C. Litka's Blog, page 2

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 151)

 

Topper is a 1937 supernatural comedy movie staring Candence Bennett and Cary Grant. The story's premise is that a fellow is haunted by a fun loving couple who died in a car crash, the car in question being the one he bought. I wanted to read the novel the movie was based on.  However, I could not find that book on Gutenberg, so I picked up another of his books to read instead. But hey, while researching and writing this lede, I discovered that Topper is, in fact, available the public domain, just not on the Gutenberg Press site, so I ended up getting it after as well.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below

Biltmore Oswald, The Diary of a Hapless Recruit by Thorne Smith  C+

This 1918 book recounts the humorous experiences of the title character as he joins the navy. It is told in diary form, each with some sort of mishap or observation about his shore training in the navy.

It is a very quick, light read, each entry is something of a short comedy skit or sketch. Nothing deep. Not a lot of details about the life, just a breezy account of a rather inept young man. It is witty enough, but does not quite have the magic of a P G Wodehouse story, perhaps because there are no supporting characters. It's just Biltmore and some nameless fellow recruits, along with a goat and a dog.

Nothing to write home about, not laugh out loud funny, but amusing enough.

Topper by Thorne Smith  DNF 21%

This is that story about a haunted car. Cosmos Topper, a 40 year old banker/broker living in the suburbs feels like his life is in a rut. Well, it is. And discontented about it, so he buys a car. It turns out the car he bought was well known about town. It was the car of a wild-living, hard-drinking married couple, George and Marion Kerby met their unfortunate end by hitting a tree. The car, however was repaired, and Mr Topper buys it. Unknown to him, it comes with the ghosts of the Kerby's, who, in this story are basically invisible people.

It probably made a better movie, especially with Cary Grant as Topper. As a book, well, it suffers from my big bugaboo when it comes to storytelling - remoteness. Cosmos Topper, as well as George and Marion are just characters in a story, with no actual connection to a believable life. Ghosts aside. And while Smith tells the story with wit and insights, I never stopped noticing him telling the story. I didn't hate it, but I realized that I as forcing myself to keep reading, and that's something I do only rarely. I decided that in this case, I didn't like anyone enough to keep reading. So I didn't. 

Still, you might like it; a screwball comedy in words, and illustrations. Thorne Smith is a well regarded writer of humorous stories. He's just not to my taste.

I'm DNFing a fair number of books these days, but I think that can be explained by the fact that I am looking far and wide for books to try. I've got a couple more iffy ones on the way.

 

Links to The Founders' Tribunal

 

The Founders' Tribunal is now available. Below are links to the stores where you can pick up your copy. I will add more Links as the book make its way through the various stores.

Amazon $1.99

Smashwords FREE

Thalia FREE

Everand  FREE WITH SUBSCRIPTION 

Vivlio FREE

Apple FREE ebook

Apple FREE audiobook

Fable FREE (in app )

Google FREE ebook

Google FREE audiobook

Barnes & Noble FREE

Kobo FREE

I am not going to release an audiobook version of this story on Amazon/Audible as it is just a novella, and the minimum price I can list it on is $3.99, the same price as all my novels. I am, however, planning to release a paperback book and an audiobook that includes this story along with The Isle House Ghost and Nine Again in  Q1 2026.

10 & 1/2 Years of Self Publishing, A Report

The first half of my 11th year as a publisher has been a remarkably good one. My best ever, in fact. The three keys have been 1.) a fairly substantial catalog of books, 2.) relatively frequent releases, and 3.) the elephant in the room: the Google Play Store.

1.) My back catalog now offers 19 to 23 books, depending on the the store. (In some stores, The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea have been split into a six book series in order to offer them as audiobooks on Amazon.) 

Even 10 years later, The Bright Black Sea continues to be my best selling book. Between ebooks and audiobook versions it sold between 150 and 337 copies a month over the last six months. This illustrates that genre does matter, since space opera is one of the most popular SF sub-genre. Shadows of an Iron Kingdom is set in the same universe as The Bright Black Sea and it's usually my second most popular title. However, for some strange and unknown reason it outselling the first two books in that series. My best guess is that it has something to do with its title or the Gothic vibe of the story.

