Today we see that adding something that most books don’t have can reduce the feeling of excitement if you do it poorly.
What I gleaned about the stories: Sometimes people leave… gaps when speaking about… odd things.
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Note: This is a short story collection, so the rules are slightly different from standard Immerse or Die: instead of reading on every time I lose immersion, I stop reading that story and move on to the next one. As usual, I stop reading after the third WTF.
Analysis: Half way through the first paragraph, I encountered ‘the opportunity to do things that most people can only guess at… for example[…]’ The most usual use for ellipsis in fiction is a thought or action trailing off, so I expected a transition to something else. So when I discovered the sentence continued with neither a transition nor a missing section, I thought I had missed something and went back to reread it.
Rereading it, I decided Trez was attempting to mimic casual speech; unfortunately this pushed me out further as I then wondered why that pause rather than any other had been flagged.
Aware I had definitely lost immersion, I moved on.
Analysis: The combination of formal structure and wacky ideas worked well, making me look forward to more of the poetry.
Analysis: There are illustrations dotted throughout the work. Unfortunately, whether due to poor originals or failure to account for how some e-readers would render them, they were both small and lacking in contrast. So, after spending almost a minute trying to make out the fourth illustration without success I moved on.
Analysis: The next story opened with a sentence mentioning the deaths of almost every animal on the planet along with nine billion people, leading into a paragraph that told me nine billion was big in several ways. By the second statement that trying to conceive that large a number could cause madness, I realised the author was right: I had no attachment to the events at all.
Without a point of emotional reference to both make the immensity real by contrast, and make me care enough about the fictional extinction to read on, I pulled the plug.
Take the Pepsi Challenge: Want to know if my own writing measures up? Download one of these free short stories, in the format of your choice, and decide for yourself.
You “pulled the plug” on ‘ONE STAR‘ after the first paragraph… that was quite unfortunate for you since I found it to be one of the best short stories I have ever read in my life (and I have read thousands). The surprise at the end was more than enough to make up for any lack of “emotional reference” you experienced in the first three sentences. You were pretty rough on a new author that wrote, editied, illustrated, and published his own book for a mere .99 cents!
I completely agree that there are stories where the ending is the best bit, and it seems plausible that some of the works that fail IoD are among them. However, IoD is deliberately not just another review of works as a whole: IoD measures immersion.
In a world where there are enough free book promotions that someone who reads a book every day can keep their e-reader full without ever paying a penny and readers download twenty samples from Amazon then pick the one that interests them most to buy, there are very few situations in which a reader has no option other than to continue with a book. Which makes pulling the reader in and not letting them out again a key marketing advantage.
So, I write these reports to help authors find the reasons why some readers either don’t continue or can’t stop.
As for the effort to produce a book? Having been writing, editing, and publishing for many years myself, I’m aware they each take time and energy. However, most readers neither know nor care, because the amount of time an author/editor/publisher spends on a book doesn’t add to reader enjoyment – only the quality as perceived by that reader does.
Therefore, while the IoD reports might feel rough, I consider them as better than not having them; because knowing that the beginnings of stories weren’t drawing readers in, or that illustrations were showing up as blurred splodges on some e-readers, and not saying anything would be cruel to every person who wants to get their best work into the hands of audiences. And would be denying them the ability to charge more because their product was as exquisite in every way as they intended.