"Preparations are underway for the society wedding of the year and Perrin gets the unenviable task of checking the kitchens for illegal magic.
In the midst of the frantic preparations, Frida, his most experienced magic sniffer, gets upset. If a magic sniffer is upset, there is magic.
No one appreciates Perrin’s discovery. Not his boss or the mayor—the wedding is a society event and can’t be delayed. Not those making money from it: the cooks in the kitchens, the seamstresses in the workshops, the bakeries making—wait, did anyone say fairy bread?
Behind the doors of the bakery lurks a secret too disturbing to be kept hidden.
Tamba, the town between the realms where magic is illegal, is itself dependent on suffering by magic creatures on an industrial scale.
Industrial relations scale, that is."
"She wanted to run her father's business. She got a mad prince, demons, ghosts and a kingdom in debt.
As the only child of a successful merchant, Johanna has her wits and a sense for business.
The royal family is in deep trouble: ever since the crown princess died of illness, the king has attempted to educate his son to become king. However, the prince is 'not good in the head' and quite unsuited to the task. In his grief for his daughter, the king has run the coffers dry: he hired dubious magicians for even more dubious tasks. Those magicians circle like vultures waiting for the kingdom to fail. The king must get his son on the throne, preferably supported by a smart and well-off wife.
He holds a ball in his son's honour. Johanna has agreed to a dance. But the guests include a number of magicians who are not there for the festivities."
"The second book in the saga. Johanna, Prince Roald, Nellie and Loesie have been captured by bandits.
Touched by evil magic, Loesie behaves ever stranger and may be a danger to attempts to escape.
Every step they take brings them closer to the duke who is said to be the source of evil. Is he the necromancer who has burned all of Saardam?"
"The last thing Steven remembers was waiting in a prison cell for the results of an appeals trial. His crime: speaking out against unfair treatment of workers. His opinion of his sentence: it's political.
Next thing he wakes up on a commercial ship run by the Merlin Company, where he meets Luciane, Rollo and Jack, fellow prisoners of an inconveniently political nature, and the four will be sent down to a planet where a research team has vanished.
Everything needed to survive and return is on the abandoned base, and all the company wants is to know what happened to twelve scientists.
Except the company is lying. They know what happened to the scientists. They're testing something, and the four are guineapigs. They're not supposed to come back. The space craft to return is not even at the base anymore.
But one discovery will change everything."
"The Oakhurst School of Magic is going places. They're applying for accreditation as an official institute of Pure Magic, and this will attract more students.
But in amongst preparations for the visiting accreditation committee, Mrs. Marsh's rabbit goes missing and Veronica gets roped into trying to find it.
Why does a wayward rabbit matter?
Well, it's a magical rabbit, and you can't have magic running loose in the school grounds if you want to impress the committee.
Scratch that, it's a clockwork rabbit and it symbolises everything Pure Magic is not, everything Mrs. Marsh and a couple of other teachers stand for. The one rabbit stands for a deep division in the school community.
The school's reputation, Veronica's job and the harmony of the Oakhurst village are on the line. How can Veronica make sure no one is harmed, not even a clockwork rabbit?"
"I've self-published for over ten years. I've seen the industry start, take off and mature. I've seen tactics, companies and people come and go.
However, over that time, a few important principles have always held true, but in the morass of advice of varying quality it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
In 2017, I wrote the Unboxed books, a series of four books about how to publish sustainably, and by that I mean in a manner so that you can keep doing it long-term, and how to use your mailing list to set up a self-perpetuating sales vehicle.
While the strategies haven't changed, many of the peripheral situations have. In short: we have far more and better tools, but far more competition, not only from other authors on the sales front, but also from services that entice us to spend ever more money before we publish.
This book is my ultimate guide to what you need, what you can try, and what is likely to be a waste of your money and time.
Over more than 500 pages I talk about the unvarnished experience of self-publishing and selling books while keeping control of my catalogue and not funding anyone's private jet in advertising costs.
I wrote this book to pay it forward to the community. I don't sell courses. I don't do affiliate marketing. I have no vested interest in anyone's self-publishing journey. Except for this: I want you to enjoy it."
