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Poetry Thursday: Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born February 27, 1807. It’s startling to think how long ago that was. At least, it’s startling to me. What was going on in 1807? Well, Hamilton and Burr had just fought their duel a few years before. Oh, Lewis and Clark had just returned! Their expedition took over two years and they got back in 1806. The Battle of Waterloo was still a few years in the future. Steamboats were a thing. And here was Henry Longfellow, a kid at that time. He lived to 1882, it says. That was right before, let’s see … it was right before the Brooklyn Bridge opened. Telephones and electric lightbulbs were still brand new things.

I know I’ve mentioned lots of older poets because of course I’m mostly focused on classics that are long out of copyright. Somehow today the depth of recent history struck me. Maybe because my birthday is in February too, so I might have been in the mood to think about passing time.

Anyway, Longfellow! I’m sure some of his poems must be familiar, some much less so. Okay, here’s one I don’t remember seeing before:

Aftermath

When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
  And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
  And gather in the aftermath.

Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
  Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
  In the silence and the gloom.

***

Not really an appropriate time of year to post that, but I like it! Here’s one which is in keeping with looking back in time and thinking about history.

***

A Shadow

I said unto myself, if I were dead,
  What would befall these children?  What would be
  Their fate, who now are looking up to me
  For help and furtherance?  Their lives, I said,
Would be a volume wherein I have read
  But the first chapters, and no longer see
  To read the rest of their dear history,
  So full of beauty and so full of dread.
Be comforted; the world is very old,
  And generations pass, as they have passed,
  A troop of shadows moving with the sun;
Thousands of times has the old tale been told;
  The world belongs to those who come the last,
  They will find hope and strength as we have done.

***

I like this one as well, but how about winding up with something much lighter in tone?

***

A Day Of Sunshine

O gift of God!  O perfect day:
Whereon shall no man work, but play;
Whereon it is enough for me,
Not to be doing, but to be!

Through every fibre of my brain,
Through every nerve, through every vein,
I feel the electric thrill, the touch
Of life, that seems almost too much.

I hear the wind among the trees
Playing celestial symphonies;
I see the branches downward bent,
Like keys of some great instrument.

And over me unrolls on high
The splendid scenery of the sky,
Where though a sapphire sea the sun
Sails like a golden galleon,

Towards yonder cloud-land in the West,
Towards yonder Islands of the Blest,
Whose steep sierra far uplifts
Its craggy summits white with drifts.

Blow, winds! and waft through all the rooms
The snow-flakes of the cherry-blooms!
Blow, winds! and bend within my reach
The fiery blossoms of the peach!

O Life and Love! O happy throng
Of thoughts, whose only speech is song!
O heart of man! canst thou not be
Blithe as the air is, and as free?

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Murderbot on AppleTV

Here’s a post at Reactor about the Murderbot TV series

Murderbot is coming in May. Apple TV+ announced the news today along with two images of Skarsgård in the title role: One with helmet on, one with helmet off. Neither gives much of a sense of the character or of why Skarsgård was cast in the role—though he is also an executive producer on the series, and perhaps his relatively big name helped it get made. And made fairly quickly, at that: The series was announced only a year and change ago.

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Should You Call It Book One?

A post at Kill Zone Blog: Should You Write a Series or Stand Alones?

I think my post title is more accurate. This post, by James Scott Bell, makes a really good point:

[W]rite book #1 as a standalone book. Keep any numbering off the title. Don’t include a series name. Just write a good story with a good ending…[I]t’s a lot easier to turn a successful standalone book into a popular series than it is to use a series to make the first book successful. … If you already have a tribe of readers and have learned how to write books they love, and you want to commit to a series, go for it! You’ve earned the trust of your readers to write a series. But don’t tell brand-new authors with no platform to follow your example. It hurts them by committing them to books that may not find an audience. It also hurts you by contributing to battered reader syndrome, which scares readers away from books altogether. New authors haven’t yet gained the trust of their readers. They don’t have the caliber of skills you have. If you encourage a new author to write a series, you may be dooming their careers without realizing it.

Bell is quoting this post by  Thomas Umstattd Jr: Stop Writing Series!

