Katherine Roberts

Not with the warrior himself, since he's been dead for almost eight hundred years. But if the great Khan's spirit is still around, then I'm hoping he'll approve of my new series of novellas The Legend Of Genghis Khan. These books are being launched under my middle initial 'Katherine A Roberts' because they're intended for a slightly older readership than my middle grade and teen titles. They're also my first venture into independent publishing - hence the 'signature' list. (Well, supermarkets have one, so why not authors?) In this case, it simply means the kind of book that came from my heart, as opposed to the sort of book preferred by publishers that's easy to market and might sell a million copies if they're lucky and the wind is in the right direction. It also means I have to do everything myself, which is why this one has been so long in coming! I started writing the story back in 2006, but in those days there was no way to get

Readers of this blog will know I am a secret fan of the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. I've read all three books, and now I've seen all four - yes, four - films. So how do the films stand against the books? These films (unlike many adaptations for the screen) follow the books faithfully. I loved the first one. The original Hunger Games was always going to translate brilliantly to the big screen with its reality TV concept of the Arena and all the fabulous costumes and showmanship. I thought the second film Catching Fire was even better than the first and looked forward to seeing the third, only to discover (frustratingly) that the third book Mockingjay had been split into two. The first part of Mockingjay on screen didn't really work for me. The trouble with splitting a book into two films is that the viewer doesn't experience the full story arc or the satisfaction of the ending. The second part was a long time coming, and I was rather hoping that there

Today I am over at Authors Electric interviewing David Wailing about his Auto series of books set in 2022, when everyone has a digital personal assistant app called an auto: http://authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/an-interview-with-david-wailing-and-his.html You know you want one! Auto Auto2

The unicorn has just spent a few years in ancient Greece with three of the girls who survived the Trojan War: Queen Helen's daughter Hermione; Princess Cassandra's slave Eirene; and eldest daughter of King Agamemnon Electra. In Frances Thomas' delightful Girls of Troy trilogy, these three young narrators bring the myths to life, giving an overview of the whole story from the moment Queen Helen elopes to Troy with Prince Paris, through the long years of war, to the violent fall of Troy and its aftermath back in Greece when the victors return with their captives. In Book 1  Helen's Daughter , Hermione has been thrown out of her father's house after her mother elopes to Troy, and tells us in her own words how the Greek kings use her mother's 'abduction' as an excuse to raise an army of a thousand ships to sail across the sea and attack the city. This is actually a relief for Hermione who, having emerged from her mother's shadow, meets Achilles'

The unicorn told me to write this post now, so that by the time you discover it my book SPELLFALL should still be at its bewitching Halloween offer price of 99p (or the equivalent in your currency if you live outside the UK). SPELLFALL - uk SPELLFALL - us The good news is I have just finished writing a sequel to this book, which is currently awaiting publishing decisions... so if you know someone who hasn't read the first one yet, then spread the magic word!

As a fan of the fantasy/SF genre, one of the most annoying things used to be reading a great book set in an exciting new fantasy world, only to find it is volume two of a series, part one has already gone out of print, part three is difficult to find and needs to be ordered specially... and then discovering the author added another volume five years later which you didn't even hear about! The good news is ebooks and print-on-demand have taken care of disappearing series by keeping the earlier volumes available until readers have a chance to discover these new worlds. Recently, I took advantage of this new technology to republish my out-of-print Echorium Trilogy and the Seven Fabulous Wonders series as ebooks, and now Amazon has made it even easier to find the missing parts of a beloved series by neatly listing the books together on one page of their site. If you're missing any of mine you can complete your collection here: ECHORIUM TRILOGY SEVEN FABULOUS WONDERS SER

As promised, the unicorn has graced us with a reply to those rules for success I posted earlier this month. This is what my beautiful and spiritual muse has to say about writing fiction... 1. There are no rules. If you look at the career paths of the authors in the top ten lists, you'll see many different paths all leading to the same place. Following a set rules is not too hard (unless you're a unicorn, anyway), and the thousands of authors who never appear in the top ten lists didn't one day suddenly decide to break every single writing rule and ruin their careers. The truth is there is no best-selling career formula, just as there is no best-selling book formula. So stop worrying! 2. Whose success are we talking about, anyway? Those top ten lists are almost always about book sales: higher sales figures equals more successful. The unicorn understands that this is the way the human world works, and the only real measure of a book's success in the marketplace is h

