Giveaway: The Queen of Ieflaria

[soc_puppet]

It has been entirely too long since I did a giveaway. Let's fix that!

I'll be giving away a total of ten copies of effiecalvin's The Queen of Ieflaria, the first book in her Tales of Inthya romantic fantasy series; I'm giving away three (3) here, and seven (7) on Tumblr. You can find more information about the book over here, from a super fun infographic made by the author (image description available in the most recent reblog), and/or you can look under the cut for some of the cool things that are in it:

* Queer main characters
* Basically everyone is queer, actually?
* Canon nonbinary characters, including gods
* Dragons!
* Princesses
* Who are going to get married to other princesses!
* Fun worldbuilding
* Names you won’t be able to pronounce but that’s okay because you’re probably not reading them out loud anyway (and if you want to, there is an audiobook available Edit: A Dreamwidth reader pointed out to me that this reads as xenophobic at best, and possibly outright racist, so I would like to take a moment to apologize for not thinking it out more thoroughly before posting it, and to anyone who I harmed in doing so. I clearly have some important thinking to do in my own time, and probably research as well. I'm leaving the original text up in strikethrough because it's important to me that I own my mistake rather than trying to erase it. End Edit.
* Gender transitioning magic (only mentioned in passing in this book, but very well thought out and affirming)
* Unicorns!
* Okay, just one unicorn, but it’s an important unicorn, and it’s implied there are others ...elsewhere
* Language that won’t make you talk like an old-timey person every time you put the book down (which you won’t want to do)
* More dragons!
* A happy ending for the dragons!
* Also the one princess is escaping from an abusive home life that isn’t detailed too much in this book and is absolutely going to get a happy ending with people who treat her right


I'm willing to go into more depth about just about anything if you have any concerns. I've also done my best to list the content warnings for the book (to the best of my memory) in the tags.

Giveaway Rules:

1) You must be a member of the queerly_beloved community
2) Comment on this post to enter
3) You can also Like the Tumblr post to enter (link will go up shortly)
4) You must have a working e-mail you're willing to share with me (preferably via private message, but I'm willing to work with you)
5) Only one entry per person per site (Dreamwidth or Tumblr)
6) I will select the winners via random number generator for Queerly Beloved first, and then Tumblr
7) You can enter the giveaway at both posts, but you can only win once; this means that, if you win the book here, you'll be out of the running at Tumblr
8) Giveaway winners will be drawn on November 2nd, 2020

If you have any questions, please ask them in this post, and I'll do my best to clear things up!

Want to start reading this series right now but also want to wait to see if you win a copy of the first book? Good news! The second book in the series, Daughter of the Sun, can be read on its own as well! They each work as a great introduction to the series, but starting in the third, they start involving more characters from previous books, and it's more helpful to read them first.

Edit: Nov 2nd, 2020: Okay, I am not picking just three people out of four. I went and bought an extra copy; everybody wins!

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Ooo!

[wyld_dandelyon]

Sounds interesting! I'd love to enter.

[foreverdawning]

Your post says they'll be drawn October 2nd. Did you mean November?

[soc_puppet]

Ack! You're right, I did! Aaahhhh, and I did it on the Tumblr post, too 🤦‍♀️ Well, it's fixed here, at least.

Anyway, does this count as an entry for you?

[foreverdawning]

Yes, this is me officially putting my metaphorical ticket down on the table. The book sounds very much my speed.

[silveradept]

The descriptions and advertisements make this sound like a book that I would be interested in reading, contest victory or no, so thank you for bringing it to my attention all the same. (But also, contest entry.)

[fred_mouse]

Not an entry, but I wanted to note that

Names you won’t be able to pronounce but that’s okay because you’re probably not reading them out loud anyway

makes me very uncomfortable. It comes across as very othering, and I see it as a racist dog-whistle

As a separate and much less relevant comment -- I'm an entirely aural reader, so if I don't know how a name is pronounced, I trip over it a lot. It matters if names are not accessible in some way. When those names are from cultural groups other than my own, I can usually find a pronunciation guide, but when it is done for 'fantastical' stories, I side-eye what the goal of the author was.

[soc_puppet]

This is a very good point, thank you for bringing it up! I'm going to have to do some thinking on what the best course of action would be for me from here (aside from doing some serious thinking on my own time). I'm currently leaning towards either flat-out deleting that one, or putting that part in strikethrough, followed by a general apology, explanation, and thank-you to you for calling me out immediately after, but welcome suggestions. I'm afraid the horse may be well out of the barn for the Tumblr version of this post, though I can at least make edits and reblog with the apology, as I did with the date correction.

IIRC, the author basically keysmashed to try and come up with generic fantasy-ish names and has joked herself about how difficult they are to pronounce as a result. I'm not sure how that plays in with what you've pointed out, really.

As to the "much less relevant" comment, I had problems with the mental pronunciation myself; I'll admit the "Don't worry, you're probably not reading this out loud!" was at least in part an attempt at self-soothing my very loud Anxiety Brain, but clearly it was not well thought out.

[soc_puppet]

Thanks again for bringing this to my attention; I went with the strikethrough-and-apology method. I will definitely be doing some extra thinking whenever I try to do bulleted lists like this going forward.