book reviews |
book reviews |
Award winning, multi-genre author, Paul C. Thornton, introduces us to his newest book, “The Joy of Cruising”: The Joy of Cruising is about passion. Award-winning author Paul C. Thornton profiles travelers from all over the world with a passion for cruising and who act on that passion in creative and fascinating ways. (Just announced as medal winner Florida Author & Publishers Association President's Book Awards!) From a Grammy award winner, Poker Hall of Famer, winner of the TV series Last Comic Standing, to "ordinary" cruisers doing extraordinary things, The Joy of Cruising will fascinate anyone who has ever cruised, aspires to take a cruise, or just loves travel. The Joy of Cruising is an anthology that takes a look at the magic of cruising from the vantage point of travelers passionate about travel--a compendium of anecdotes, stories, and profiles of cruisers who have some unique or interesting perspective. It is not cruise-line specific, nor an industry overview, cruising guide/how-to, exposé or behind the scenes. The Joy of Cruising is a positive examination of why cruisers do what they do in the pursuit of their passion. Ready to “skydive” on Royal Caribbean Anthem of the Seas. I have never been on a cruise. I am now wishing that wasn’t the case. The author has a relaxed and comfortable writing style that I enjoyed a great deal. He taught me how passionate so many are about cruising. Observing their passion and enjoying their story through their eyes, has imparted a great deal to me. I didn’t understand how much fun is available on a cruise. The activities onboard and ashore are plentiful and quite exciting at times. I am that guy that loves museums and learning more about history, I like to read all the descriptions and plaques for displays. The lecture series on a cruise is right up my alley. Some of the themed cruises call to me a great deal also. Being on a cruise with a couple thousand people who share a similar enthusiasm sounds ever so interesting. A wonderful way to meet and make new friends. I award “The Joy of Cruising” 4.6 stars! You can buy this book:
https://smile.amazon.com/Joy-Cruising-Passionate-Cruisers-Fascinating-ebook https://www.goodreads.com/-the-joy-of-cruising https://www.barnesandnoble.com/the-joy-of-cruising-paul-c-thornton Available at many of the other major platforms also You can follow the author: https://twitter.com/joyofcruising http://www.thejoyofcruising.net http://www.facebook.com/TheJoyOfCruising http://www.instagram.com/thejoyofcruising http://www.amazon.com/author/paulthornton I reviewed the second book here: www.wordrefiner.com/book-reviews/cruising-interrupted I reviewed the third book here: www.wordrefiner.com/book-reviews/the-joy-of-cruising-again Copyright © 2020 Mark L. Schultz except for the author’s introduction
33 Comments
7/26/2020 03:54:36 pm
Wow, you’re good. I proofread the book a zillion times and you still found spelling errors! Seriously, thanks for the kind words. The book was a blast to write and it always pleases me when readers seem to find it as fun to read as it was to write.
Reply
Mark
7/26/2020 05:18:16 pm
You are very welcome, Paul. Spelling is my specialty. I did enjoy your book a lot.
Reply
7/26/2020 05:44:09 pm
I wrote my first book at 58 years old. It had nothing to do with cruising. When I woke up on the day I started the book, I had no plans to be an author. It was my daughters wedding day and I had to give a talk at the reception. She told me to just talk about memories of her growing up. In the process of doing so I shared things I had hidden for 30 years. The more I shared, the better I felt--it was liberating. When I was done there wasn't a dry eye in the room.I wanted to hold on to that feeling, so when I returned to my hotel I started writing my memoir. It is provocatively titled "White Man's Disease" but is not about race. It is about trauma I endured when my daughter was only 6, and she helped save my life. To understand the title you have to read it, haha! I won awards with that book and it made me want to be a writer.
Mark
7/26/2020 06:49:44 pm
Wow! That is a powerful story! What an amazing way to start a writing career! I love it.
Reply
7/26/2020 07:00:22 pm
I have a day job as an administrator at a university. Yet I consider myself a full-time writer because I carry an iPad with me every waking hour so I am always writing—or thinking about what I am going to write. I write because I love it but any writer would want to sell enough books to make $. I would tell any aspiring writer that if you want to write primarily to make $ you need to research the business thoroughly before taking that leap of writing a book. As the saying goes: don’t quit your day job...