There is interesting arithmetic in that post. But there is an inexplicable premise as well. Umstattd says, reasonably, that if 1000 people buy Book #1 in a series, the expected number that will purchase Book #1 is about half that. Yes, fine. But Umstattd then goes on to say that if you write a standalone, you can market it to the 100,000 readers looking for something new in your genre. Which you can. But you also marketed Book #1 to those 100,000 people, presumably, and 1000 people bought it. Therefore if you write a second standalone, it looks to me an awful lot like you can guess that maybe about 1000 people will buy that one too.

I don’t think you’ve dropped your expectations for your second book from 100,000 to 500. I think you’ve dropped it from 1000 to 500 — at worst.

Umstattd is assuming that if Book #1 isn’t a hit, then a series is a bad idea. But he’s also assuming Book #1 is probably pretty bad. Look at this:

When you start your career by writing book #1 in a series, the nature of the series sends all new readers through your freshman effort for the rest of your career. Before readers can enjoy your better, more polished writing, they must first read your oldest, sloppiest writing. When readers tell their friends, “Author Smith’s series gets really good around book 3,” Author Smith is in trouble.

And this is exactly what I’ve been told about two series: Ilona Andrew’s Kate Daniels series and Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series.

For the first, I started at book one, read the series in order, and I agree: the Kate Daniel’s series takes off about Book #3. One reason I think their Hidden Legacy series is better than the Kate Daniel’s series is that it’s great from the first book, not the third. For the second series, the one by McGuire, I started at book one, did not finish it, and that was it for me for that series.

I therefore agree with Umstattd, to an extent. It’s better if your first book in a series, not your third, is already really good. BUT, a lot depends on just how sloppy your first, oldest book is. And the answer should be:

It’s not as great, but it is genuinely good and it is not at all sloppy.

And if that’s not true, then why are you publishing it at all? Because “not stellar” is one thing, but “sloppy,” really? That’s something else, and that’s under the author’s control in a way that no other aspect of quality is. You may not be able to write something like Piranesi as your debut novel — though you might, who knows — but no one should read your first book and think it is sloppy. What an indictment that would be!

Not that I disagree about writing standalones inside a series arc. I think that’s good advice. I think series books should mostly stand alone and I think that is much more true early in the series than late in the series, so there you go, I’m basically agreeing. I also agree that it’s probably better not to put “Book One” on the cover of a standalone first book. “Book One” is on the cover of Tuyo, but that’s not the first cover for that book. Also, there’s nothing sloppy about it (in my opinion) (but I’m right).

The linked post offers advice for new authors and for established authors. I do think it’s worth reading that advice.

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Update: Intermission

Okay, so this past weekend I paused the major WIP (Tano’s next book) and picked up Midwinter. This was largely because it’s just been sitting there mostly finished since Christmas, and partly because it just seemed like a nice time to work on it, so I did.

Oh, I should add, we had heaps of snow last week, but with no wind and deadly cold, so the snow fell gently and softly all night, did not stick to anything, could be fluffed softly out of the way with a broom, and therefore we didn’t see widespread power outages as happened in early January when we got all that ice. Which was good because “deadly cold” is great for keeping the snow from weighing down the trees, but we literally got down to below 0 F. Brrr. Not a good time to lose power.

We do have our generator now, by the way, and the tank of propane, but it’s not all hooked up, so it would have been ironic, or at least unfortunate, to have the power go out with the generator right there. But as the power did not go out, no problem, and that’s a moment of irony (or, I mean, misfortune) I’m glad to have avoided.

But the reason this is relevant is that I did get a lot of work done earlier in the week because everything was closed most of the week, and that was all work on Tano’s novel.

Then, on Friday, I switched to Midwinter. And I messed with that all weekend and it’s … probably … not quite finished. But it’s almost all editing at this point, so it’s basically finished. And I guess I can go ahead and get a cover for it any time, since one of these days I’ll want that cover. It’s certainly long enough to stand as a separate novella. It’s not going to be quite as long as Shines Now (78,000 words). But it’s going to be over 60,000, I’m pretty sure. I’m going through it, tweaking this and that, and I wound up adding a tiny bit of a subplot, and so that’s where I am right now with it.

AND

Just so you know, I also wound up re-chapterizing (re-chapterating? Re-chaptinating?) a lot of the book.

I cut the first chapter in half; now the part where Taranah is talking to Mitereh is chapter one, while the part where she and Daniel have started their journey toward Chaisa is chapter two. I did that because I wound up coming full circle, with the very last chapter being a very short chapter where Taranah is again talking to Mitereh. (Spoiler, but, I mean, not really.) So it makes sense to basically have those conversations serve as a frame around the main story. And once you have a couple really short chapters, does it matter a lot if some of the other chapters are also short? So I took every scene break where we shift pov and made those chapter breaks.

