Today we see that if the opening pages of your book suggest you haven’t spent time on it, readers won’t either.
What I gleaned about the stories: Sometimes, characters will— But perhaps the point would be clearer if I explained the context. When people are young, they often—
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.
Note 2: The cover, while a pleasant piece of art, suggests the genre is literary or fantasy rather than science-fiction; however, that didn’t make me doubt that the title and blurb were telling the truth so I didn’t score a WTF.
Analysis: The title page labels the book: Becoming Estevan and Other Science-Fiction Tales of Love &Obsession. A missing space in any circumstance could make me question whether a book has been thoroughly proofed; a missing space on the title page, where any proof reader is both freshest and has only a few lines to review rather than a page of text, elevated that concern significantly.
Noting in passing that the error also caused the text to wrap in an unsightly fashion, I moved on.
Analysis: The table of contents lists the page number of each story. Reflowable formats, such as MOBI and EPUB, don’t have fixed page sizes so don’t have actual page numbers; any page numbering that is displayed is an approximate comparison to print and not a navigation method. So, my first thought was that this ebook had been converted from the print manuscript without any changes being made to account for the differences between print and electronic layouts.
Where the first WTF had raised a concern that there might be distracting spelling errors or punctuation niggles, this brought to mind sentences broken in half due to the input manuscript defining a fixed page size, erroneous page numbers, misalignment due to manual tabbing/spacing, and the other layout issues that can occur if a format with fixed margins, fonts, and such is converted to an ebook without consideration for the differences.
Hoping the conversion would turn out to be clean, I moved on.
Analysis: The opening paragraph of the first story ends halfway through a sentence, which is punctuated with – – – (three hyphens) instead of an em-dash. Although the failure to convert the placeholder to the actual character niggled me, the correct use of a dash rather than an ellipsis gave me just enough confidence in the author’s prose that I awarded the benefit of the doubt.
Then the third paragraph ended in three hyphens as well. While one ill-formed em-dash had been bearable, two in the space of the first three paragraphs suggested the author might be fond of em-dashes, and thus the forthcoming prose would tug at me like a dripping tap.
My concerns over the conversion confirmed, 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.
On Amazon I “looked inside” to see about the pagination, but the preview didn’t reach the start of the second story. Anyway you would soon have reached
> We had no need of the electroenchalophone or neuroimager…
To make any sense at all, that needs to be “electroencephalophone” I think. Anyway the narrative structure of the first story is all askew: it opens by posing a puzzle about Claire, who has gone through some mysterious but profound “change”, but instead of exploring that, Claire’s problem is ignored and she is made to be a second banana for the first-person narrator to spin a long expository tale about a second unexplained mystery. I’d’a dropped it from boredom and confusion 4 “pages” in.
Might not be an attempt to build a new word from real Greek/Latin chunks; however, I agree electroenchalophone looks like a few letters were accidentally omitted from electroencephalophone.
Somewhat unfortunate that the story didn’t hold you: I suspect some readers are much less bothered by odd formatting than I am, but without a solid story even the least typographically minded reader will just move on.