Writerly Ways

[cornerofmadness]

Something interesting came up in a group I belong to, asking about blurbs and cover art. I was shocked at how many people said they never even read a blurb. I can't imagine not reading them. How the heck else do you know what a book is about? For me author name and a pretty cover aren't enough. I don't think there's an author out there that's an autobuy for me. Series yes, author no.

Now I understand a little better why some people get so pissy when a m/m author writes a lesbian story or god help them, a het romance. They're apparently not reading blurbs. You know what, they get what they deserve in that case. If you skip over the thing that tells you what the story is about, I have no pity for you if you got stuck with something you didn't like.

In other matters have you seen this new nonsense Microsoft to ban offensive language . Most of what I can find is for Skype only but literally everyone is losing their fucking minds (see that offensive language, I'm banned) saying it's for all Microsoft products including Word. Me, I'm not that worried. If they honestly tried to do that via Word a) how could they monitor it? b) an ACLU lawyer would give their eye teeth to go after that level of censorship. But that hasn't stopped the romance writing community from losing their shit, screaming for everyone to go to open office or libre office. As someone who had both, there's a fly in that ointment,you can't do track changes every publisher out there wants you to use. Oops.

It's been a long while since I've done links so let's have them now, lots and lots of them

From Betty (thank you!) - Keeping a Series Organized

Five Common Pitfalls For Stories With Deep Ideas

The scent of bias ink…

The Pleasures of Genre

Should Your Main Character Be Likable?

A Look at Subtext

Tips for Adding Visual "Texture" to the Telling of Your Tale

Six Types of Turning Points for Climaxes

Six Illogical Genre Aesthetics

Visual Thinking

4 Tips on the Road to Publication

The Elements of Surprise: Untwisting the Twist with Vera Tobin, PhD
(I haven't listened to this yet but I've been told it's excellent)

And from other places around the web

Structural Language Is The Foundation Of A Great Story

The Drama Is In The Details (the humor, horror, and suspense are too)

“DO THE THING?” — AN FAQ ABOUT DOING THE THING Chuck Wendig speaking of offensive language....

Publishers Are Hiring Sensitivity Readers … Should You? (probably one of my bigger worries right now)

The Hybrid Publishing Model

You Can Succeed In The Marketplace As An Independent Author



Yearly Word Count-

36435 / 100000 words. 36% done!

Haunted Hills -

52675 / 75000 words. 70% done!

Sacred Kin - being beta read

Saint Augustine Saturnalia - this idea just hit me it'll need to be done before July but only has to be 5K min so...

SPlinters - Ch 2 at the critique group. I've done squat all otherwise.

Rose Island - currently on hiatus

Comments

[ysilme]

To be honest, I rarely read blurbs, too, or give them more than a fleeting glance, but for different reasons. There are a few authors I'd read anything by, or have, in the past - and I read them for the way thy write, so I wouldn't be surprised if they wrote something different than usual. I've been disappointed in two or three times, but not because the story was different than expected, but because the quality was so low/different that I wondered if it was really written by the very author.
But the reason why I don't read blurbs, and even if I do, don't expect them to reliably inform me about the content, is because I've experienced far too often that the blurb doesn't really tell me what to expect, and what I'm getting. Same goes for ebook samples - or it's even worse with them. I've been promised something I really wanted to read so often, just to be disappointed to a smaller or larger degree, because the blurb did not really tell about what kind of story this was. I'm frequently getting the impression that whoever writes the blurb has no idea what the book is about, hasn't read it, has no idea about the author...
I've always discovered new books more by recommendation than by anything else, closely followed by searching for a specific subject or theme and finding lists of books about it. Be it by my bookshop dealer, friends, articles in magazines, and now with the internet, by the one or other book journal or booklover site I occassionaly frequent or stumble upon. I often also read reviews if I'm interested in a book, but I'm not likely to buy something I haven't had a chance to test read first, to get a feeling for the style and way of writing, which are really important to me.
At least two of my friends who are even more avid readers do it more or less the same way; one of them even started to write reviews for historical novels on a special site in German where only a handful of reviewers publish their reveiws. I often check the site for books, as I know by now which reviewer are close to my own likes, and can rely on liking the books they recommend.

[cornerofmadness]

That's interesting.

It's definitely not true whoever wrote the blurb didn't know the story. Usually the author writes part of it and then marketing fine tunes it. I've written enough of them for my publisher. Maybe in the huge presses like Berkley, Simon & Shuster it is true it's written by someone else but definitely not of smaller press. And they ARE hard to write. Is it too much? Not enough? Did it spoil something?