Depending on the month, most of my other books sell from 50 to 150+ copies between ebooks and audiobook editions, the bulk of them on Google. With twenty-odd books to sell, sales add up. Plus, as I've mentioned before, for every new reader you sell a book to, they may go on to read more of your books, ideally, all of them. In my case, a single new reader might account for 18 additional sales. 

2.) Since September 2024 up to this week's Nov 6th, 2025 release of The Founders' Tribunal, I have released two novels, and two novellas. I plan to release a third novella with a bonus short story, The Isle House Ghost and Nine Again, in February 2026 to continue this pace. New books generate a bump in monthly sales, not only on account of the sales of the newly released book, but in sales across the board, as new releases have their own less crowded selection on the ebook stores making it is briefly easier to reach new readers and remind past readers you're still around and writing. 

I am not racing to release books for the sales. I write because I enjoy writing every day. When I have shorter stories to tell, I can write more stories, which naturally leads to more releases.

3.) My sales on Google for both ebooks and audiobooks continue to dominate all the other venues combined. In any given month, most of my books on Draft2Digital, Kobo, and Amazon usually sell in only single digits, and many do not sell at all on Amazon. I sell 8x to 10x more books on Google than any other venue. The only way I can explain this is that people read books on their phones, and there are a lot of Android phones out there, with the Google Play Store as the default book store.

I'm going to keep this simple this time around. Here are the sales by month, venue, and book type for the period May 2025 thru Oct 2025.

Monthly Book Sales May - Oct 2025

 Sales           ebooks        audiobooks     percentage ebooks/audiobooks

May 1405     779 ebooks 626 audiobooks   55.4% ebook/44.6% audiobook

June 1707    982 ebooks 725 audiobooks   57.5% ebook/42.5% audiobook

July  2040  1407 ebooks 633 audiobooks   69% ebook/31% audiobook

Aug  2084  1364 ebooks 721 audiobooks   65.4% ebook/34.6% audiobook

Sept 2007  1261 ebooks 746 audiobooks   62.8% ebook/37.2% audiobook

Oct  1796  1121 ebooks 629 audiobooks   63.4% ebooks/36.6% audiobook

                       6 paperback books sold

Total Book Sales 1H 2025  11,039  ebooks 63% audiobooks 37%

For comparison;  1H 2024 7,671  1H 2023 9,177   1H 2022 9,054 

Total Book Sales April 2015 to October 2025  114,503

Sales by Venue/ Percent of Sales. (Year 10:  May2024 - April 2025)

Draft2 Digital* 1,767     16%  (Year 10: 21.5% -5.5% )

Kobo                 118       1%   (Year 10: .5% +.5%) 

Amazon             256       2%  (Year 10: 5% - 3%)

Google           8,888      81%  (Year 10: 73%  + 8%)

*D2D includes Apple, Apple audio, B & N, Smashwords, et al. 

Revenue from Amazon sales

$36.53

The most interesting number in the data is that audiobooks only accounted for 37% of my sales so far this year, compared to 49.5% in my 10 year sales period (May 2024-April 2025) despite selling more total books this half. I have no clue as to why.

The bottom line is that I continue to sell at a midlist author's rate. Enough to keep me from getting discouraged. Of course, it is 100X easier to sell books at $0 than even $.99, so you can discount my sales as much as you care to. However, underselling your competitors is a Business 101 strategy. I sell most of my books at cost, and yet still make a tiny profit doing so, and have been doing that for more than 10 years now. I chose to value readership over pocket money, and laziness over hustling for sales. This low stress approach to writing and publishing has paid off; I'm still writing and publishing new books after 10 1/2 years in the business. Most authors, indie or trad can't say that.

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No. 150)

 

Well, today kids, we have another story rifting off of a classic story. It seems that you can't throw a dart on a publisher's lead title list and fail to hit a "retelling." We are, perhaps, in the end times of literature. Just about everything has been written, so all we can do is go back and rewrite stories already told. Well, no one was twisting my arm to pick this book up, so I have no right to rant. Right?

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Wait! No, that's not the one! Mine has a talking dog, not a bustling beaver. Alas.

Toto by A J Hackwith  C

It could've been worse. This is a retelling of Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz, set in modern times, with Toto the dog as the narrator. I watched the movie half a century ago, but never read the book. (Though I do often use that line in the movie when Toto pulls back the curtain on the real Wizard.) Given my vagueness, I can't speak to how faithfully this version retells the story, though, of course it has its modern twists to it. Having a snarky dog narrate the story who can talk to the inhabitants of Oz gives the book the only flare this rather prodding story has going for it. It was just enough.