Reply
Mark
7/26/2020 08:14:46 pm
I think you are in the company of most writers, especially fiction writers. Most do it for the love of the art or, as some put it, to keep the voices in their head mostly quiet. It seems that some writers have stories that demand to be told. I think others find the outlet ultimately satisfying for a variety of reasons. 7/26/2020 08:24:20 pm
No my work really doesn’t influence my writing. Given that my first book was a memoir, my various work settings and situations were integral throughout my life and reflected in the book. My cover is a photo a friend took in Venice when I was writing the book. He posted the photo on Facebook and I asked if I could use it. Got a little criticism in that there is no cruise ship in the photo!
Reply
Mark
7/26/2020 08:55:02 pm
You could have photoshopped a cruise ship in, but maybe cruise ships aren't allowed that close, you would know better than I.
Reply
7/26/2020 09:12:11 pm
The title was inspired by an iconic 70’s bestseller called The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort! My next book is called Cruising Interrupted. It is a sequel to The Joy of Cruising; started off as More Joy of Cruising and then the pandemic hit and decimated cruising. It will still be fun and upbeat but obviously will reflect the pandemic’s influence on cruising. It is dedicated to the hundreds of thousands who’ve died due Covid-19, included several dozen on cruise ships.
Mark
7/27/2020 09:56:47 am
Cruising Interrupted is certainly an appropriate title. The world has been interrupted.
Reply
7/27/2020 12:07:23 pm
It is not hard to be fun & upbeat when it comes to cruising; it is hard to write with “Joy” in the title when there is so much death and misery in the world. Cruising will survive; for awhile I was worried. I was reading too many articles like “ Meet the Insane People Still Planning Cruise Ship Vacations!” But the spirit of passionate cruisers on social media helped lift my own spirits. I believe worst case is cruising won’t be totally the experience we are used to until 2022.
Reply
Mark
7/27/2020 03:18:01 pm
It's very true, you cannot believe everything you read on the internet. I appreciate your optimistic outlook and I share it. When there is a demand for a product or service, people will find a way to satisfy that demand. The cruise ships may be idled, but they will sail again. I have no doubt about that. It's basic human nature.
Reply
7/27/2020 08:51:41 pm
The Joy of Cruising is my 2nd book. My first is called White Man’s Disease which is a memoir about trauma, recovery, and resilience. It won several awards, as has the The Joy of Cruising. I am most proud of White Man’s Disease winning the grand prize in the North Street Book Prize in creative nonfiction/memoir. It was a judged, rigorous competition (with a decent monetary award🤓)
Reply
Mark
7/27/2020 09:21:10 pm
Congratulations on those awards! That doesn't happen to but a few and not everyday.
Reply
7/28/2020 12:12:27 pm
Funny thing is I used to read mainly fiction; among my favorite books are The Firm, and Misery. As a student I loved creative writing and was told I was good at it. But as I have gotten older for some reason I have gravitated to nonfiction; that is all I read and my 3 books I have/am writing are nonfiction (although I write in the genre known as creative nonfiction.)
Reply
Mark
7/28/2020 01:37:18 pm
That is quite interesting. I think we all go through phases and seasons in our lives. The one thing for certain is that they change for the most part.
Reply
7/29/2020 12:16:29 am
Didn’t go the agent/querying process because I didn’t start writing until I was 58. So, I felt “time was of the essence” and went straight to the self-publishing route. KU was not something that appealed to me but I didn’t know a whole lot about it. I will consider it going forward.
Reply
Mark
7/29/2020 09:51:52 am
I can appreciate your thoughts about time. The querying process can go on for a long time. Amazon has altered the publishing world so much. The traditional publishing industry has suffered a tremendous contraction. It remains to be seen how small it will get. Their profit margins have shrunk so much, they don't take very many chances on an unknown author any more. There is no large advance for the unknown author, also little to no promotional efforts are made on the author's behalf. Plus, the unknown author loses control of their book and intellectual property rights for a period of time.
Reply
7/29/2020 01:08:42 pm
I think the two biggest advantages of self-publishing are: 1. As alluded to earlier, self-publishing can significantly shorten the time from writing to getting your book in the hands of readers; that was critical to me starting to write so late in life; 2. Purely speculative having never been traditionally published; I believe that as a self-publisher you will work much harder to market your book. For one thing you have to try to recover whatever investment you made to get your book self-published and that can be significant. I think self-published books can the same quality as traditional, but it depends on a writers willingness to do the work to make that happen, and their financial resources (you get what you pay for), i.e. editing, cover design, proofreading, print quality, etc.
