do the map-makers necessarily agree with each others’ marks on the charts they hope to produce.

The Queen’s Courier is a sequel to Abduction of the Scots Queen, where Matho Spirston had kidnapped Mary, an infant, and given her into the care of Margaret Douglas - Meg - the daughter of the Earl of Angus and Henry VIII’s sister, with Meg then being blamed for the deed. But it is not necessary to read this first novel (although I would recommend it!)  

Matthew, Earl of Lennox, champions Meg but he is greedy for power, and as the niece to the English King, Meg herself  is obliged to retain her virginity and follow the King’s permission for marriage. As for the future Mary Queen of Scots, Henry wants her as wife to his son, Edward. Her mother has different plans.

The author, in addition to being able to write delightful novels, is skilled at taking the reader right into the feel of time and place, by painting visual pictures within her narrative. Her research is well done, as is her depiction of the unsettled politics of the period, with all the upheaval of war, intrigue, scandal, plot after counter-plot and the dangers of being an appointed spy where messages had to be taken in utmost secrecy between Scotland, London and France.

Jen Black’s characters are believable, the diplomacy, the scheming, the hopes, dreams, nightmares and dangers all zip along at a good page-turning pace. The only regret I had is knowing the eventual fate of Mary Queen of Scots!

© Ellen Hill

Createspace quibbles

As a warning to anyone else who sets out to create a paperback with Createspace, be warned: if you get in a muddle with trim sizes (or whatever other problem) and decide to cut your losses, delete it all and start again, this is where the system clocks your ISBN and won't let you re-use it - not even for the same story.  So don't delete - persevere, otherwise you will lose your ISBN.

Despite my 5 complaints and 5 responses from Amazon staff all assuring me I would now be able to re-use my ISBN, I could not; it still came up as Invalid in red  text. Exasperated, I remembered they could only be bought from Nielsen in batches of ten, so I had a few still on file. I tested a different ISBN - with the trim sizes I wanted this time - and it worked. I have made progress at the cost of losing my original ISBN and considering they probably cost around £10 a time, that's quite a loss.

I suppose I can re-use the initial ISBN with another system such as Lulu, or Smashwords or whatever, It will be interesting to see if I can ever re-use it for another story on Amazon. All I can say is that Createspace has a definite slant on persuading people to use their own (free) Createspace ISBNs.

Another thing - the fifth and final response from Amazon told me I should be using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer 11. Evidently Createspace was designed to be used with Firefox because of "its encryption and security coding"- but why is that not made clear right at the point of starting out? There were other hints and tips such a reloading the page from the server, clearing out the cache on my pc so that it would work more efficiently, but if these things failed, then I should "contact my service engineer for a system revision." In other words - it was my fault.

I am using  Mozilla Firefox for Createspace now and by using a new ISBN I have got the book to the proofing stage without any hitches this time. Hopefully when the proof copy arrives, it will be OK. We shall see!

Queen's Courier and re-makes

Queen's Courier went live on 31st July - available on Kindle. at last. Yesterday I spent fiddling about with Createspace to see if I could produce a paperback copy. I've done it once before, but I'd forgotten how fiddly a process it is. I shall have another go today, once I've showered, walked Tim and popped into the store to get some beef in order to prepare lunch for visitors expected this week or early next.
This is my final cover picture - a little less green now after a friend commented that she looked seasick. (Her complexion was rather too green in the shadows!)
Already I've gone over chapter two of the my new wip. So much to do, so little time! I wish I'd started writing much earlier, but I never seemed to have much time, or the confidence to do it. When I was a child, wanting to be an author seemed such a pretentious thing to say but nowadays everybody and the dog are at it. No wonder agents are flooded with submissions every day of the week.

In spite of the fact that most re-makes don't do well at the box-office, Hollywood seems to be rehashing famous stories all the time, as if they can't find enough "new" stories worth filming. I wonder when they will get around to re-doing Gone with the Wind or Forever Amber? Surely it is only a matter of time. What about Brief Encounter? Would that be believable in today's world? Probably not.