Monthly Roundup – May 2021

Hello and welcome to another Monthly Roundup article here on Track of Words, where as usual I’m taking a look back at what’s been going on over the last few weeks. I’d say it’s been slightly quieter on Track of Words than the last few months, but hopefully there’s still been plenty of new content to keep your interest, and I’ve been busy planning interesting things to work on in future. For the first part of the article I’ll do my usual run through of all the reviews, author interviews and blog articles that I’ve published over the last few weeks, so if you missed anything you can click on the links and go take a look. Once that’s done, I’ve got a couple of things I want to talk about in the general update section, so check that out for a bit about why I’m cutting down on Black Library reviews and interviews, and some thoughts on a Track of Words landmark that I’ve recently passed.

I’m always interested to know what you think, so once you’ve read through the article, do let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see more or less of on Track of Words!

Reviews

I’m finding at the moment that my productivity in terms of review writing is really going up and down. After a couple of months of getting loads of reviews written, I only managed six in May – four book reviews and two short story reviews. It’ll be interesting to see if I end up writing loads more in June…but either way, I hope these six reviews are interesting! Of these six titles, I particularly loved The Beautiful Ones and Piranesi, so I’d recommend those if your time is short.

The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – take a novel of manners, set it in a late 19th Century France-inspired alternate history, throw in a little telekinesis, and what you get is something wonderful! More romance than fantasy, it’s nevertheless a total joy.

A Game of Broken Minds by Tom Jolly – an interesting sci-fi novella full of great ideas, but which didn’t quite come together for me. Quick and easy to read though, so still worth checking out if you fancy the idea of networked superbrains and mind-enhancing drugs.

Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory by Martha Wells – a slow, quiet and characterful short story in the Murderbot Diaries series, fitting in after the events of the fourth novella. It’s a bit different to the series’ usual approach, but well worth reading for the insight into Dr Mensah and how she sees Murderbot.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke – this strange, slow, dreamlike novel won’t be for everyone, but I absolutely adored it (I listened to the audiobook, narrated by the wonderful Chiwetel Ejiofor). This is probably the longest review I’ve written, there’s just so much to talk about with this fascinating book.

Fandom For Robots by Vina Jie-Min Prasad – what’s not to like about a story featuring a robot who gets obsessed by a Japanese anime show, finds an online fan site, and starts writing his own fanfic?! This one is loads of fun, and well worth getting hold of.

Richards & Klein by Guy Haley – two of Haley’s earliest novels, reworked and combined into a single volume. If you like his 40k stuff you’ll probably enjoy this madcap SF detective adventure story, which is bold, imaginative, full of ambition and generally just a lot of fun.

Author interviews

I may have only managed six reviews in May (compared to 11 in April), but on the flip side I did publish five author interviews, across quite a range of styles and publishers. My Gitslayer interview is probably going to be the last Black Library-related one I do any time soon (and it’s a pretty good one to finish with), but rest assured I’ve got plans to talk to plenty more authors across the whole of SFF.

RAPID FIRE: Alisa Kwitney Talks Rogue: Untouched – find out more about this modern origin story for a much-loved X-Men character, as Alisa gives the lowdown on what to expect from her excellent new Marvel prose novel.

RAPID FIRE: Darius Hinks Talks Gitslayer – the latest instalment in the adventures of Gotrek Gurnisson in the Mortal Realms, this has possibly my favourite title of the whole series! Check out the interview to get the lowdown from Darius on what to expect.

RAPID FIRE: Guy Haley Talks Richards & Klein – want to know more about this cool new omnibus collecting a pair of rewritten, remastered SF detective adventures into one single volume? Check out this interview for all the details!

RAPID FIRE: Peter McLean Talks Priest of Gallows – find out more about the third book in the War For The Rose Throne series, as Peter gives us a quick recap on what’s happened so far and then the lowdown on what to expect as Tomas Piety starts to figure out exactly what he’s got himself involved in.

