Brilliant Book Reviews and Many Thanks.

Great fantasy book review site https://sfbook.com/ -- Well worth a visit. My books were book of the month in 2010 which was a great achievement. Made my month :)

Check out my Amazon author page for books 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Burrows/

And

http://www.amazon.com/David-Burrows/

There are alternative book sellers on my website http://davidburrows.org.uk/ as well as sample chapters and much more.

Self Published Authors and Dealing with Piracy

Piracy is a very difficult issue. When I started self-publishing I used Kindle  because of DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection. However, DRM removal tools are now common place and so this is no longer a protection. I do not know what Amazon are doing about this, if anything.

I recently checked on Google for Free downloads of my books and surprisingly found numerous sites. I was also irritated to discover people blatantly Googling for the best sites for pirated ebooks. So what is the impact on the author of pirating? I spent a lot of time writing and editing my books (many years) and also paid to have the books edited and for cover artwork. Books simply aren't free. Having pirated copies is heartbreaking, especially when reading how grateful folk are at finding one. I have tried very hard to make my books competitively priced and even offer an Omnibus Edition.

Back to the piracy. The first thing I did was to notify the website with an email along the lines: "I am David Burrows and I am the author of the Prophecy of the Kings. Your site is offering free downloads of my book which is infringing  my copyright as I have not authorised this. Please can you remove any offer of free downloads of my book and notify me when this happens."

Some sites required proof of ownership of copyright and I referred them to my website http://davidburrows.org.uk/

It was not easy to contact some websites so I used http://whois.domaintools.com/. This site told me who owned the URL and sometimes it supplied a contact email address. 

Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) is another route and I emailed them following the guidance provided here http://readpdfonline.com.unlimitedbooks.club/dmca.php - The information required seemed quite detailed and I had some reservations about this.

The worst one to contact was Amazon. I found someone was using their cloud to offer free copies of my book. Given my books are for sale on Amazon this highlights how ludicrous it is that authors have to do all the work. To contact Amazon I used https://aws.amazon.com/forms/report-abuse. This was incredibly complex and I am not certain that I got this right so feel free to post here if I am wrong. 

Anyway, I hope this helps other authors. Together, let's sink the pirates. 

The Ill-Made Knight: Christian Cameron

The Ill-Made Knight by Christian Cameron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Apologies it's not fantasy but it has close similarities, being set in medieval times. Very interesting book but faded in the middle. Set mainly in France after Poitiers 1356. The main character William Gold wants nothing more than to become a knight and his route to that goal is set with difficulties. The tale tells of mercenary bands of soldiers making a living after Poitiers and much of it relies on looting and rape. Overall I enjoyed it. I did get a little bored in parts as it did seem to go on but the perspective was interesting and the battle scenes lively.


View all my reviews

Warcraft: The Beginning

Anyone else seen this? I thought that it was fun and an excellent film although the acting was a bit stilted in my view. However, the CGI-Orcs made up for this. They were tremendous and the Shaman was truly evil. The tale was good and there were nods throughout the film to the game, World of Warcraft, that made me smile. Travis Fimmel was good but not as good ad his role in Vikings, which almost seems made for him with that sly twinkle just before a good double-cross.

http://www.warcraftmovie.com/