Except for one chapter, where we have a series of vignettes from … let me see … seven different points of view, one after the next, in quick succession. Which I like quite a bit, but obviously I’m not going to break that up into seven extra-teensy chapters.

Anyway, this means that the LAST chapter that appeared in my newsletter was, I don’t remember, chapter seven, maybe. But the next chapter to appear will be CALLED chapter thirteen or something like that, even though it’s the next chapter in order, because the numbers have changed dramatically. I’ll add a note about that so as to avoid startling people who get the newsletter without seeing this blog post.

It also means that I’m actually getting ready to send the updated version here and there for critiques, and also probably post it at my Patreon. I guess, since I’m this close, I will finishing this primary revision before the end of the month and most likely post it at my Patreon in March, though I’ll still probably set the preorder for it at Amazon for November since it’s basically a Christmas story.

So … that was last week! A bit unexpected with the sudden shift in focus, but productive!

Coming up: Only five days left in February! I definitely, for sure, will finish the draft of Tano’s next book in March.

Joy, determined to find the mud under the snow, because of course she is

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Recent Reading: Sagacious Blade by Sherwood Smith

Okay, so I finished reading the draft of Sherwood Smith’s soon-to-be-released Sagacious Blade last week.

This was a beta / proofing read, and now, for a regular book I’m not beta / proofing, I find myself reaching for my highlight function on my Kindle app to mark yellow (questionable), pink (definite typos), blue (love this!), and orange (suddenly struck by a thought unrelated to the text I’m highlighting). I wonder if this happens to everyone: you get into mark-it-up mode and then feel weird when you’re just reading the book without the intention of passing comments back to the author.

Anyway!

So, I really loved the Phoenix Feather quadrilogy, comments here.

Then Sherwood Smith wrote Tribute, set in the same world, massively offset in time, which I loved, if anything, even more. Comments here.

Then there are the Sage Empress books I and II, which are again set in the same world, again offset in time.

This book, Sagacious Blade, I think finishes off the loose-knit  “Sagacious” quadrilogy set in this world, which kind of very loosely links the Phoenix Feather books with the “Sagacious” quadrilogy and is again rather offset in time, more or less, minus the frame story and, well, never mind, my point is, Sagacious Blade is essentially a standalone set in this world, though the frame story will make more sense if you’ve read the others. But you don’t need to — though you should! — because you can just skip the (very brief) frame story if you prefer.

How does Sagacious Blade stack up?

This is a tough question because I *really* loved Tribute and also loved the Phoenix Feather set.

I liked the Sage Empress duology as well, but not as much, for reasons … let me think … okay, mainly because the stifling court setting that takes up a lot of the first Sage Empress book is, well, stifling. Once the protagonist escapes from enemies and takes to the road and starts learning stuff and then gets stuffed aboard a slave ship and leads a revolt … I hope I’m not spoiling this duology? My point is, I dare anyone to be bored during the slave escape and so forth, even if the stultifying life of a girl at court is incredibly stultifying. You know, looking back on it, I think that part hit my “claustrophobia” button. That was probably the problem. Claustrophobia isn’t really the term. My trapped-by-circumstances button. This feels like claustrophobia sounds. I have a lot of trouble with some kinds of settings that incorporate a strong trapped-by-circumstances element for the protagonist OR for people in general who are just trying to live their lives in whatever society. City of Bones hit me the same way. I see this is a quote revised unquote version of City of Bones; has anyone read it? Is the revision substantial?

That was a digression. Back to the topic: Sagacious Blade.

I enjoyed this story very much. This is one of Sherwood Smith’s signature uberbrick novels, 226,000 words, not that I can talk, I realize. Also, I love really long novels, so it’s not like I’m complaining. This story starts with Ki Mek, whose connection to the other stories set in this world is not relevant, really, so leave that aside. Ki Mek is a toddler, a child, a boy, and off he goes on a ship voyage for reasons, where he encounters Tai, a kid who’s a few years older. The ship is caught in a violent storm, much excitement ensues, and the story really takes off. I’m not going to spoil this in any way. Except it’s great. And I want to steal parts of the setting.