It starts with the tornado and the house landing on the Wicked Witch of the East and Dorothy ending up with the silver slippers (in this story), with Glinda, the good fairy arriving on the scene and sending them off along the yellow brick road to the Emerald City to see the Wizard of Oz for help getting home. Along the way they collect the usual characters and several more as well. As I said, I'm not sure how closely this story follows the plot of the book or movie, so let's just say they have adventures, they reach the Emerald City, see the Wizard, who sends them out to capture the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West, in order to get home to Kansas.

The world building in this book is sketchy at best. This Oz feels as deep as a stage set. They seem to travel from the Munchkin village to the Emerald City in a day or two. There is no sense of distance or how they find the food to live on after the picnic basket they are given runs out. As I said, they meet Scarecrow, Tinman, and Lion, each with their special twists. As with all modern stories, there is commentary on the social and political issues of today sprinkled through the story. Though, rather heavy handed, this author thankfully weaves these observations into Toto's narration instead of delivering then as lectures as was the case in that Mary Darling book. I may be the pot calling the kettle black, but for me, I found this book overlong. If it wasn't for Toto, and Crow, I wouldn't have continued on to the end. The two of them were just entertaining enough to get me to the Emerald City and back.

This book only has a 3.5 star rating, so with my C grade I'm a lot closer to the mark than I usually am.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 149)

 

This week we return to what has turned out to be one of my favorite authors of 2025. As I mentioned last week, I was at the library for the previous books, and walking through the stacks, picked up this one as I passed it by.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below

April Lady by Georgette Heyer  B+

Georgette Heyer's Regency Romances vary somewhat in intent. Some are more serious or at least more soap operaish, while others are more light hearted, even comedies. This was one of the latter. Clearly Heyer was having fun writing this lighthearted story, since it is full of sly and dry humor which are the ones I most enjoy and this outing proved to be a good one.

The set-up is Nell, a daughter of a count whose fortunes had been largely gambled away, has been the wife of Giles Cardross for a year, she, under the impression that the marriage was one of convenience. Her papa need the money, her husband needed a heir. Even so, she was desperately in love with Giles, and though she did not realize it, he with her. Prior to his marriage he had a mistress, and so she strove to be a perfect wife, expended only fondness in return. She spent more money than her generous allowance allowed her and gave some of it to her brother, a somewhat wild young man about town as well, against her husband's wishes. As a result, she had bills that she could not pay and had to approach Giles about paying them. He did cheerfully enough, without more than obtaining her promise that these bills were all of them. 

However, as it turns out, she forgot one big bill from a dressmaker who was pressing her for payment. She was afraid to bring yet another bill to him, after promising that she had given him all of them. Since she did not want to appear to have married him for his money, she, with the dubious help of her brother, set out to get the money to pay the bill. Somehow. Add to this plot line, Giles' 17 year old half-sister and ward, Letty, who is living with them. She's in love with a young man working at the foreign office - a sensible but boring young man, totally opposite of Letty. She wants to marry him before he goes off to South America as a diplomat, and Giles refuses; saying that she is too young, and her lover hasn't the fortune needed to keep her in the style she is accustomed to. It is one of those stories where two minutes of conversation would have solved Nell's problem anyway... but that wouldn't have been anywhere near as much fun.

As I said at the top, Heyer's romances vary in tone and approach. All concern themselves in the romantic couple discovering that they love each other, but only at the end of the story. While not a page turner, Heyer takes her time with this story, it features her signature characters, including the noble, tolerant, somewhat remote gentlemen, young goodhearted rakes about town, and naive, well-bred young ladies.

