The Sticky Review

[sartorias]

Here's a question I've been asking in person, where I can see the answerer and where I tend to get a blunter answer. Only the answers I keep getting have so many other hands on it, it's pretty much got universal tentacles

Comments

Re: "If you liked XYZ, then..."

[zornhau]

Yes. In general, good writing (plot, characterisation pace etc) are things I take for granted - barriers to entry, if you like, rather than selling points. The only exception is if the lyricism and quirky characters *are* the selling point.

To give you examples:

I started reading the 1632 series because it was called "1632" and the front cover had rednecks in a red truck in a shooting match with 30 Years War mercenaries. A riffle through the pages to check there was actual white space, and a glance at the spinde to confirm that it was a Baen effort, and I was hooked.

Joe Abercrombie's "Blade Itself" came to me via a friend who said it was like Gemmel with more plot. The back cover alone would have hooked me, since it has key sword and sorcery words like "Barbarian", "Sorcerer", "Inquisitor" and has quote to promise a fast-paced read.

I suppose the other thing you can do is convince me that a book is "best of breed". For example, I don't normally read "Fang Fu..." I mean "Urban Fantasy" books because the genre is a minefield of Mary Sues and cliches. However, a friend convinced me to try the Harry Dresden series by simply saying it was "[expletive deleted] good, with all the good stuff and none of the usual [expletive deleted]".

Re: "If you liked XYZ, then..."

[sartorias]

Keywords, then. Yeah, that makes sense.

It also occurs to me that loglines that do justice to the book are damned hard to come up with. (at least for me.)