On the other hand I don't use reviews much. I look at them. If a book is getting dozens of 1 and 2 star reviews I might consider getting the book from the library rather than buying it or not reading it but on the whole, that is someone I do not know's opinion. Often my friends and I don't have the same taste in reading. We'll recc to each other but often we find we aren't on the same page.

[ysilme]

It's definitely not true whoever wrote the blurb didn't know the story.
Sorry to have to contradict you, but it does happen, although I wasn't speaking of these, but of the impression I'd got from comparing the blurb to the actual content. But it happened to a published friend of mine; on one of her books (with a different editor than usual) the blurb was written not even by her editor, but somebody who'd just read a short summary of her book, and got some things spectacularly wrong. And I've heard it mention in at least two other cases, too, by the authors themselves. With my friend, the argument was that "the book would sell better if this and that was put into the blurb", no matter that neither "this" nor "that" actually happened in the story, or played more than a very fleeting role.

[cornerofmadness]

That's why I corrected myself further along. Some publishers might not let author's do write a blurb but many do. Mine all have. I find it weird that publishers don't let an author at least help with the blurb (OR the title, that one blows my mind and I know that's common and ditto the cover art. It's obvious some covers have diddly to do with the book)

That said, a blurb still a good source of what's in a book especially since some reviews are absolutely garbage. I've had ones complaining about things that aren't even IN my book. I'm like that's not my book people. What the hell DID you read.

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I greatly enjoyed this list of links, especially as they are from writer blogs rather than news sites. So many of the news sites have gone to limited access that it's pointless linking to them when there's no way to know if readers can see the material.

Re: Thank you!

[cornerofmadness]

You're welcome. Yeah I don't think anything either Betty or I share will be behind pay walls and the such

Re: Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

That is greatly appreciated and a reason for sharing things you link to.

I am trying to cut down on my linking to access-impaired sites. The problems with this are twofold: 1) None of them tell you before you enter the site via link that it has a limit on viewing, so you can't choose to skip less-important links. 2) Almost all of them only notify you after you've exceeded the limit. Few give you a countdown. So all I can do is try to remember the list of famous "news" sites that lock up the news, so I don't link to them. It's frustrating, and getting rapidly worse.

Re: Thank you!

[cornerofmadness]

I haven't run across that but I don't link to many news sites. Most of these are definitely open source which is nice (a lot of them as you said are blogs)

Re: Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

More and more of the news sites are doing it, like the Washington Post and New York Times. The ones that block everyone but subscribers are annoying, but at least you know for sure to avoid them.

The ones that allow 5-6 articles a month are shredding the usability of the web. You can't ever tell what your audience has been reading, so you don't know if the link is "good" or not -- and people despise links they can't actually read. Sure, 5-6 articles is fine for people who don't routinely go online to read things. But you can blow through that many in one newsfeed or link cloud. It is prohibitively expensive to subscribe to more than one or two sites if you're willing to do it at all, and again, that doesn't help your readers. And they won't turn off their search engine access because they want to suck in eyeballs for the ads. In terms of the dispersion of information, it's a disaster and getting worse.

Say somebody dies, and I want to link an obituary. Not only do I have to find one with decent detail in a reliable source, I have to hope the link will actually let my readers in. They're making it a lot harder to pass news around, let alone read large amounts of stuff just for the sake of staying informed. >_

Re: Thank you!

[cornerofmadness]

Oh yes with them, I do see that. I'm fine with that. We've always had to pay for newspapers so I see no difference when it's moved on line.

Re: Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's a structural difference. Ideally, newspapers would be free to encourage an informed populace. They weren't, but you could usually find them at libraries or coffeehouses if you wanted to. It worked well enough -- because people didn't use extensive references anywhere outside of academics. And there, yes, it was always giant pain in the ass trying to track down references.

The web fixes that problem, to the extent that people can read links. You can easily add value to any post by linking articles that support its points or explain how to do things you mentioned. It's fantastic for sharing information. But without people posting material that is freely accessible, that doesn't work. The more paywalls there are, the less well the net functions as an infosphere and more it's just an imaginary store.

At the very least, if a site wants to put up a paywall, they should turn off search engine access so that everyone else's searches don't dead-end into their paywall. There's nothing wrong with keeping your stuff in a locked box. But if you leave that box in the middle of the floor for people to trip over while looking up information, then it's a nuisance.

We need to find a way of supporting websites that doesn't cause massive collateral problems. Ads and paywalls get in the way of what the product is meant to do -- inform people -- and that's not good.