Ten Years Have Got Behind You

[starshipcat]

Sarah Hoyt has an interesting post at her blog about looking back on your life and mid-life crises. In her case it was precipitated by a trip home to Portugal to visit her parents, who are still in good health at the moment but are approaching the age at which frailties and health issues tend to multiply and snowball

Comments

[sartorias]

The market has always been flooded. Indie has only begun to be respectable. And new people are coming along all the time, and being successful. It's important to catch the eye of the ever growing number of readers getting e-readers, with eye catching presentation, blurbs, positioning the story or book best to catch the eye of the readership one writes for.

And then getting the book into the best shape possible. I read a lot of Goodreads reviews, and one consistent complaint I see is that it is harder for readers to take seriously a book that has typos and formatting glitches. It's like we won't take seriously a new doctor who has spaghetti on his jacket, and a broken stethoscope.

[starshipcat]

I do my best to make sure that it doesn't have any typos or formatting glitches. Obviously there are some formatting issues that are difficult to prevent because they only show up on actual devices that I don't own, but show up fine on the previewer software. But I always keep an eye on the spellcheck alerts, make sure that everything that's marked is indeed a proper name, a technical term, or a foreign/fictional term, rather than an actual spelling error or typo. No doubt a few things slip through, especially in a text that's heavy on words that the spellchecker won't recognize

[sartorias]

Well, there are many using paid reviews out there. Unfortunately, most of these reviews read like paid reviews, and potential readers now trained to skim past the daily hundreds of "Read My Book!" pleas on Facebook and Twitter skim right past all the burble of superlatives that don't actually say anything about the book. When you're reading through reviews, what can you really learn about the book from "Author Firstname (always a clue to paid or friend reviews) is better than J.K. Rowling and G.R.R. Martin, with her brilliant and lyrical tale that was such a page turner I simply couldn't put it down!!! This is the times better than Game of Thrones/Harry Potter/Divergent/Katniss Everdeen, and I am so exciting about volume two coming out soon! Everyone should go out and buy this book right now

[marycatelli]

OTOH, no one's going to put up a review to say that the work was grammatical, correctly spelled, and well formatted.

[sartorias]

Oh yeah, and a bunch of authors with lots written will put a chapter a week up at Tumblr, and slowly build an audience if they keep it up regularly. They also get feedback. If they post regularly and the audience begins to diminish, then that book isn't working, and probably needs beta reading to figure out where it's losing readers.

[starshipcat]

I'll think about that. However, I didn't have a lot of luck with serial format when I was putting stuff up over at JukePop back in 2014.

[sartorias]

That is a very clunky system, and no one has heard of it. Tumblr is public, easy to link to, etc.