Today we see that self-publishers must be diligent in the entire book production process—not just the manuscript.
What I gleaned about the stories: The horror probably won’t get you if you don’t involve yourself.
Find this book on Amazon.
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: The collection opens with a précis of the contents; the last of which is described with: An elderly store manager, disturbed by a stranger eyeing the armoured truck deliveries, takes matters into his own hands, to shocking results…
By the time I reached the end of the sentence, I felt (mentally) out of breath, which raised the question whether all of the collection would have the same rushed feel.
In addition, a précis supposedly reduces a story to it’s essence, so I started with the expectation each fact would be important; however, there seemed to be too much here; would the manager’s age really be important? Once I doubted one fact was vital, it tainted the others.
Occurring together, the blows to both flow and content deflated my curiosity to find out more. Uncertain if the stories would hold my attention, I moved on.
Analysis: Partway down the first page of the foreword, I encountered: Prehistoric man’s first thriller – for which he was rewarded with a warm fire, roast strips of mammoth venison, and ample grunts of approval – was called “The Terror at Black Rock” and told of a brave warrior’s near-death experience with a sabre-toothed tiger.
As the name and audience response are stated as certainties, I expected the foreword to expand on this specific prehistoric man’s life, to continue in the same vein. Instead, it didn’t expand the conceit at all.
While many stories lose tension through too much uncertainty, in this case the statement is too definite. Without the trappings of speculation, it moves from placing horror among the first genres of story to placing this specific story as the first story; a bold assertion that makes the unconnected following paragraphs seem flat by comparison.
This was a true foreword (being written by someone other than the author), so I considered not scoring this; however, the issue had broken my immersion, so is no less a subjective WTF than other issues not created by the author such as distracting punctuation introduced by a proof-reader.
I therefore moved on.
Analysis: The first story in the collection opens with a shop manager noticing that a man is watching armoured truck deliveries. However, the précis that solidly matched that opening wasn’t the first in the contents description, so this wasn’t the story I was expecting.
This disjunction was enough to bring the précis that was first into the front of my mind. And start me puzzling over whether this opening could progress to that story. While it wasn’t unfeasible, it seemed unlikely that two stories would have the same opening but only one of them would build on them enough that they were key.
So, I started wondering why the order at the start of the book wouldn’t match the order of the stories themselves.
Realising I was firmly out of the stories and into theories of why authors/editors/publishers might do something, 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.
I don’t know. I always feel a bit cheated when you don’t actually get to the stories. I know a book has to be professional but those things you mention could perhaps be put together in one WTF. The worst thing is, as a result I felt I had to go and read one myself, having mentally geared up to do so. It wasn’t badly written but I didn’t like it – on various levels. You could have saved me (which, given the theme of the story, is actually mildly amusing) so now I’m even less pleased.
IoD is designed to focus on why readers lose interest, so if a series of technical issues makes me lose my trust in a book before I’ve hit the stories I treat it as exactly the same collapse of immersion for me as an author who loses my trust with three first pages that niggle me.
I’m not certain whether the technical issues are actually more pernicious: studies of typesetting and system usability suggest that poor layout or a niggle when first accessing results in readers on average both enjoying and trusting the prose less. So – while I might consciously notice the issues more than some – a proportion of readers won’t really enjoy the book or find the explanations of the speculative bits as plausible without being able to say why.
Um….?
Whoops! My ‘um’ was becasue I couldn’t parse that long sentence in the second paragraph, even though I read it several times. I read : ‘when first accessing results’ and it was meaningless from there on.
Having woken up and tried again, I worked it out. However, I would have to say that, as a reader, I wouldn’t ‘not read’ because of a banal or otherwise deficient foreword (probably as I rarely read such things)
This is where the subjectivity comes in: IoD aims to be different from the holistic “overall, I liked this book…” structure that most reviews take; however, there will always be matters of usage that irritate some people more than others.
For example, my gut feeling on copyright pages is that they are the place in the book where getting everything exactly right is most important because they can fail on a single word. So if a book doesn’t get the copyright page right, the author is much less likely to have gone all out on accessible editing and formatting in the rest of the book. However, I know many people don’t even read the copyright page.
So, I think it comes down to what Jeff calls trust. An author only has as far as the reader goes to convince them to carry on; so anything that makes a few readers less sure the part of the book they haven’t read is going to be great is something sensible authors will want to consider.
So, if they choose to include a foreword they accept that some readers will read it and judge the book on the basis that the foreword is likely to be at the same level as the body.