You didn't think the unicorn would leave you with the party line, did you? Now that I've had a chance to read through all the literature I picked up at the CWIG conference, here is a cynical version of the rules in my last post . Brace yourselves, male authors... 1. Be born a boy -  or use initials so nobody knows you're a girl. According to an independent study  on what kids are reading in British schools in 2015, seven of the top ten most popular children's authors are men, with only three women on the list: Jeff Kinney Roald Dahl Roderick Hunt David Walliams Francesca Simon Suzanne Collins Julia Donaldson Michael Morpurgo Martin Waddell with John Boyne, Michael Rosen, David McKee, Eric Carle, John Green and Dr Seuss all tying for last place at the top table (which sounds like a fun game of musical chairs!) Interestingly, J K Rowling is not in the overall top ten list, although she featured on it in 2013 and 2014. Also, all three of the women on the 2015

Some tips from the 2015 Society of Authors Children's Writers and Illustrators Group conference. 1. Talent You need to be able to write. Obviously. Many people have the basic talent to write a book. 2. Work You need to work at your writing to make it even better. Fewer people are willing to put in the necessary amount of work. 3. Luck You (and your book) need luck. I think this means during the publishing process rather than the writing process, although life can interrupt your writing. Luck is something the writer cannot control, so even fewer people have this one. Or maybe you just need to avoid the bad luck? I've heard people say "you create your own luck", which I actually think means working on the other rules (see 1 and 2 above) so you're in the right place at the right time when the luck comes along... if you don't write the book, then how can you possibly be lucky? 4. Ambition You need to be hungry for success. Most authors are hungry (so

Rhianna Pendragon and her friends have been exploring again - this time across the English Channel, and are proud to appear in their very own French edition of "Sword of Light" published by Hachette. Here's the lovely cover: King Arthur's Daughter - Book 1 That magical looking white horse in the bottom left corner is a mist horse of Avalon, which are closely related to unicorns even though they do not have horns. They're difficult to ride, since they have a habit of misting from beneath you when they are alarmed and appearing somewhere else entirely - which happens quite often in this book, since Rhianna is being hunted by the dark knight Mordred. It's interesting to see this edition since French is the only foreign language I learned at school so I can (sort of!) understand some of the words. If you want to test yourself, here's the poem about the four magical Lights translated by Blandine Longre. Quatre Lumieres se dressent contre les tenebre

That famous red-haired recluse, Rhianna Pendragon - daughter of King Arthur and heiress of Camelot, speaks to Olga Godim about her childhood on the enchanted isle of Avalon, her work as a Warrior Princess, and her secret love: Click here to read the interview! All four of Rhianna's adventures are now available in hardcover, paperback and ebook from Templar Books , and you can download a free short story about Rhianna's childhood in Avalon for Kindle - see the sidebar of this blog or click  HERE .

Question: What do these two have in common? Answer: A flash in the pen. If you missed the sunrise at Stonehenge today, don't worry. The unicorn would like to invite you to the launch of Authors Electric's fiction anthology "A Flash in the Pen", which involves a unicorn and possibly some naked dancing around a virtual standing stone (optional). Katherine's story is called The Last Maiden (because of the old wives' tale that only maidens can lure unicorns out of the enchanted forest) and was first published in the British Fantasy Society  magazine "Dark Horizons" back in 1995. That was before ebooks, and before many online magazines too. It had black-and-white artwork printed on real paper and looked like this: cover illustration (c) Alan Casey The story even had its own full-page illustration in the magazine: illustration (c) Bob Covington As you can probably tell from the picture, this is not your typical sweet sparkly pink uni

The unicorn is delighted to invite you to Mermaid Mania, a feast of books about mermaids over at Serendipity Reviews all this week! There, you'll meet a host of wonderful authors introducing their special brand of mermaids, and also find Katherine talking about the 'merlee' (that's mermaids to you) in her Echorium trilogy. I suppose she can't always be talking about unicorns, so I'll forgive her just this once. Human or Fish? - Katherine lets us into the secret of how mermaids breed, and wonders if it's ever right to hunt them and eat their unborn children. ( No, the unicorn's answer is NO! Mermaids are NOT fish... but humans have been known to hunt unicorns, so you might have a different view? Click the link to swim on over and vote. ) Favourite Mermaid Films/TV - Vivienne of Serendipity Reviews lists some of her favourite mermaids from the silver screen. What are yours? Why Mermaids? - Laura Dockrill says she doesn't have a sparkly t

