So a wee while back I get a message through Facebook from a chap called Ian W. Sainsbury giving me some good-hearted and well deserved jibes about chart bumping going on. I recognised the name immediately. Ian writes the stunning, amazingly staggeringly…just mind-boggingly good World Walker series. The strange thing was that a couple of days before his message came through I had downloaded book one of his series, THE WORLD WALKER. (Our books are ranked in some of the same sci-fi genre charts with mine bumping him off in one or two and Ian completely and utterly dominating in others…as you can see from this handy illustration….)
I’ve now read The World Walker…and I can bloody well see why it’s ranking so high and selling like hot cakes. It’s stunning. Just blooming brilliant. I mean, like…like knock your socks off and make your mouth drop open. I knew this was effectively Ian’s debut novel too. Now I read a lot and from all genres. You can’t develop as a writer unless you have an insatiable desire to READ EVERYTHING EVER WRITTEN. But I can honestly say that The World Walker book one has one of the strongest opening chapters ever. I was hooked within the first paragraph. Not mildly interested or just happy to go along but I was in it, on it, part of it. I was invested and gobbling the words up like a mad reading fiend.
The series is also entirely self-published. I adore that. It’s a testament to hard work and dedication that us indie authors can compete with the big publishing houses with their teams of editors and huge marketing budgets. That’s not a dig at the publishers. I am published now and I love being published (In case my publisher reads this…love you heaps n heaps forever n always xxx) but I’m from a self-pubbed background. I will self-pub again. I love self-pubbing and I love self-pubbed works. It’s the sexiness of it. The lone wolves battling away by candlelight while holding down jobs and lives. Men and women grabbing a few minutes to write. We are mums and dads and normal folk by day… but by night we go willingly into the darkness of our secret society where the initiation is years of graft and the willingness to lay the words on the page and reflect harshly to get better. To compare our work to those we admire and see the flaws and seek to find how to improve. Yeah. That’s sexy that is. I know how hard it is. My god it’s hard. What Ian has done here, achieving this on his own, is something so very special and for that there is no greater reward than buying his books and reading them. (And get blown away in the process).
Take care RR Haywood.
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