All About The Founders' Tribunal

1 

With the release of my newest Redinal Hu/ Red Wine story just a week away, I thought I'd offer a little background on the story. However, being a novella, I can't say too much about the story without spoiling the story itself.
This story is a sequel to The Darval-Mers Dossier, featuring the main character of that story, majordomo and ex-lawyer Redinal Hu. Finding himself left to look over a large, and empty house in the wealthy borough of the Rivers, he has a lot of time on his hands. He fills some of that time by doing occasional consulting work for his old law firm, and since the Darval-Mers affair, for his friend, Roghly VonEv's private inquiry agency. Most of that work is background and legal research, though at Roghly's insistence, he's taking lessons on arms and hand-to-hand combat. Just incase.
As I said in an my last blog post about my writing projects, I came up with this story in order to bridge the time gap between The Darval-Mers Dossier, set in autumn and a different story I wanted to write that would take place the following summer. That story became The Isle House Ghost. due for a Q! 2026 release. As such, I wasn't concerned about the length of the story, I just wanted a little something to fill that time gap. I set the story in the Lorrian winter holiday period to match my planned release date in early November. It ended up running some 25K words. A solid novella, but still not long enough to make a print version of it very appealing. Thus, initially it's an ebook only release. I'm planning on bundling it, with with The Isle House Ghost. a 38.5K word novella and its 9K word short story sequel titled Nine Again. 
Besides bridging the length of time between the stories, I wanted a story that included Red Hu's good friend, former colleague, and sometimes lover, Lorivel Carvie. She only appeared as a voice on the caller in The Darval-Mers Dossier, so I had her appear in order to introduce Red to her cousin, who remains a character throughout the rest of the story.
One of the happy accidents in writing this story was that Red gains a side-kick. All good detectives need a side-kick, if only to explain to the readers what they are thinking. I hadn't really planned on a side-kick in this story. It came about as a "why not?' sort of addition as I was writing it. The side-kick's name is Ellington. We met him in the Darval-Mers story as fun-loving dog Red's retired yardman had adopted so that the neighboring children would not lose him entirely when he was exiled for breaking too many knickknacks. I used Ellington in that story somewhat as a side-kick, having Red talk out loud to, in order to organize his thoughts and speculations about the case. I wrote those scenes that way in order to make those thoughts an external dialog into shorter sections instead of big block of internal speculation, plus Ellington adds a dash of humor - at least I have fun with him. Ellington plays a much a much more active role in this story. And he's going to remain Red's faithful sike-kick going forward.
Other than that, I don't want to say too any more about the plot of the story than what is revealed in the blurb below.
I do think, however, that a little background on the story might be helpful. 
These Red Hu/Wine stories are set some 1,500 years before Chateau Clare and Glencrow Summer, just prior to what became to be known as the Second Founding or the Humanist Revolution. This was later stages of the period that would become after the Second Founding, the Age of Sorcery. 
The first founding was when the Commonwealth of Lorria was founded after the planet was terraformed and the passengers landed from two slower-than-light settlement ships which had sailed from our own solar system. They had traveled for ten plus thousand years to reach the planet. 
The subsequent first 1500 years saw the population slowly growing, and still featured the advanced technology of the solar system spanning society they had come from. However, one of the three settlement ships has yet to arrive, placing some limits on this technology and manufacturing capacity. Moreover, it seems that the manufacturing of key high-tech components needed to support this level of technology were not, at first, in great demand, so they were not manufactured for a long time. And when things started to break down, ten plus centuries later, it seemed that too much time had passed so that the know-how had been forgotten, and could not recovered in time to prevent a nearly complete collapse of the high tech society. At the same time, the population has reached a stage where it is growing rapidly, making the short-falls in manufacturing all the more pressing.
This then is the turning point where these stories take place. Pocket callers, i.e. cell phones, and info-systems, i.e. computers still exist, but as they break down, they are not being replaced. The question arises as to what to about the situation. The traditionalist plan is to keep the old system of production, everyone is a craftsperson, but require each item to be as durable and repairable as possible, so that new manufacturing can be focused on meeting the demands of the expanding population. The progressive faction want to introduce more efficient manufacturing methods, including human-manned assembly lines, systems of production at odds with the founding ethos of the world.
This conflict is not played out within the population, but rather within the rich and powerful Founding Families, also known as the Great Houses. Lorria is governed, such as it is, by a non-political bureaucracy, as there is universal agreement about the nature and shape of society, with no political factions. The Great Houses have, since the Founding, divided and operated this bureaucracy for the public, and their benefits, and this growing crisis has split the Great Houses into Traditionalist and Progressives camps, with the newer wealthy concerns outside of the Founding Families, divided as well. There have always been feuds and rivalries within the Great Houses as they strive to maintain and increase their wealth and power within the government and society, but as the crisis builds, these rivalries have only increased the bitterness and ruthlessness of these rivalries, so that they increasingly employing agents to do their often illegal biddings. 
The Red Wine Agency stories that I used as a plot device in Chateau Clare are the basis for this set of stories. However, I don't think I'm the type of writer to do those thrillers justice, so I have my stories featuring Redinal Hu as he slowly becomes Red Wine, gentleman for hire. The are, in effect, prequels to the Red Wine Agency series of books, set perhaps a year of so prior to Red setting up his own agency. And as such, are much more small scale affairs with lower stakes than what I would imagine a full blown Red Wine Agency thriller would feature.
So with that background out of the way, here's the blurb. Look for the story itself to be release on or a few days before or after November 6, 2024. As always, it will be free in every story, except Amazon where the ebook will be $1.99 and the audiobook $3.99