RAPID FIRE: Josh Reynolds Talks Death’s Kiss – return to Rokugan with the latest Legend of the Five Rings novel from Aconyte Books, the sequel to the brilliant Poison River. Here’s Josh to let us know what Daidoji Shin and Kasami get up to this time.

Articles

Although I’m focusing my reviews and interviews away from Black Library, I’ve still got lots of Warhammer-related articles planned, and in May I published one that I’d been thinking of for a while and one that was inspired by reading a slightly disappointing post on the Warhammer Community page. That’s on top of another one of my Aconyte roundup articles.

Aconyte Books Roundup: May 2021 – details of the two latest Marvel novels from Aconyte (along with review and interview links), a look ahead to what’s coming soon, and a look back at a fantastic novel from the back catalogue.

Where to Start With Black Library – Necromunda – unlike a lot of other BL series/settings, there isn’t really an obvious ‘definitive story’ for Necromunda as yet. Instead, I’ve gone through most of the modern range and offered suggestions for what each book/character arc provides.

Where to Start With Black Library – Age of Sigmar Grand Alliance Order – if you’re a fan of the (nominally) good guys in Age of Sigmar, this article should be of interest! I’ve gone through each of the factions in Grand Alliance Order and recommended one or more books that would make great places to start for each one (apart from the Seraphon, who don’t have any BL stories).

General update

For much of May it felt like I was having a hard time finding the time to read – I’m not sure why, it just seemed like a bit of a struggle. Looking back now though that seems kinda crazy, considering I still managed to read 10 books – five print books and five audiobooks. It certainly wasn’t another reading slump, and for the most part I’ve really enjoyed everything I’ve read, with Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Beautiful Ones proving particularly enjoyable, so in the end I think May qualifies as a good reading month! In terms of my goal to read (at least) an even split between male and non-male authors I hit a healthy balance of 50/50 in May, which means for the year to date I’ve read 31.5 (counting D.K. Fields’ The Stitcher and the Mute as .5 considering its male/female writing partnership) female-written books out of 60 in total. Not bad!

With that done, I want to talk about two main things in this section, the first of which being…

Black Library
As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve got plans for more Black Library guide articles – I enjoy putting these together, and I feel like it’s valuable for me to share my knowledge and experience of BL to hopefully help other folks get into these stories. However, I’m not currently working on or planning any BL-related reviews or interviews, and I thought it might be worth quickly covering the reasons for that. I recognise that a lot of people visit Track of Words to read my BL content, and over the years I’ve written plenty of it – but right now I don’t feel particularly engaged by BL, or motivated to read new releases. Partly that’s because I’m simply enjoying branching out and reading different things – I would say that I’m a sci-fi and fantasy fan before I’m a Warhammer fan, and there’s so much great SFF out there that I want to read!

I’m also in the very fortunate position of having early access to books from loads of awesome publishers, some of whom directly reach out to me to ask if I’d like to read their books. Now this might sound mercenary, but I only have so much time and money, so as long as I’m enjoying reading widely across the range of SFF I’m of a mind to concentrate on the great books coming my way from these publishers, whether that’s IP fiction from publishers like Aconyte or general SFF from traditional publishers large and small. I’ll still read the occasional BL book purely for fun – I recently enjoyed Andy Clark’s Gate of Bones, for example – but they’re not going to be my priority, and I’m going to concentrate my writing time on reviewing other titles. It’s the same with author interviews – they take a lot of work, and I’m more inclined to put that work towards publishers who actively engage with folks like me in the SFF community.

So partly it’s a case of concentrating on other publishers, who are putting out fantastic books that I’m really interested in and who actively want to work with reviewers and bloggers like me. As well as that though, I’m feeling a general air of malaise when it comes to Black Library – not regarding the authors or the editorial team, all of whom continue to do sterling work in my opinion, but more the way the business treats us as readers. I’m increasingly fed up with how little information BL is prepared to give us, with how poor the overall communication is and with the overarching sense that they just aren’t bothered about engaging with fans, readers and the wider community. There isn’t one single thing I can point at and say “that’s what’s bugging me”, but rather months (and years, if I’m being honest) of frustrations at dreadful marketing and business decisions that penalise readers. It all adds up and dampens my enthusiasm, which is a real shame. I don’t love the worlds and characters of Warhammer any less…I’ve just lost a bit of my desire to spend so much time reading about them.

