Today we see that readers reaching the end of your story isn’t a victory if they leave feeling cheated.
What I gleaned about the stories: However train tracks are arranged, they pose little threat to fictional planets.
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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: The table of contents displays as:
Stories From Social Media
- Stories From Social Media
- Introduction
- Midpoint
The duplication of the title and the reference to midpoint both strongly suggested the book had been auto-converted. While I might not use a table of contents in a fiction collection (so don’t directly suffer from this one being useless for finding a specific story), it raised concerns both that other, more distracting, artefacts might have occurred due to the author not having formatted the original manuscript for a clean conversion and that the author had not proofread it after auto-conversion.
Concerned that the forthcoming prose would not be smoothly formatted, I moved on.
Analysis: A few lines into the first story, I encountered, “Not I Mister Watson, but this gentleman caller….” As the speaker is addressing Watson, there should be a comma between I and Mister. Errors in the top half of the first page leap out anyway, but in this case a combination of long indents on first lines and a full line between paragraphs had slowed my gaze to the point where the editorial part of my mind had plenty of time to ponder the text.
With evidence the book contained errors that would niggle at me growing, I moved on.
Analysis: The second story comprises a character quoting the “that’s no moon” line from Star Wars to a friend, then a couple of sentences in which they describe a piece of train track in greater accuracy, and finally closes with the mutual accusation of being nerds.
While it was not, as a snippet of conversion between friends, implausible, it didn’t engage me in the slightest. With no description of surroundings or characters, no conflict or challenge, no quality other than the lack of things that actively seemed implausible, I didn’t care about the characters.
As this was the first of the author’s stories I’d read in entirety, this immediately raised the spectre that all of them shared the same lack of reasons to follow the characters’ journey. With the previous two WTFs having raised concerns that textual issues might get in the way of fully immersing, I had little motivation to press on if there might not be much to immerse in anyway; so 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.
As the author, I’ll address the points you raised.
#1 Mangled table of contents.
Don’t blame me, I made my own contents list. Smashwords generated that piece of shit above it, I deny any involvement in that. I’ve never learned how to format a properly linked TOC because it’s overly complicated, and I released titles over a 6 yr period on Smashwords (where this ebook originated). If you had looked a little bit further down, you’d have seen my TOC. Smashwords insists on a linked table of contents, it adds its own if you don’t make one.
Actual hotlinked tables of contents are hard as fuck to do.
#2 Missing comma.
Don’t be a grammar Nazi. I clearly explained in the intro these stories were all written for social media release. Don’t expect high art.
#3: Lack of emotional resonance.
So you stopped reading there? 2 stories into a 22 short collection? If you’d even read ONE more you’d have got the first real proper “long” story.
You saw the intro. “The following collection of 22 stories were all written for one form of social media or another. Either Facebook, my blog, or Twitter. And one for Google Plus. That means they are all fairly short and all reprints.”
All of the “stories” in this collection were already 2 years old when I compiled it. I was writing this just to amuse myself, and my friends. It so happened that I reached a point where I’d made enough of them to fill a short ebook, so I did.
I’ll repeat that end quote “all fairly short”. That should have been your cue to download something else. Try “Tomorrow, There Will Be A Bear” or “Who Goes There?”
You get more interaction off those.
This highlights one of the core lessons of IoD: the author doesn’t get to tell the reader what they are allowed to think.
I’m aware the Smashword’s Meatgrinder (or BookMangler as I like to call it) doesn’t always produce perfect ebooks. However, readers who’ve never published a book almost certainly won’t know that, so all they see is a book with the author’s name on that’s not formatted right; at which point, that author’s brand is unconsciously associated with books that contain errors. Readers who are aware that Smashwords doesn’t produce a great product every time might forgive it, or they might decide that if the publisher didn’t ask Smashwords to fix the issues then the publisher doesn’t care about readers. Ultimately, author-publishing is taking responsibility for all the steps in the process.
The test isn’t whether the books are high art or not; the test is whether they maintain my immersion. In this instance, it didn’t because a niggle on the first page – where a proof reader’s attention is going to be greatest – suggests further issues could well have slipped through. So it isn’t a missing comma alone; it’s the loss of trust that the text was going to be a smooth ride. It might seem harsh to you, but some readers are considerably harsher: I know authors who’ve received a one-star review because a reader didn’t agree with entirely valid spelling/punctuation.
The IoD rule is three strikes starting from the front of the book. This highlights another IoD lesson: the best work in the world does nothing if you don’t keep the reader’s interest long enough to reach it.
And as for “fairly short”? I like short stories. Authors have created powerful stories in 1000 words; some authors have created engaging stories in 100 words; Hemmingway did it in 6 words. So didn’t know in advance that these wouldn’t engage me.