Caina & the Ghosts: your opinion needed!
After seven and a half years of marketing books, I’ve found that it works best when I can describe a book in a single phrase as “X meets Y”, where X and Y are both well-known movies or books or games.
For example, I’ve had great success describing FROSTBORN as “WARCRAFT meets THE LORD OF THE RINGS.” Now, if you’ve read the books, you know that isn’t strictly accurate, but it does give you a good thumbnail view of what the book would be about. And if you liked the Warcraft games and you enjoyed THE LORD OF THE RINGS, there’s at least a reasonably good chance you’re going to like FROSTBORN.
For CLOAK GAMES, I’ve had good luck describing it as “THE DRESDEN FILES meets SHADOWRUN.” I didn’t even know Shadowrun existed until after I wrote the ninth CLOAK GAMES book, but once it was pointed out to me, I saw the resemblance. Granted, CLOAK GAMES is only a little like THE DRESDEN FILES and a little like SHADOWRUN. (Unlike SHADOWRUN, there’s no cyberpunk element, probably because the Elves deliberately suppress both information technology and powerful corporations.) But in the “X meets Y” formula, THE DRESDEN FILES meets SHADOWRUN does a really good job of describing CLOAK GAMES in a snapshot.
That said, I’m not sure how to do an “X meets Y” formula for THE GHOSTS.
So, what is your opinion? If you were to make an “X meets Y” comparison for Caina’s books, what would you pick?
-JM
I spent way too long trying to come up with something. The biggest challenge is that the series is so long and varied that a straight forward X meets Y comparison is almost impossible. There are other novels/games one could use to describe The Ghost, but none are big enough ip’s to really matter when trying to describe The Ghosts. The series genres shifts from story arc to story arc. At the end, I could not come up with anything satisfying.
Throwaway answer. The Ghosts, Assassin’s Creed meets Tomb Raider, with espionage, sorcerers, and geopolitics.
That is a good answer!
And GHOST IN THE TOWER is going to have another genre shift. 🙂
Black Widow in the world of Conan?
That’s really good!
I like Black Widow. But maybe Black Widow meet Gladiator (the movie)?
I really like that comparison! The trouble is that Gladiator doesn’t have any fantasy elements, so I think “Black Widow meets Conan” clicks better.
Pop culture, she says to herself. Something well known.
Yeah, have to lean toward Black Widow meets Conan, as long as you don’t want something like “Black Widow meets Gladiator — with magic!”
“Black Widow meets Conan – with magic!” sounds like a good description.
Don’t people nowadays know that Conan had magic?
sigh
I’m only familiar with Black Widow from the movies not the comics, not stealthy enough in my mind. I would go with something like Alias or Dark Angel tv series meet the Solomon Kane movie, but I’m still early in the series, just on the first book of Ghost Exile.
Catwoman meets Codex Alera, but that works more for the second series.
I like that one! I might try “Catwoman in the world of Conan the Barbarian.”
Black Widow is good, but I’d probably use The Twin Towers instead of Conan. There are more immortal wizards and battles deciding empires.
Or maybe “Catwoman meets the Lord of the Rings”, since more people have heard of LoTR.
Im going to chime in here; the world of the Ghosts is far more Robert E. Howard than J.R.R. Tolkien, which is something I really enjoy about it. It’s pulp sword and sorcery in a late antiquity fantasy world, not Tolkien’s brand of High Fantasy. It’s gritty, cosmopolitan, violent, sexy, and intelligent.
I agree. Caina’s stories are more sword-and-sorcery than high fantasy.