Welcome to our Blogger of the Month feature where we at Read Indie Fantasy want to celebrate the bloggers, booktubers, and booktokers that review and support indie authors! It’s these amazing bloggers who volunteer their time championing authors, and without them, it would be a lot harder for self-published and indie authors to spread the word about their books. In short, the blogger-author relationship is a special one, and we appreciate reviewers and bloggers as they appreciate awesome new books!
So without further ado, let’s introduce our next Blogger of the Month for March, Queen Terrible Timy the Kickass of the Queen’s Book Asylum!
Timy is the almighty (and just) ruler of the Queen’s Book Asylum, which is an amazing blog packed full of reviews and unique features, some of which Timy herself highlights below. The Asylum showcases a variety of trad and indie books, and has been a staunch supporter of indie and self-published authors through reviews, spotlights, and interviews, as well as taking part in the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off as a judge for many years in a row, including this year!
I was lucky to meet Timy in person at BristolCon and Worldcon Glasgow, who bribed me with a goody bag of treats. Timy is definitely one of the coolest people I’ve met in the blogging community, so take a visit to the Asylum and learn what it’s all about!
Please tell us a little about yourself and your blog:
I’m Timy, born and raised in beautiful Budapest, Hungary, where I still live. I have a degree in History and an MA in History of Religions – although I work in a completely different field. Anyway. I love jewelry, I love rock and roll and I like to work away on DIY projects in my free time. I also run Queen’s Book Asylum that just celebrated its 7th birthday in March. I’ve been judging SPFBO since the 4th edition with only one year out when I needed a break due to burnout. I occasionally beta read which I enjoy a lot more than reviewing. And I’m slowly finding my way back to writing again after a very long break.
What made you become a book blogger?
Funny story, that. I’ve been planning to take a step back from reading to focus on writing (which would have been the smart idea, in hindsight), but just a month earlier I had a good chat with an indie author friend of mine on my birthday, and by that time I also somehow ended up in Benedict Patrick’s inner ARC readers cycle. Thanks to that and another friend, I had two indie ARCs (one by A.J. Norfield and one by Mike Shel) falling in my lap and I thought to myself, well, shit, these guys deserve better than my shitty GR reviews. Simply put, I wanted to have a bigger platform to help promote these books. I had a half-assed attempt at a blog not that long before in Hungarian, but that lasted for like a month. I didn’t have higher expectations than that for QBA…
What do you write about on your blog?
We mostly have reviews ranging from SFF to mystery. I have an eclectic taste in books and I always wanted the blog to mirror that. Although we really mostly do fantasy. We also have a weekly feature called Music Monday I’m hosting with Bjorn. We also do cover reveals, interviews, and occasionally fun features such as What the Hungarian?!, Stuck in the Pages, To Be Continued, etc. Though, in the past year or two these really got neglected, which makes me sad. I also sometimes write big rambly discussion posts when something’s on my mind, but that’s also something I would have liked to do more.
How often do you update your blog?
Really depends. I’m trying to do one or two posts a week aside from Music Monday, but recently I’ve lacked the motivation to focus on writing anything that’s not my own fiction. In our peek time, we had 4-5 posts a week. But it’s hard to keep that up with everyone on the team being busy with life, and we also have SPFBO to contend with.
What are your goals as a book blogger?
If you asked me this back in 2018, I would have said that I want to become one of the most popular blogs out there. I had grand visions, I wanted it to be something magazine-like with features, articles, and everything. But my ultimate goal was to become big (i.e. important) enough to be invited to judge in SPFBO. The first I never quite realised, the second, well…let’s just say I was super lucky to be invited as a guest judge in my first year as a blogger, and for some reason, Mark decided I was good enough to do it with my own team the next year when I applied.
These days I’d say that my goal is to somehow drag my ass to the 10th anniversary of the blog (only 3 more years to go!), and my secret dream is to celebrate that milestone with an anthology including some of the absolutely talented author friends I made over the years. Maybe even do a Kickstarter to finance it, because I’m certainly not made of money.
What is your favourite thing about being a book blogger?
The free books. No, seriously. I wouldn’t be able to afford to read as many books as I’m doing now if it weren’t for the ARCs and the generous copies I’m getting from the authors to review or as a gift. Oh and the book sales. In Hungary, English language books are not that easy to come by unless they are super popular, and even then they are not cheap. Thankfully, there are some online bookshops that ship free to Hungary so that definitely helps when I really crave a physical book and my travels to book events, of course.
