Today we see that sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.
What I gleaned about the stories: It must be a terrible burden being perfect all the time.
Find this book on Kobo.
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.
Note: The semi-colon in the title niggled at me, to the extent I might have dismissed the book without opening it had I been seeking purely for entertainment. However, on the basis books don’t always have a representative cover, I decided to give the benefit of the doubt.
Note from Jefferson: I find it odd that the title of the book openly suggests that the contents are unworthy. As in, “These stories are all based on ideas that weren’t good enough.”
Analysis: Rather than one of the usual formats of copyright declaration, the author uses
Rejects From The Idea Factory; A Flash Fiction Anthology By Ray Daley
Raymond Daley
Copyright 1/12/2015 by Raymond Daley.
The deviation from the standard immediately made me wonder what other e-book conventions the author had (wittingly or not) ignored. Had the changes enhanced the declaration, I might have been less distrustful; However, the all-numerals date is actively confusing: was the book published in January 2015 or December 2015? It’s far simpler to stick to the standard, which is to simply cite the year.
Having not scored the unusual semi-colon in the title, this second instance of the author’s usage warring with effortless reading experience removed the last of my trust.
Analysis: The first story is about the Earth being a utopia before humans existed, ruled by Lion. The opening explained that all the other animals brought their problems to Lion and he solved them. Toward the bottom of the first page, I encountered: So Lion considered the matter carefully and directed Monkey towards a small empty piece of land that would be ideal. It had many high fruitful trees and a thriving river. It was an ideal place to start a new life, not just for a Monkey, but for any animal. Lion had been most generous in his wisdom!
As Lion was already set up as a wise and just monarch, the second use of ideal seemed a little over-egging the pudding but it fitted the style so I pushed on. Being told Lion was generous in his wisdom felt like this was PR rather than fiction. But it was the exclamation mark that really pushed me out: with so much praise of Lion already, my mind parsed it as ironic.
Even had the usage not caused the opposite effect from what I suspect the author intended, I felt a touch like I was being drowned with sugar. So I moved on.
Analysis: Two paragraphs into the second story, I hit “Nav! Find us some freaking ground! I don’t care how or where, as long as it’s solid enough for us to land on.” Captain Jessie screamed at Nav Officer Willows. The use of a full stop rather than a comma after “land on” sent my mind in two (equally WTF-worthy) directions. The grammatical issue built on the impression that the book needed a good edit/proof-read created by previous niggles. But, more comically, part of my mind created an image as if it were intentionally two sentences: Captain Jessie issues the order to find land, then leans toward Willows and screams.
Neither inspiring trust, 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.
Okay, I guess I get my feedback here?
Semi-colon in title:- There’s a reason for that. You can’t use colons in filenames – they are classed as illegal characters, so I was forced to go this route. Blame whoever invented DOS.
WTF #1: Rejected conventions.
If you’d read my biog, you’d know I’m British. So the date was December 1st 2015. As a rule of thumb for Smashwords releases, they were all (generally) done on the 1st day of every month. For 6 years. If I recall rightly, Smashwords had just changed their copyright policy because of iTunes so I was covering my bases there.
WTF #2: Counter-productive hyperbole.
That particular story was an experiment, I was parodying the Just So story style. You clearly weren’t familiar with the source material so failed to get the reference. “I felt a touch like I was being drowned with sugar.” I did my job then, that was exactly the reaction I was aiming at.
WTF #3:
Is a fair point. My grammar is terrible. I’ve since started using Grammarly.
My writing can’t be that terrible, I’ve got multiple ISFDB credits now.
Actually, the inability to give feedback to readers is what IoD is about. It isn’t about whether or not a book is good overall or whether a book does something innovative. It’s about whether the book keeps the tester immersed in the experience for 40 minutes or not.
While some readers always finish books once they’ve started, many readers will drop a book and move on if it doesn’t hold their attention. And their assessment is based on what they’ve read up until that point, so no amount of great prose later in the book or reasons behind the story that aren’t shown can make a difference because the reader doesn’t know that when they make the choice.
However, most book reviews don’t address the things that make a reader decide to stop: they talk about the book as a whole, they discuss whether plot arcs were satisfying, they suggest that readers of X might like the book. So, we set out to create a test that measured what moved readers from immersed in a book to deciding whether they want to continue. Not to judge the quality of books or define the correct way to do something, but to give authors a resource for what can damage a reader’s immersion so they can decide whether the benefits of doing something outweigh the risk of losing readers.
Your “Just So” pastiche is a perfect example: it did exactly what you intended but that caused me to doubt the book was going to be enjoyable. That doesn’t mean including the story was a good or bad decision, but knowing in advance the risk of the parody seeming straight would make for a more informed choice on whether to do include it and whether to mitigate it in some way (for example, would an author’s note at the start reveal the intent with little to no reduction in impact?).