Inthis sequel to The Darval-Mers Dossier, Redinal Hu findshimself once again playing a small, but perhaps dangerous, role inthe Great Game.

WhenRed’s former colleague and good friend, Lorivel Carvie, calls andinvites him to dinner – her treat - Red suspects it’s morethan a social get-together. As much as he wishes it was. And, as itturns out, he was right.

Lorivel’scousin, Carleesa Trilae, is the private secretary of their greatgrandmother, Penlane Trilae, the First Minister of the Commonwealthof Lorria. The First Minister has received a summons to appear beforesomething called the Founders’ Tribunal to defend heradministration against charges that she is not following the foundingprinciples of Lorrian society. What this Founders’ Tribunal is, andwho’s behind it, is a mystery. The Minister believes it to be aploy of a cabal of Great Houses. Nevertheless she is determined, eveneager, to face this secret tribunal to let them know exactly whatthey need to do if they want to maintain the founding principles. Hergreat granddaughters do not think this is a wise idea. They hope topersuade her to accept Red Hu as her legal counsel and bodyguard. 

Well,Penlane Trilae hasn’t remained First Minister of the Commonwealthof Lorria for over half a century by being timid. So it’s on toplan two.

TheFounders’ Tribunal is a 25,000 word novella that takes place several monthsafter The Darval-Mers Dossier. Set during the troubledtimes leading up to the Second Founding, this story is Red Hu's first outing using his alias, Red Wine, a gentleman forhire. The story is takes place in the same world of ChateauClare and Glencrow Summer, but in an earlierhistorical period than those two novels.

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No.148)

 

While I was at the library to pick up The Inn on Lake Devine, I took the time to wander through the fiction section looking for something else to read, and realizing that I should have given it some thought and written down some authors I might want to look up before I drove down to the library. I did pick up the only Georgette Heyer book they had on the shelf (coming soon) and then, still wandering through the stacks, I saw, by chance, this book. I'd read a review of this book on the blogs who had recommended The Adventures of Mary Darling, but I didn't hold it against him. So I picked it up.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford   DNF 34%

This is a gritty noir detective story set in 1922 America. But not the America we know. Rather, an alternate history America, where the mound building native civilization of central North America did not decline, as it did in our time-line. Thus there is the state of Cahokia, along the Mississippi River south of Illinois that is largely made up of Native Americas from this civilization, along with a volatile mix of black and whites - the white people being very much 1922 pre-civil rights white people, and black people of the old segregated south. Lots of world building used n this story to bring the setting in time and place alive.

My problem with this book is that Spufford took every noir trope and every bad aspect of 1920's America, and then dialed them up to 11 in this 400 page plus mystery story. I wasn't crazy about the story to begin with, but pushed on reading it for another day. However, on the third day, having read 140 pages of it, 34%, and we were still only in day two of the investigation - just to give you an idea of the pacing of this story - I decided that I had enough. I didn't care about the two detective protagonist, found the world unbelievable. I just didn't feel like forcing myself to read any more.

However, having read the first third, I can say that he had indeed, introduced just about every noir feature found in the books and movies of and about the period. There's a gruesome crime; a ritual killing, whose lurid headlines dials up racial tensions in the city. Thus it has to be "solved" fast, and in anyway possible, i.e. the stakes are at 11 right from the get-go. Then toss in stock hard drinking tough-guys, corrupt cops, the good cop-bad cop trope, the squeaky-clean asshole FBI agents, gangsters and bootleggers, various mysterious rich people, the bog-standard poor losers-types, as well as the KKK on streetcorners, touring jazz bands, grim, smoke stack factories, slaughter houses, and this alien society, all jammed together in an exaggerated caricature of the 1920's American society which is largely taken off the historical shelf, but not "roaring".  As I said, it's  an 11 on the trope dial.