My other favorite thing is the friends I made over the years and the opportunities I got, especially beta reading for some of my favorite authors. And visiting places I’ve never been to thanks to the cons. I learned a lot about myself over the years, I became more open and forged true friendships that are not just about the books, or writing, or anything related. I found people who actually like me for myself. There is probably something very wrong with them 😂
What are some of your favourite posts you’ve created? Feel free to link them below and tell us why you loved making them!
Do you have any idea what you are asking of me?! We have over 1300 posts published, how do I narrow them down??? *takes a deep breath* Okay, I think we can count reviews out, I hate them (sorry to my lovely team, your reviews are all great, I promise, I mostly hate mine).
One of the discussion posts I wrote. This one was our 1000th post and I got all my feelings and experiences about reviewing: https://queensbookasylum.com/2022/12/21/lets-talk-about-reviewing/
To Be Continued is probably my favorite feature on the blog. We had a couple of stories written over the years, and the first three are probably my favorites, they are titled The New Song, The Butcher Queen, and The Enchanted Forest (this one I started off myself!). You can find the first episodes of all stories featured on this page: https://queensbookasylum.com/features/to-be-continued/
Last but not least, here are a couple of my favorite interviews I had with the coolest people I know:
- T. Frohock: https://queensbookasylum.com/2021/02/08/interview-with-t-frohock/
- Tom Parker: https://queensbookasylum.com/2020/03/12/interview-with-tom-parker/
- RJ Barker: https://queensbookasylum.com/2020/02/27/interview-with-r-j-barker/
- Peter McLean: https://queensbookasylum.com/2019/07/02/interview-with-peter-mclean/
What does your TBR look like?
GR says I have 519 books on my TBR which is more or less accurate. I organized it back in December, so it shouldn’t be too off, although I’m pretty sure I’ve got a couple of books I haven’t added yet. Also side note, I usually only add the first or next book of a series, partly to keep the list manageable, and partly to save myself the trouble of adding the books and then removing them if I decide not to read them after all.
How do you decide what to read or review next?
Depends on a few things. I learned very early on that filling up my reading schedule with requests and ARCs will never work for me. I need at least some freedom to pick up books on a whim, so I try to schedule only 2-3 books and give myself the freedom to pick anything else. Now, that works in theory, but sometimes it’s just impossible between SPFBO and ARCs to have any freedom. And that’s where audiobooks became life savers for me. That’s where I can pick books to my heart’s content without worrying about deadlines and reviews, and all that stuff.
I have a spreadsheet where I have a tab for my monthly plans so I can see when my ARCs are due and it helps me to plan ahead and avoid completely messing my schedule up. It’s a good way to try to avoid burnout too. At the beginning of the year, I also put together a shortened list of TBR I’d like to focus on (including upcoming releases I already know about), but that’s more of a guide. A lot depends on what I feel like reading next.
As for reviewing, I always try to review SPFBO books and ARCs, of course, and indie books in general. Outside of that, I’m pretty lax, as I hate writing reviews. Yes, I said it. I really do. Unless I have really strong feelings and opinions, I don’t bother. In the beginning, I tried to write more reviews, but, this was always my least favorite part of blogging and after my burnout, I tried to give myself more room to breathe.
Finally, what are some of your favourite indie or self-published books?
I’ll never not stan the Yarnsworld series by Benedict Patrick. It’s amazing. I also really love his latest Card Mage series, but I’m biased, as I’m one of his regular beta readers, so… And! I got to meet him in Glasgow at last!
I’m also a big fan of Craig Schaefer, especially her Daniel Faust series. If you like UF, it’s hands down better than the Dresden Files (mind you, I only read book 1 and never looked back, take it how you will). Since we are at UF, Phil Williams’ Dyer Street Punk Witches is also a must-read.
If Norse mythology is more your cup of tea, then I highly recommend Alex S. Bradshaw’s Windborn Sagas novels (there are two, both standalone) or Bjorn Larssen’s books he writes both dark(ish) fantasy and humorous ones, so you can find whatever you like.
For historical fiction/romance, I would go for the Stariel series by A.J. Lancaster (my personal favorite is book 5, A Rake of His Own, which also works as a standalone and I read it like 5 times at this point). In the same vein, my most recent favorite is The Reanimator Mysteries by Kara Jorgensen.
And if you want thriller/police procedurals, then don’t look any further than Michael Dylan’s PI Simon Wise series – the audiobook is also highly recommended.
Where to find Queen Timy:
- Website: QueensbookAsylum.com
- Bluesky: @queensbookasylum.com
- Instagram: @queensasylum
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