No, I don't mean covering the side of a double decker bus with an advert for my book... although the book in question might well turn out to be the size of a small bus if it were printed and bound in the traditional way. I mean my Seven Fabulous Wonders omnibus collection of all seven titles in the series, which is available as an ebook only (being kinder to trees and buses). In America, such collections are called boxed sets and come with the kind of e-cover that looks like a shelf full of books. But my Seven Fabulous Wonders series was never published in America, so I decided to call mine "Seven Fabulous Wonders: the omnibus collection" and go down the single cover route. My first attempt looked like this: This cover followed the design of the seven individual ebook covers, so I kept the series title small across the central black band and used "the Omnibus Collection" as the larger main title. I didn't even consider if this might be confusing

The radio tells me this is International Women's Day so, in defiance of the current blockbuster "Fifty Shades of Grey", here are three books every woman should read before she's fifty. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood . I still think this is one of Margaret Atwood's best books. Possibly belonging under the label "dystopia" if it were published today, the story tells of a near-future religious society in America where the birth rate is falling and those women still able to bear children are a national resource. The chilling way that these women are controlled, and in particular the simple and scarily believable way their power was taken away and handed over to the men in their lives, forms the real message of this book. Read it today, and tell me you're not afraid. The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper Anything by Sheri S. Tepper is well worth reading, and this is one of her best known books. It's science fictio

Music can change your mood.  Experiments have shown that it can help people recover faster from an operation or injury, and even improve IQ, as well as cheer you up when you're feeling low. Of course, it has to be the right sort of music for you... which might not be the same music that works for someone else. My first novel Song Quest sprang to life after I'd been reading a book on music therapy. I started thinking 'what if'? What if there was a magical song that could heal everyone? What if young singers could be trained to sing this powerful Song? And, if there was a Song that could heal, why not also a Song that could kill? So I invented the Echorium, where children could be taught to sing these Songs, and ended up with five Songs of Power: Challa for healing, Kashe for laughter, Shi for sadness, Aushan for fear, and Yehn for death. The names of these Songs were plucked out of my head as I was writing the Echorium Anthem - they just seemed right the way I imagin

How do you make a life-affirming film about a brilliant mind trapped in a body that does not work the way it should? You make it into a romance with a brave young heroine, add a few mind-blowing theories about black holes, and invite God to the party - then give everything a good spin, preferably reversing time as you go. I enjoyed this biopic the same way I enjoyed the film Titanic - knowing what lies ahead for the characters just makes the early part of the story more poignant. Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease while he was a 21 year old student at Cambridge, and given two years to live. Now 73, he has defied medical science and continues to amaze the world with his theories of the universe. The film begins as a fairytale romance between Stephen, the slightly nerdy Science student, and his sweetheart Jane, a church-going Arts student who becomes his wife. It does not shy away from the tragedy of Stephen's condition, and I found myself looking away fr

No. 1 title in UK libraries It's that time of the year again, when PLR (Public Lending Right) payments are made for loans of books from UK libraries. These payments refer to loans made between June 2013 and June 2014, and the unicorn always finds it interesting to see how the loan figures compare to sales of those books over the same period. I did a blog post here on my best-selling and top-earning (not always this same thing!) ebook titles. Here are the unicorn's Top Ten loaned titles: 1. Sword of Light (Pendragon Legacy) - 3293 loans 2. Crown of Dreams (Pendragon Legacy) - 1013 3. Lance of Truth (Pendragon Legacy) - 558 4. Grail of Stars (Pendragon Legacy) - 525 5. The Cleopatra Curse (Seven Fabulous Wonders) - 488 6. Song Quest (Echorium Sequence) - 429 7. The Mausoleum Murder (Seven Fabulous Wonders) - 309 8. The Great Pyramid Robbery (Seven Fabulous Wonders) - 306 9. The Amazon Temple Quest (Seven Fabulous Wonders) - 294 10. The Olympic Conspiracy (Sev