Musing on Common Themes

May 7, 2018 – 5. A list of books that inspired your stories or feature similar themes

If you have an upcoming book release, this type of content offers a way to mindfully position this book while also drumming up interest from readers. Try rounding up a list of books that share commonalities with the one you’re launching — perhaps they inspired your writing, or approach similar themes and problems. Does your book focus on a specific time in history? Recommend a list of novels set in that same period. Or are you marketing your book as a hot summer read? Include your new book in the company of other novels that fit the bill.

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1. Link your blog to this hop.
2. Notify your following that you are participating in this blog hop.
3. Promise to visit/leave a comment on all participants’ blogs.
4. Tweet/or share each person’s blog post. Use #OpenBook when tweeting.
5. Put a banner on your blog that you are participating.

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I’m at least three months out on my next book release, which will be Thanatosis (Book 4 of Transformation Project). Don’t worry, fantasy fans! I am still chipping away at Book 3 of Daermad Cycle.

So, I thought about books that might go with the apocalyptic theme. It was hard. So few apocalyptic books really focus on characters. It’s all about the Big Bad – the terrorism, the natural disaster, the biological outbreak that the characters are just paper cutouts to deal with — and so many of them devolve into prepper manuals. I started writing Transformation Project in part to redeem the genre. I wrote the books to show how it ought to be done.

Saturday evening I was thinking of not even participating in this blog hop because I just couldn’t come up with any books I would recommend — other than, once again, recommending William Fortschen’s John Matherson series — when Brad — who doesn’t read fiction — told me that Keirnan, our son, had told him about this book and I should check it out.

In my books, New York City is one of the few big American cities that was not destroyed by a suitcase nuke. In Loss of Reason by Miles A Maxwell which is the first book of a three-book series, New York is the target of a nuclear attack. Ironic. But what brought me to the point of recommending it is that it focuses on the relationship of two brothers who are extremely different, but who both want desperately to save their sister who was in New York City when the bomb went off. And, that’s all I’m going to tell you about the plot.

It’s got a lot of action, but what sets it apart from most books in its genre is that it is focused on characters who are not major players in the world, but ordinary men who just get tossed into a situation that turns them into heroes. I liked it so much that I now will have to buy the other two books. Well worth the cost.