I did an e-purge this weekend, deleting some 50-odd titles from my bloated Kindle, and what I have learned from the experience is this: on the blessing side, the e-universe makes getting your book into a reader’s hand easier than ever. But the downside? The reader knows that there’s always something else around the corner. If you don’t win them over, and fast, they’ll bail on you and your book forever, and in less time than you might think.
When I started this little spring cleaning, I had 800 books to choose from, right on my Kindle, before I even went trolling for anything new on-line. I am getting RSS feeds which send me, on average, 25 new Kindle freebies a day; I am getting about 5 review requests a week; I have family members who read, and we recommend and share books amongst ourselves often. I belong to three ebook-loaning public library systems. And finally, there is that mile-long list of great classics that I have barely begun exploring, beginning with the 50-volume Harvard Classics series that my father and I plan to read together. And all of this is before I even start on the ones I pay for…
So sure, I’ll try the unknown indie book. But if it doesn’t hook me in, and fast, it’s heading straight for the trash bin, because I have all those other books to get to, and some of them are books I really want to read. I used to write reviews of mediocre books, just so other potential browsers would have some information or opinion about them beyond the blurb on the author page. But I think the advent of the Free Sample Era has made me feel less guilty about bailing on a book which isn’t thrilling me. Nearly every book has a sample these days. Other readers can try it out without spending a dime, so I don’t need to feel obliged to slog through something tedious just on their accounts. I do still enjoy blogging about the great indie books I discover. But increasingly, I am finding that I bail on the merely average ones before I get to that point. I simply haven’t got the time for mediocre books these days when there are so many fabulous ones I haven’t gotten to yet.
Here is a sampling of some of the books I deleted, and what specifically it was which prompted me to bail on them:
– There was a regency romance novel that I downloaded for free during Read an Ebook Week because I had spoken to the author online and she was a really nice person. This is a dumb reason to choose a book. I never have enjoyed this genre, and the author being a nice person didn’t make me enjoy it more. As soon as I got to the first appearance of the word ‘Lord’ followed by a WASPy British name, I shuddered and reached for the delete button.
– There were a few books which I downloaded on the strength of a blurb, without actually reading the sample. In several cases, I found that the blurb had been deceiving and I had not properly understood what the book was about. For example, there was one book that presented itself as a fairly pedestrian murder mystery and neglected to mention that the protagonist had some quirks. As soon as I encountered the words “S&M pain slut” about five screens in, that was it for me.
– There were two ‘first in a series’ books which looked promising and then failed to win me over. One of them just took too long to get going. A dozen screens in, the narrator was still narrating, in classic ‘telling, not showing’ fashion, the history of her college career and I became impatient for something to happen. In the other, I found that I was having to work much too hard to suspend my disbelief. After the main character is left unsupervised at a crime scene, messes it up and then gets subsequently deputized AND asked out on a date by the hot sheriff, I checked out of that one.
– A few books turned me off with usage and editing issues that were a little too apparent. There was one author who seemed to have a phobia of commas, and did not use them when she should have. Another author confused the words ‘there’ and ‘their.’ Anything that pings my ‘World’s Greatest Slushpile’ radar goes in the trash. I just don’t have time.
– There was a YA book I was really enjoying, from a storytelling and creativity point of view, that had several obvious grammatical issues. I felt bad about this one because I really was enjoying it and I felt like it was one of those diamonds in the rough where if a ‘real’ publisher got their hands on it and worked out the kinks, it could be a huge best-seller. But unfortunately, I decided that I had to hold a YA book to a higher standard than I might for adult fiction. It’s fine to say that I’m a grown-up and I know better and can ignore the odd typo or quirk of usage, but in a book geared to children, who will learn from and be influenced by their childhood reads, such errors are, in my opinion, unacceptable. I could not in good conscience recommend this story to a young reader who would absorb these errors and truly not know better. It’s a shame, because the book did have real promise and if an even half-decent editor got their hands on it, it could really shine…
– Overwrought description is a killer for me. It’s a sloppy way to open a novel, and it tells me that the author’s style is not my thing. A five-screen description of the rain, with more than four adjectives per sentence? Next!
It turns out all those old Writer’s Digest books which lectured about the first ten pages were spot-on. It took me about ten Kindle screens worth of text, on average, to figure out if a book was worth continuing or not. Authors, take note: you’ve won control of the distributing, which is a huge boon to you. But that means you are responsible for editorial side too, and that won’t be a boon unless you make sure your book is in top condition. In today’s abundance of e-choice, they won’t wait around to see if it gets better.
In the writing world, YA novels are held to a significantly lower standard than adult novels. YA readers just want the story and don’t care about the writing and editing details [blatant generalization]. I agree that it sets a poor example, but authors and publishers aren’t in it to set shining examples; they’re in it to sell books.