Musings

[telophase]

I've been reading--well, starting--a ton of books from Instafreebie lately, looking for that one book in a hundred that intrigues me enough to be an insta-buy. And so, so many of them start so, so boring. I have read paragraphs and pages and, a few times, chapters* of bland, indistinguishable characters dispensing worldbuilding or story setup to each other before the plot kicks in.

* First, I read fast. Second, in the chapters cases it's because there was something about the book's description/blurb that caught my attention enough to think that it might be worth it. Alas, optimistic as I am, it has so far never been worth it.

I'm wondering if some of these authors are the same ones asking on Reddit and other places why their books haven't taken off and how they can get reviews: they've dropped the money for a good cover, they've set up a mailing list, they're giving the first book away for free in order to lure readers in to climb a pricing ladder from free to $.99 to $1.99 to $2.99, they're running ads in places, trading blog appearances, maintaining a social media presence...and nothing's translating to sales.

They're doing all those things right, and yet they forgot to make sure their book was good.

This thought brought to you by a couple of Reddit comments from a post asking about what to avoid in the opening chapter. The first comment below is responding to someone asking what "opening the story too soon" meant:

If you were opening at a bar, you don’t need to talk about the staff wiping down tables, doing the drink order and then unlocking the doors to let the protagonist inside. Your reader knows that bar staff have set up, so your protagonist can walk in and start that bar fight without all the preamble.

It was followed up by someone posting this:

The man arrived with a purpose. No one knew what that purpose was until he punched the hostess in the face.

No shit, I'd totally read on.

Comments

[larryhammer]

I'd read that, too, even though we still don't know his purpose (for what reason is he punching her?).

I've said it before, and I'll say it many times more: not doing anything wrong is not the same as doing enough right. If your storytelling is good, you can even be a bad writer, but if you don't have that then never mind.

(I found exactly one author worth finishing the book through Instafreebie, after a lot of sampling. That would be one reason why I don't bother with it any more. Another is that there's oodles of free or free-enough translated Chinese and Japanese fiction out there.)

[telophase]

I'd argue that we know his purpose, we just don't know his motivation. ;)

I've found several books through Instafreebie that I decided were worth finishing, and a few of them I found worth buying sequels to. The ratio of finished-to-unfinished isn't great, but it's only slightly worse than the ration of finished-to-unfinished I find with trad-published samples.

I'm mostly looking for books that fulfill a particular narrative need for me, which I am finally managing to identify as:

--vaguely European extruded fantasy productish
--1-2 POV characters
--not epic in character, or if it's epic in the background, the story is pretty tightly focused on the POV characters (a la Cook's Black Company)
--characters I want to spend time with (probably the most vague of the qualities)
--told with a distinct voice.
--Humor helps, but it can be a minefield. Most of my favorites do tend to be told in first- or third-person smartass, however.

It's amazingly hard to find all of that, in any book, but I'm willing to invest a lot of time looking at duds to find the ones that speak to me.

[larryhammer]

1-2 POVs I want to spend time with, preferably an entertaining time, working through a story of non-epic scope pretty closely defines what I want in a western fantasy product as well. I don't find that very much. Especially taking place in a world built out of examined assumptions.

[selenite0]

This is why I usually finish the book and go back and write a new first chapter. Because it doesn't just have to be good as you described, it has to fit the rest of the book, so I don't know what it should be until I'm done with the rest of it.

[estara]

Have you discovered Andrea Höst yet, telophase?^^ - She keeps the first book of her Touchstone Trilogy free of charge at Amazon ^^. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004T3A518/

[larryhammer]

+1 for this rec.

[telophase]

That sounds like an excellent practice.

[telophase]

I've tried the sample for the first book and it just doesn't grab me, alas. :/