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If someone you knew liked both T. Kingfisher's Swordheart and Melissa McShane's Company of Strangers series, what other books/authors would you suggest to them?

(No books by Kingfisher, Vernon, McShane. I'm basically doing cover/genre research here and I'm aware of the other books by the writers. :D)

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Maybe Bujold's Paladin of Souls. Note, I haven't read Company of Strangers (but just bought it because I'm curious what the similiarity is with Swordheart). I'm basing that on the theme of older women starting adventures and finding love in fantasy novels. Maybe Hambly's Bride of the Rat God (though that's not a recent book at all).

Thanks!

Company of Strangers manages to hit me right in my Extruded Fantasy Product feels: with shades of fantasy RPGs, it's a ragtag group of adventurers, each with their own specialty, in a world where some sort of magical event happened in the past that destroyed a bunch of stuff and they go on expeditions to dig up artifacts from said world, while also dealing with their own pasts and lots of found family feels.

In other words it hits several of the points I'm hitting with Deadfall so it's therefore a comparable. XD Swordheart has fewer direct correspondences with DF than CoS, but it's got an ineffable feel that I'm reaching for with DF.

Also, they show up in each other's also-boughts on Amazon, or at least they do for me: no telling what algorithm Amazon is using for those, so they might be different for you.

For cheerful band of rogues in extruded fantasy, maybe Patrick Weekes's Palace Job books? Certainly read as a fun D&D adventure.

I keep wanting amazon's also boughts to be more helpful to me. It usually is a list of the books by the same author, or books by authors that I already know I don't like.

I would second Bujold, both Five Gods and Subtle Knife. Also, if this was a reader, I’d rec Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Spiderlight as similarly fantasy-tropes-with-a-twist and interesting characters. Mmmmaybe Brandon Sanderson, though that’s more on the “interesting worldbuilding and twisted tropes” than the “realistic down to earth characters you can root for” side.

HOWEVER

For market research, the problem with these is that they don’t actually fit together in a clearly defined niche, and they’re all long-established trad pub authors who sell based on name, so tend to get truly weird covers (I have no idea who Bujold has offended at her publishers, but she’s had some really bad covers over the years). Kingfisher/Vernon is making no attempt to look like anything except her own highly distinctive stylised ( and often very plain) covers. Sanderson has covers to appeal to readers of epic fantasy. Tchaikovsky gets covers on his fantasy to try to appeal to readers of his more popular SF (except for Shadows of the Apt, which has very epic fantasy covers).

Soooo, I think you need to dig through also boughts looking for the smaller more recent self pub names. And tell us what they are when you find them. :-)

P.S. use yasiv for researching also boughts. It is suuuper useful

Oh lord yes. "I see you've purchased Blade of the Immortal book 12! Would you be interested in books 1-11?!"

Then you might like The Afterwards or The Empress of Timbra. (I should really, really stop ragging on that second book's conventionality given how many times I've reread it already.)

Alternatively, you could try Rachel Manija and Sherwood Smith's Stranger series, but it's been forever and there's still no concluding fourth book. (It's technically post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but c'mon, it's fantasy with superpowers.)

Thanks! I'm just starting to dig into this, because I have finally accepted that it may actually be good enough that someone would want to purchase it. XD But I am poking about trying to find the niche here: yeah, there's a strand of romance, but it's not Fantasy Romance, and I don't consider it Epic Fantasy because it doesn't have a wide scope, but what the hell do I know: Swordheart is doing well in Epic Fantasy. The Penric novellas may be somewhat like it, with character-centered fantasy but yes: Bujold. I just keep falling into Fantasy Romance self-pubbed books as I click through following the trails of also-boughts.

An author who's popping up in the also-boughts who isn't Fantasy Romance is Michael McClung, specifically the series beginning with The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids, which appears to be going strong and has spun off at least one other series. I bought the first one back in 2015 but never read it, so I'll have to give it a go and see what it's all about.

I don't expect Deadfall to be a bestseller, but I'd like to find its audience SOMEHOW! At least I've got time: I'm not on a specific deadline, and I'd prefer to get book 2 written before worrying about posting book 1. Once I've got it edited I may ask for people who are willing to read it and advise me on what they think it is.

(The cover thing is because I'm currently goofing off while procrastinating on a task and can't do much else besides make lists and Pinterest boards, so I'm collecting lists of possible artists on Artstation to inquire in 6 months or however long it is when I'm ready to do that [I'm planning on doing the actual design but not the art]. I know this is jumping the gun, but it's a decent goofing-off activity. :D)

Edited (finished a sentence) 2019-09-30 20:52 (UTC)

Who's the author on The Afterwards? There's a couple of possibilities I'm seeing.

Thanks!

Sorry, that's The Afterward, no s.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36998181-the-afterward?from_search=true

Oddly, the prime category I am seeing coming from Kingfisher's works on yasiv is "books published by Tor"!

Books coming from The Thief Who... seem to be GRIMDARK, but I think the real thread is "authors popular on the r/fantasy subreddit".

Thank you!

/stalks comments for recs

Maybe also Gaie Sebold's Babylon Steel? It's pretty hard to think of fantasy books that aren't marketed as romance with non-world saving stakes. Which says something about the genre.

There's more romance in the offing, and the stakes are slightly higher, but I'm wondering if Miranda Honfleur's Blade &n Rose would be a halfway decent match? I bounced off partway through, alas. :/

Hello! I'm here via James Nicoll's reading feed.

I haven't read Kingfisher, but check out Finders and Mighty Good Road by Melissa Scout. Possibly the Scott and Jo Graham series too.

Edited (Typo) 2019-10-01 03:52 (UTC)

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