Reply
Mark
7/29/2020 01:19:02 pm
Sometimes a traditional publisher will wait a year or longer to release a book. You make a good point.
Reply
7/29/2020 10:18:42 pm
The one piece of advice I would have for a new writer is: ensure that you are passionate about you are writing. If so, instead of struggling to find time to write, you will make time to write.
Reply
Mark
7/29/2020 10:46:02 pm
Good advice for a new writer. Write the story that wants to be told the most.
Reply
7/30/2020 03:56:46 pm
For White Man’s Disease, I chose Book Brokers of Florida, based on a referral. They were very helpful to me as a first time author: a major editorial recommendation regarding ordering of the narrative was powerful, and their cover design was killer. For The Joy of Cruising, I used Bookbaby, a major self-publishing firm. I won a book award for my 1st book, and among the prizes was a few hundred $ off a self-pub package at Bookbaby. More importantly, I needed global distribution/printing as TJOC had more of a global scope (a third of the book’s features were from UK, Australia, and New Zealand.)
Reply
Mark
7/30/2020 04:30:50 pm
That was a great prize you won! Not all writing contests are so well funded. A few of them are downright shady in one way or another. The worst grab an author's intellectual property rights and never let go. Anne R. Allen writes one of my favorite blogs. She has list of honest and worthwhile contests at the end of a lot of her blogs.
Reply
7/31/2020 08:09:46 am
As a fledgling self-publisher (which means self-marketer!), winning book contests can help in marketing. But as you alluded to earlier there is a whole cottage industry of shady contests designed to separate eager writers from their money and enrich the contest organizers. They don’t provide judge feedback, rewards with any value, and exorbitant entry fees. That would be the biggest unethical practice for me.
Reply
Mark
8/1/2020 09:32:54 am
You are right, being a self-publisher requires you to wear many hats or rent the hats you don't have.
Reply
8/2/2020 11:50:43 am
My favorite two books are both nonfiction and by the same author—Alex Haley: Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Roots. FDR by Jean Edward Smith, Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela, And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts each left a lasting impression on me. I know they’re all heavy nonfiction but I have enjoyed several fiction books by Stephen King, John Grisham, and in my first own first book, the medical thriller Coma by Robin Cook had a brief but significant storyline.
Reply
Mark
8/2/2020 01:18:44 pm
I recall reading Roots as a young adult. It blew me away on multiple levels! Coma was quite good also.
Reply
8/3/2020 12:52:26 pm
I’m probably not the best writer to answer the question about tapping into the emotions of characters because I write nonfiction. However, that certainly was important in my first book which was a memoir with the inciting incident having occurred over 30 years ago. It was important to tap into the emotions of the main character, me, so that readers would care about reading the story. My life turned out differently—mainly because of that aforementioned inciting incident!
Reply
Mark
8/3/2020 02:50:59 pm
You certainly stirred some of my emotions while reading your book. I really want to go on a cruise now.
Reply
8/4/2020 10:19:38 pm
The Joy of Cruising was a bit long at 352 pages so I guess an over-writer, and I am consciously trying to edit out superfluous narrative as I go along on my work-in-progress, Cruising Interrupted.
Reply
Mark
8/4/2020 10:27:26 pm
You profiled quite a few cruisers in Joy of Cruising. It did not feel long to me. I enjoyed it to the end.
Reply
8/5/2020 07:46:28 am
Thanks Mark. This was a lot of fun. I love talking about my books and discussing writing. I am glad a non cruiser found some fulfillment in The Joy of Cruising. I have actually used that theme in promotion before, I.e. you don’t have to be a cruiser to enjoy TJOC. It’s just fun, fascinating stories. Stay safe all!
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Who am I?An avid reader, typobuster, and the Hyper-Speller. I am a husband, father, and grandfather. Archives
October 2024
Categories |
|
"I'm very pleased with all your efforts. Twitter promotion and proofreading were beyond what I expected with a book review. Your suggestions throughout the process of refining both books helped me immensely. I look forward to working with you again." A.E.H Veenman “Dial QR for Murder” and “Prepped for the Kill”
|