I found this world too unbelievable, in that the existence of this civilization would certainly have altered American history far more radically than the British author has it doing. Basically, he seems to just have dropped this civilization and its people into America of the period, with a few additions - an independent Mormon nation in the west, and Russians in Alaska. The whole set up reeks of being an artificial device designed to highlight the ills of society, with a notable lack of subtlety.   

Raymond Chandler is my gold standard for detective stories. His stories have plenty of corruption and grit, but he often uses it poetically, and keeps his stories grounded in everyday life. His writing is clever, his characters each have their  own characters. And his stories prove that you don't need sky-high stakes to make an engaging, thought-provoking story. I like clever, understated stories, and this isn't one of those. It lacked any wit or charm. It's characters are bland and do things that don't make a lot of sense, at least to me. All in all, I didn't care about them, the mystery, the stakes or the story.

While the story sounded interesting, it turned out to be a dreary slog, though, as usual, it seems to work for a lot of people, having just under a 4 star rating on Goodreads. If you are fan of gritty noir fiction, and want something different, feel free to give it a try.

As for myself, I hopefully have a more engaging book waiting in the wings. Onward.                 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 147)

 

During the second season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the family packed up the car to spend a month in a holiday camp in the Catskills. This was a custom of New York Jewish families throughout the most of the first 80 years of 20th century. In those days Jews were often denied accommodations at many places, so they made their own places. 
I learned all this in my search for books set in a summer camp where whole families would spend a month or a summer living in bungalow camps, returning year after year. It just seemed such a wonderful idea; spending more than a week in the wood with people you knew, doing all sorts of activities. I felt that this would make for some entertaining stories, so I searched for them. And I didn't find many. The few I did find seemed to be either mysteries or only slightly related to setting I was looking for. I suppose I'd have to find autobiographies and such of people who grew up in this tradition to get a flavor of the time. I did, however, find one book that looked promising, and it was available from the library, so I placed a hold on it. How did it turn out?

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

The Inn at Lake Devine  by Elinor Lipman   B

As it turned out, this book, too, did not have what I was hoping to find. I enjoyed it, read it in a day, as you can see from my grade, but except for a couple of chapters set in a hotel in the Catskill in the 1970's, it had nothing to do with the time and place I was hoping to find. 

It is, however, a story about anti-Semitism. The young narrator's mother had sent out letters looking for places to stay for a family vacation in Vermont, and received a letter from the owner of the story title's inn, implying that it was only open to gentiles. This upset the young narrator more than her parents. They took a cabin on that same lake for a couple of years after that, and one year, they adopt a different name to visit the Inn at Lake Devine to see if they could book a room, with no results. However our narrator, Natalie Marx had made a friend at a  girls' camp with people who actually stayed a week at this very inn every year, and a year later she is invited to stay with them at the inn. It turned out to be not a great week and the two girls don't keep up their relationship, having little in common, including religion.

The story then skips ahead to when she is 24 years old. She is studying to be a chef. More or less by chance Natalie hooks up with that old friend, who remembers her fondly, and invites her to her wedding. What follows is the main part of the story, involving Jewism, expectations, and the Inn at Lake Devine.

As I said, I enjoyed the story, though it was not what I was looking to read. While it explored serious topics, it did so grounded in everyday life. Family considerations - young people, gentile & Jew and family considerations - played a large role in the story and the lives of the characters And while I am not fond of contemporary novels, the '60 & 70's are remote enough to be almost historical, even if I lived through them. A nice story, I recommend it.

The Saturday Morning Post (No.145)

I haven't seen the movie, but why not read the book? I ordered the book from the library, and it showed up sooner than I expected. So here we go...

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

The Princess Bride by William Goldman   DNF 19%

A dumb book. Okay, I thought it was a dumb book. Still, it's a dumb book. A joke is a joke, but when you repeat it, and repeat it, and repeat it, and then advise readers that if they don't like it, they don't have to read the remarks in the parenthesis, I took Goldman at his word, and in the spirit of skipping what I grew weary of reading, I skipped the rest of the book. Actually, to be completely honest, the rest of Chapter One.

