Today we see that trivial proofreading problems can derail an otherwise promising story.
What I gleaned about the story: A guy named Oran woke up and looked at his lady-friend. And that’s about as far as I got.
Find this book on Amazon.
Analysis: Halfway through the first paragraph, there is a carriage return that seems to signify a new paragraph, but it would be an odd place to break the action, and there is no subsequent blank line or indentation, which all the other paragraphs have. So I’m left confused about the layout and what it was intended to be, and completely torn out of the story.
Analysis: Oran slid from the bed, and turned to face her briefly comparing his body with hers. So did he face her briefly and make a comparison, or did he face her and make a brief comparison? As it happens in this case, the difference is quite minor, but I didn’t know that until after tripping over the line and parsing it both ways. And since it’s on the first page, it carries full weight.
Note: The very next sentence began a triple echo—three sentences in a row beginning with “He.” But since immersion had not yet resumed after the comma issue, I’m just making a note and moving on, even though we are still on the first page.
Details: After the protagonist notices the extra girth around his middle, we get: Old warriors don’t die, he thought, they simply expand until no one would ever consider them a threat. I went into that line expecting an eye-roll from the cliché, but then it went a different way and I ended up smiling at the nice little turn.
Analysis: Dammit. I get the sense that this was going to be a decent story, but I was still on the first page when I hit: her body was still lithe and beautiful ,denying her true age. It might be a little thing, but that transposed space and comma grabbed my attention and brought me back to the words, rather than the story. So, since it’s first page, the flag goes up, and being the third flag, this time the clock stops.
Intrigued, I went and had a look on Amazon. I read about twice as far as you and now I’m sad. There is a LOT to like about this, but there are more simple editing errors (missing list commas and a ‘from whence’ were the two that jumped out at me). Worse, there are several ‘head-hopping’ moments mid scene. It is these sudden, unflagged changes in pov that pulled me out of the story and make me unwilling to pay for this or read further. The silly thing is, a half-way decent editor, or even a good beta reader could easily have helped this become an excellent little story indeed.
I share your sadness, Belinda. I’ve estimated that fully half of the IOD reports cite nothing but mechanical problems, all of which could have been fixed if the book had been reviewed by an experienced editor. And without those trivial issues to slow me down, I would have spent about three times as long with each book — long enough that I could have actually gotten caught up in the story.
What I don’t understand is this- if an author is at all familiar with Immerse or Die than they know they are going to get dinged for editing mistakes. So the books that don’t make it five minutes because of editing errors must be turning over their work to a review blog they are not familiar with, or are completely unaware their book needs edited. Either option seems like career suicide.
To be fair, Brian, not all IOD books were submitted by their authors. The series began as me taking books that authors were asking people to pay real money for, and putting them to the test. In those early days, none of the authors knew they were being evaluated. But very quickly, authors began submitting. From week to week the ratio varies, but about 1/3 of the books overall continue to come from that original process. Whenever my hopper of contributed books gets low, I go round up a new crop of candidates on my own to tide us over till the tides shift again.
But even so, you’re right – some of the contributed books don’t seem to be much aware of how this works. It’s my opinion, however, that most of them do, and that the ones who still have these mechanical issues just haven’t reached the point where they can recognize them in their own writing.
I’m ashamed and surprised that such glaring errors were on the first few pages, especially having been through them so many times (as have others it was proofread several times – and professionally).
Not that any of that is an excuse, it isn’t.
Shame you never got to enjoy the tale, but thanks for reading (or attempting to anyway).