• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Review: The Battle Over Britain, by Simon Brading

The use of springs for power is interesting; one comes across their use in books written at the turn of the 20th century as a 'they can do anything' plot device, usually to explain why Indiana Jones-style elaborate traps in old houses can work after a long time.
 
The use of springs for power is interesting; one comes across their use in books written at the turn of the 20th century as a 'they can do anything' plot device, usually to explain why Indiana Jones-style elaborate traps in old houses can work after a long time.

So kind of like mid-20th century comic book radiation?

(As for the book itself, looks good-and the cover also looks great. I love the Red Army-esque "minimalist but effective" cover style)
 
The Great thing about The Battle Over Britain, and Brading as an author, is that there's this real sense of enthusiasm and fun to be found inside the book. This is obviously a passion project and that really comes through; the technology is well-explained in good detail, and the characters well realised as well. And I mean, when was the last piece of AH that was just fun to read without any horrifying or dystopian elements?
 
You don't read much of my Sergeant Frosty stuff, do you.

Like the good man said, "without horrifying or dystopian elements". Heaven only knows a poor sod who's half-underground in a foreign land can be both to the faint of heart, especially if someone did the rest of the country a misservice and brought him back.

(As for the book itself, looks good-and the cover also looks great. I love the Red Army-esque "minimalist but effective" cover style)

I honestly can't see the resemblance to anything vaugely Russian in that cover unless we went back to the Tear, honestly. It's too busy to be early Communist, too organized to be late Communist, and the whole affair just screams of the time when royalty still meant something. Still, I wish we had covers that well done- it would certainly help move sales I'd think. As it is, Art Deco has been rather dead for the last seventy years.
 
Like the good man said, "without horrifying or dystopian elements". Heaven only knows a poor sod who's half-underground in a foreign land can be both to the faint of heart, especially if someone did the rest of the country a misservice and brought him back.



I honestly can't see the resemblance to anything vaugely Russian in that cover unless we went back to the Tear, honestly. It's too busy to be early Communist, too organized to be late Communist, and the whole affair just screams of the time when royalty still meant something. Still, I wish we had covers that well done- it would certainly help move sales I'd think. As it is, Art Deco has been rather dead for the last seventy years.

This is hardly the correct forum to bring these concerns up; but if I may make a few points about the SLP covers, which I've found to be uniformly excellent and of a very high quality:
  • Most covers not produced by mainstream publishers or publishers with a large pot of money are crap, to be brutally honest, especially from indie authors who don't have a budget or an eye for design. Mr Brading's cover is good quality and distinct but still quite basic
  • The SLP covers meet every requirement to attract readers to their titles. They are a) cleanly laid out b) attractive to the eye with a minimalist layout and c) are distinctive. Even scrolling through the Kindle listings at a rapid pace, I can always pick out an SLP title. Do you know how difficult that is even for the big publishers to achieve? I'll be damned if I can pick out a TOR publication by sight, for example; perhaps a Penguin due to the, well, penguin
  • You're also very lucky, if I may say, to have a publisher that devotes that amount of time and budget to covers such as SLP have - do you know how many publishers I see, in multiple genres, who think that some vaguely related copyright-free image is enough for a cover?
 
I need to finally get things together and do my analysis of AH cover art and what makes a good and bad piece of cover art. Probably it an article as I wouldn't want to make it seem like an attack on any author or publishers, but an internal forum thread would be a good thing to help dispel myths about cover art.
 
Honestly I'm not sure there's anything SLP could do to improve sales that it isn't already doing. I think the biggest reason for a small amount of sales is that it's an indie publisher in a niche genre.

We could always take the old standard of quid pro quo advertising, but that means we need to find more friends to do that with. Professional connections should always be a thing to look for and cultivate.
 
We could always take the old standard of quid pro quo advertising, but that means we need to find more friends to do that with. Professional connections should always be a thing to look for and cultivate.

I'm sorry you feel this way, but this isn't the thread for taking up alleged grievances about SLP. If you have concerns, please raise them privately with whoever you need to discuss it with
 
I'd seen this around before and not thought too much of it on an Amazon browse, but this review's got me interested. (I mean, except that "fun and not dystopian", but I'm sure I can stomach this "nice things" THIS once)

I need to finally get things together and do my analysis of AH cover art and what makes a good and bad piece of cover art. Probably it an article as I wouldn't want to make it seem like an attack on any author or publishers, but an internal forum thread would be a good thing to help dispel myths about cover art.

I would like to read that article. Cover art is definitely a thing I've bitten my fingernails off worrying about with self-publishing, and you see a lot of, er, 'stock photoshopped' covers out there in the wild because people can't afford much else. The 'in universe' aviation patch for this book is a really good budget-conscious idea (and you can have different patches on sequels!), it's not the most exciting and eye-catching for me but what it isn't, is a photoshopped plane with the roundel slightly altered and a sepia filter.
 
Back
Top