I’m sure I’m not the only BL reader feeling a bit like this. At the risk of sounding deeply immodest, for a long time I think I’ve probably been one of the most vocal and prolific supporters of BL, so if I’m losing interest I’ve a feeling other people will be too, and may well have been for a while. I can’t speak for anyone else, but it may well be that my enthusiasm will return at some point – maybe BL will publish a book that I absolutely love, or maybe they’ll turn a page and start trying to work with the community a bit more. Time will tell, of course! In the meantime though, if any BL authors read this then please do feel free to get in touch about reviews/interviews – I’m always happy to chat, and I’m not ruling anything out! Likewise if someone from BL reads this and wants to start engaging with the community, by all means get in touch. Until then, I’ll talk about BL stuff if and when there’s something that interests me, and as I said earlier I do still have plans for more longer-form guide articles! I hope you enjoy them.

I don’t want to end this on a downer however, and I did say that there were two things I wanted to talk about. The second thing is, from my perspective at least, pretty cool…

A Track of Words milestone
If you follow me on Twitter you might have already seen me talk about this, but I was delighted to see that Track of Words has recently had its 750,000th page view! I still can’t quite believe that my little niche website has been viewed over three quarters of a million times…it blows my mind to think about it, really. When I started the site back in 2014 I was just looking for something that would keep me occupied and give me a sort of focus for my time – I had recently been made redundant, and I wanted to keep myself busy and challenge myself at the same time. I didn’t expect anyone to actually read my reviews, I was really just writing them for myself. I could have written them down in a notebook but I thought I might lose motivation if I did, so I started a free WordPress site as a way of pushing myself to keep writing.

That first year I was pleasantly surprised to see people reading and enjoying my reviews, and when I hit 13 thousand views by the end of the year I was stunned! That seemed like such a lot of people, and to be honest it still does. The next year my total yearly views nearly doubled; the same again the year after. In my fourth year the views more than doubled, and in the fifth year they blasted past 100k for that year alone. Of course page views are only one way of looking at the success of a website, and I try not to place too much importance on them, but they’re the most obvious and visible marker, and watching the numbers rise each year has helped keep me motivated to continue writing, especially when it’s felt at times like a bit of a struggle, or when I’ve questioned whether I want to keep putting so much work into a project that I do completely for free.

I still wrestle with those questions, but knowing that so many people have visited the site – that it’s been viewed three quarters of a million times and counting – definitely helps! Beyond a few comments here and there I don’t really know what people think of my reviews, interviews and articles (blogging and reviewing is a very strange activity to be honest, and it exists in a weird kind of empty space at times), but hopefully this shows that I’m doing something right at least! With that in mind, I want to say thank you to everyone who’s visited over the years. I imagine I would still be writing something even if the site had never taken off, but there’s no doubt that the increasing numbers have helped push me to keep writing, so thanks to you all for keeping me going!

Maybe I’ll plan some kind of celebration for if/when I hit 1 million page views, which at this rate could well be sometime in 2022! I’m open to suggestions, so let me know if you’ve got any ideas for what I could do! Until then, I’ll do my best to keep writing, and I hope you’ll continue to enjoy the reviews, interviews and articles that I put out.

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So that’s it from me for another month – here’s hoping June is a good month for all of you, in general and in terms of your reading goals! I’m always keen to hear about what you’ve enjoyed reading or listening to recently, what you think about the interviews and articles I’ve been publishing of late, whether you’ve read and enjoyed any of the books I tackled this month, and whether there’s anything you’d like to see in these roundup articles! Do drop me a line in the comments below, or get in touch on Twitter.

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