Thus, that 19% read is a bit misleading. I skipped the two forwards in my edition, though I did read the framing sequence. However, I didn't make it all the way through the first chapter, "Bride," before I gave up. I'm sure it gets better. It has no other way to go.

Maybe it works better as a movie. Indeed, I suppose it must, since everyone has seen the movie and it has a 96% rotten tomato score and is 8/10 with the critics. Plus, the book comes in with a 4.27 star rating with almost a million reviews on Goodreads. As usual, what do I know?

What I think this all comes down to is that I don't like silly. Not at all, never. It's not a flavor of comedy I appreciate. The Princess Bride pummels the reader with silly humor. Mercilessly. 

Now, while I hesitate to make a broad statement, I will anyway. I don't think I'm much of a fan of American humor in general. I like British humor. But not all British humor. Silly British humor, and they have a lot of that, isn't my cup of tea either. I like sly, dry, witty, understated humor, and that's not what The Princess Bride offers. Or perhaps it offers too much of it. Nah, it's just silly and dumb.

Well, here I am, six paragraphs into my review of The Princess Bride, and I haven't said anything about The Princess Bride itself. Do I need to? I assume everyone has seen the movie, and maybe some of you have even read the book. Anything is possible. But the thing is, I haven't seen the movie, nor, to be candid, even now, read the book. Though I tried, I read part of chapter one. Thus, I can't really say much about the book itself. I knew it was a humors fantasy/fairy tale story, but I guess I expected something along the lines of a lighthearted Prisoner of Zenda story. As I mentioned in a previous review, I need a story that is grounded in some sort plausibility. Absurdity doesn't work for me, so the silliness of this story was never going to work for me. The framing sequence that I did read, came off more like lame advertisement for the career of the author than anything else, and the first part of the first chapter of the "novel" itself that I read proved to be even lamer. 

So to sum it up, if you haven't read The Princess Bride, you shouldn't bother. In my opinion. But if you have, and if you enjoyed it, well, I won't judge you.

Alright. Fine. I'll say two positive things about The Princess Bride. ONE: Books like The Princess Bride make writing reviews for them a very enjoyable task. A popular, fifty year old book that allows my inner critic to roam freely, dagger out, is a godsend. TWO: Because of reason ONE, I didn't waste my half hour reading what I did of it.

That's a win, right? Sort of. 

Developmental Editors and Indie-Publishing

I'm going to say it up front. Publishing is a business. A very risky business. So if you're not certain that the revenue from the book you're publishing is likely pay for a developmental editor, you should not hire one. A developmental editor is someone who goes through the story and tells you where to change it to make it "better."  A developmental editor's value, at least in indie-publishing, is minuscule. And considering that they will likely charge from one to more than three thousands dollars for their work, unless you have a large enough established readership that you confidently expect will cover this expense, you're likely never see any return on that investment. Spending this sort of money on developmental and/or line editing without a booming self-publishing business, is simply a very poor business decision. In my opinion. As I said, publishing is a very risky business, and investments in it need a thoughtful consideration of facts, not dreams, and any money spent, spent very prudently at the scale of expected sales.

Writing, unlike publishing, is an art. Stories are a work of art, created by their author(s). This work of art can be, and almost always is, turned into a product in the hope that it will sell. The job of the editors is use their expertise to re-shape a work of art into the most commercially appealing product possible. In traditional publishing a team of editors work on the cream of the manuscript crop, i.e. manuscripts culled from the thousands submitted to agents, vetted by the agents, and then selected by acquiring editors. Still, they only manage to produce one profitable product out of every three books they publish. And how much of that success might well be attributed to its promotional budget is an open question. This is not to say that editors are completely incompetent, it is simply very hard, even for professionals, to know what readers will like. Yourself-edited, self-published book is as likely to commercially succeed as a professionally edited self-published book, i.e. statically very unlikely.

A "well edited" book is like a tree that falls in a forest. No one will ever know it is well edited, unless they somehow discover and read it. For this to happen,  thousands of impressions are needed just to get a potential reader to click on the cover, read the blurb, and perhaps, read a sample before buying it. Only if, or when, they get to the sample pages will editing ever have a chance to play a role in making a sale. Thus, money spent on getting the book seen is a far more effective way of making sales than thousands of dollars spent on editors.

