Word of mouth
Today's riff is about the power, and the problems of word of mouth.
Especially for Indie writers, who have zero budget for publicity. And I talk about current reads, and why I'm reading them.
Especially for Indie writers, who have zero budget for publicity. And I talk about current reads, and why I'm reading them.
I would never bother looking at a list of a hundred books. I might look at a list of twenty, out of curiosity, but I wouldn't be expecting to follow up on it. I do need to have actual details about the book picked out, and few lists of that length can do so, and by the time I got through twenty entries I think they might all be blurring. My own imagination tends to come up with lists of three examples of something-for example, Guns of the Dawn, Too Like the Lightning, and The Traitor Baru Cormorant as three novels inspired by the French Enlightenment-but I think anything up to half a dozen is manageable.
Things I specifically liked about The Privilege of the Sword included the portrayal of training in a skill; the Little Tailor plot, as Heinlein calls it (this did not read to me as Boy Meets Girl); the "you can't go home again" scene (another Heinleinian note); the running storyline about Katherine and Artemisia finding inspiration in a romantic novel about swordsmanship and a play based on it, even though Katherine knows that real swordsmanship is different. And the dialogue was great; I read two or three passages aloud to C. And then there was the serious theme about the conflict between the ethic of chastity and the ethic of consent, which I've been thinking about a lot in recent years.
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