"Veronica arrives with her class in the spellcraft tower of the Oakhurst School of Magic to teach the bunch of young--and not particularly well-behaved--teenagers about the school's ancient spellbook. But the book has gone missing from the cabinet!
Only a few people have the key to the tower, and very soon, the town's mayor will need the book to bless the start of the new council year.
Who has stolen the book?
Is it Barnaby the caretaker, and has he sold it on the black market?
Is it Jasper Bloom, a fellow teacher, and did he want to find a love spell?
Is it the cranky teacher Mr. Stone, who hates the mayor and would gladly make the council's life difficult?
And what can Veronica do if the truth potion she gives these people only complicates matters, backfires spectacularly and makes them say outrageous and embarrassing things?"
"A fisherwoman finds a dead man on a tiny offshore island, with no clue about how the man got there.
A camel driver deep in the northern desert rescues a man who speaks no known language, but is clearly well-educated.
An ancient sect that was considered close to extinct sucks in all the land's young people and creates tension that may well lead to a civil war.
And the old astrologer to the court, a weaselly and much-maligned relic of old times, might have hidden, for twenty years, evidence that those things are connected.
An epic saga of magic-turned-technology, power and discovery."
"After many years in space, Jonathan receives the message he's been dreading: his father has taken a fall. He can no longer live by himself and Jonathan's cousin has managed to get him into a care home.
Jonathan is an only child, he is no longer in contact with his mother, and a deep sense of guilt forces him to return to Earth to look after his father's wellbeing.
Except his father has a secret. He's in poor health and rather confused, so Jonathan finds it hard to get to the bottom of it.
It's not like he has a lot of time, since he has to look for a job, a task which is proving surprisingly hard. P
No one wants scientists, especially not if they've worked in space. But his father's secret shows how important it is to keep the work going. Not that governments will listen."
"Picture this: you've somehow come into the possession of a dragon (long story--you can read the previous book if you really want to know, but it's kinda embarrassing, so you don't need to).
And you need to return that dragon to the place it came from.
You've tried putting it on a truck--but it destroyed the truck.
You've tried putting it on the train--but it destroyed the carriage.
Now you've put the dragon in a warehouse while you figure out what to do, but--
You guessed it: the dragon destroys the warehouse.
Tell me, why wouldn't you trick some rich merchant into lending you the only thing you haven't yet tried: a boat.
Trouble is, the merchant's price is that you return an old artefact to the whale kingdom along the way.
Whales are not nice. They're very big. They're cranky. And, here is a secret: they hate dragons.
They especially hate dragons."
"When Perrin was so desperate that he applied for a job with the Bureau of Magic Abuse, there were two things he didn't realise. One, that he might actually get the job and two, that it would involve working with magic sniffers.
And what an annoyance the creatures are. They keep him up at night, need to feed on expensive fresh fruit and cause him embarrassment.
A new inn opens in town and patrons flock to it. Perrin checks it out for forbidden magic, finds none but something doesn’t add up. Is it the stranger, clearly a wizard, who makes little effort to cover up his illegal activities? Is it the owner of the new inn, who can’t possibly have accumulated enough money to buy the place? Or is it the unfailingly raving reviews?
Something fishy is going on, and his boss at the Bureau doesn't even want him to investigate. But Perrin has never let that stop him."
"One day when bullied Florian comes home from school, he finds a visitor in the caravan where he lives with his father.
The woman, who looks older than time, tells him that his father is king of Celestia and has seven days to renew the spell of protection over the land.
But his father has no interest in going back.
So Florian finds himself with a crown on his head, having to complete a task he has no idea how to do, on the way across the sea-bridge to Celestia.
He has some companions: his father three motorcycle-riding friends who insist they're elves, and his father's horse, which is a unicorn in disguise.
The problem is that the elves haven't been to Celestia for a long time either, and the horse has always hated Florian.
An extra problem is that the unofficial queen of Celestia, Florian's mother, doesn't want him back. She is under the control of powerful magical spirits.
Did I say Florian knows nothing about Celestia or about magic? And he has only seven days?"
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