Given how late in the sales process any effects of editing might have on influencing sales, there is no compelling case that it is needed at all. Your work, your vision, is just as likely to succeed as an editor's. With books you never know what will click with whom.

These days, in traditional publishing, authors usually get only one chance to prove to their publisher that they're potentially a bestselling author. This is not the case in indie-publishing.

The beauty of indie-publishing is that, unlike traditional publishing, you have as many chances as you care to take in chasing commercial success. There's a very simple reason for this; on average, only several dozen to a hundred readers will ever buy and read most indie-published books, be they good or bad. A hundred readers out of a million potential readers gives you a lot of headroom to make mistakes and a chance to get better over time, without coming close to exhausting your potential readership. And the best way to get better is to write, publish, write and publish, again, and again, learning from your mistakes and any feedback you might get along the way. And then, when you reach the point where you can look back and find yourself embarrassed about your first book, you can unpublish it. In the meanwhile, you've been building a back catalog for readers to explore and buy, when the day arrives when your newest book sells more than a hundred copies. When you've made it.

Thus, it's indie-publishing's very long odds of commercial success that allows an author the freedom to write their story the way they want to write it, without compromises to conform to some "professional" editor's opinion. I strongly believe you shouldn't give up that artistic freedom. Who is to say that being different is any less effective than being a copy of last year's successful books? Fashion moves on.

Advocates of using editors often try to make authors feel that they are betraying readers and their fellow indie-authors if they don't get a "professional" editor to polish up their story. Never mind that anyone can set up shop as a "professional freelance editor." There are no bar exams for editors that they need to pass in order to put out a professional editor shingle on the internet. Who knows what your "professional editor" knows about editing.

Advocates of professional editors will also point to popular authors who, they say, grew too big for editors and taking their advice, so that their books suffered for it. Authors like Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson are examples of whom they say produced bloated work as a result. What they don't mention is that while some readers might find this the case, there are likely as many or more readers who think those "bloated" stories are wonderful just as they are. You can never please every reader, and shouldn't try. 

So don't be afraid. It's okay, indeed, desirable, to create your story, your way, no matter how quirky it might be. Remember the abysmal success rate of agents & editors in the traditional space. You really can't do worse by doing it your way. 

Now, by all means produce the best book you can. Get all the feedback on your story that you can from spouses, family, friends, critique partners, and beta readers if you have any doubt about your story. Produce as clean a copy as you can, using the built in spelling and grammar checks, as well as free, or paid (for a month) grammar checkers like Grammarly. But, whatever you do, keep your book uniquely yours. That's its greatest value. Don't let its uniqueness be eroded by someone's idea of making it more marketable. The numbers tell the story; editors have no magic to make a book better and more salable. And when it comes to indie-publishing, it's a very different market, with different readers and reader priorities, so that hiring traditional publishing editors, and mimicking traditional publishing standards is almost certainly a recipe for missing the mark in indie-publishing.

I believe that authors should keep the "self" and "indie" in self-publishing and indie-publishing.

The inspiration for this post came from watching a small publisher/author's YouTube video several weeks ago. In his list of "lies authors tell themselves that will destroy their careers," he listed not hiring a professional developmental editor as one of them. It seems that we're too close to our work to see it's trash. Then last week, he posted another video, where he made the case even stronger - despite the fact that he doesn't feel the need for a developmental himself. (Is he telling himself a lie like the rest of us?) In any event, his advice seems to be a do as I say, not as I do. He then went on to say that cost of editing should be no excuse. Save up for years, if need be. No mention of the steep odds of success in indie-publishing. And in this video he freely admitted that he was acting as a gatekeeper to keep the riffraff, the "bad" books out of the market - something a holy mission for him. He also admitted that he sees himself and his small press a traditional publisher, so his mission seems to be keeping indie writers out of publishing, or to bankrupt them as quickly as possible, should they take his advice and hire expensive editors. All of which struck me as pretty self-serving. I don't think it is in the best interest of aspiring indie authors to follow his advice, since he never addresses the sad truth of indie-publishing; that tens of thousand books are released every month and only a tiny fraction of them will sell a hundred copies or more. Most will lose most of the money the authors spend on publishing their books.