Technique alert: there are a whole bunch of good chapter breaks through this part of the novel, so many I was like: Oh, another one, look at that! I admired this a lot, plus this is a contributing factor to the intense page-turn-y quality of this section. If you want to look at artistic chapter breaks, this story would be a good choice for that.

After about a novel’s worth of stuff (about 90,000 words), we transition to a quieter series of chapters, with Mek and Tai largely leading separate lives and a lot of time passing that is basically summarized.

2nd technique alert: If anybody is curious about showing vs telling, there is a lot of time compression in this novel, which of course is one of the primary uses of telling (not the only use).

While we’re on the topic:

3rd technique alert: omniscient viewpoint / rapid pov shifts. This is of course rather uncommon and fairly difficult to do well (or it would be difficult for me, which is no doubt one reason I don’t do this).

The story is lower intensity through the middle. Also, the story loses a lot of the slice-of-life feel as time compression occurs and pov characters begin to multiply. Let me think. Mek, Tai. A girl named Ardal. Waha, a little. Anise, a little. Tai’s sister, Lei. Imperial Princess Lam. That ass Cousin Venshai, more’s the pity. I really dislike villain pov scenes, as you know. A different villain, whom I won’t name because major spoiler, whoa. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. Mek and Tai remain the most important pov characters, but here in the second section of the story, Tai takes over as primary and those near him pick up importance, while Mek recedes.

For me, the first 90,000 words stand out as super compelling; as the story begins to sprawl and characters come and go but Mek steps more into the background, it remains good, but not always as compelling for me personally. For a bit, Tai is back in his aristocratic home and/or dealing with his super-aristocratic relatives, and you know how I mentioned I find this setting claustrophobic? Yep, still true. Then Tai leave that setting, yay, and personally, I would have enjoyed lingering in much longer slice-of-life sections when, for example, Tai is organizing the long-ignored records in the catacomb. I’m not saying that would have been exciting, just that it would have appealed to me personally. There are other elements where I personally would like to have seen another, oh, 20,000 words of development, despite the total length, because basically my attitude is yay, long book!

Anyway, then things start moving, and remarkably far-flung plot threads start to weave back together rather neatly. The ending is (almost) exactly what you would expect from Sherwood Smith: pieces click into place and people step into position to move on with, largely, happy endings. And a very brisk wrap up and epilogue. I would sat “startlingly brisk,” but for Sherwood Smith, perhaps not that startling.

Overall: great story, thoroughly recommended. The close focus and slice-of-life stye in the first half and more sprawling nature of the second half means that the story seemed less even to me than, say, Tribute. That one remains my favorite. But I liked this one a lot, it’s up for preorder with a publication date rapidly approaching (as you may know, since I mentioned this book in my newsletter), and if you like this series, there you go.

I very definitely recommend the eight books set in this world. Publication order would be fine. So would this order: Tribute, Sage Empress, Phoenix Feather, Sagacious Blade. Of the lot, Tribute is the one that most perfectly stands alone. Sagacious Blade does too, except for a single thread that leads to the other books plus the (brief!) frame story.

I haven’t re-read the Phoenix Feather quadrilogy, but I think I’m now going to do that. For values of “now” that are vague, but probably this year.

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Poetry Thursday: Sidney Lanier

I remember this poem from, I think, a high school lit book. Might have been college, but I think it was high school. This was the time during which I was memorizing poems and copying a lot more poems into notebooks, which I still have in a drawer somewhere, I think. I Googled “poets with birthdays in February,” and recognized Lanier’s name at once because of this poem, which has a simple rhyme and quite a bit of alliteration. This, I think, helps give the poem a rushing feeling, like a swift river. See what you think:

The Song Of The Chattahoochee

Out of the hills of Habersham,
Down the valleys of Hall,
I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall,
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
And flee from folly on every side
With a lover’s pain to attain the plain
Far from the hills of Habersham,
Far from the valleys of Hall.

All down the hills of Habersham,
All through the valleys of Hall,
The rushes cried `Abide, abide,’
The willful waterweeds held me thrall,
The laving laurel turned my tide,
The ferns and the fondling grass said `Stay,’
The dewberry dipped for to work delay,
And the little reeds sighed `Abide, abide,
Here in the hills of Habersham,
Here in the valleys of Hall.’

High o’er the hills of Habersham,
Veiling the valleys of Hall,
The hickory told me manifold
Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall
Wrought me her shadowy self to hold,
The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine,
Overleaning, with flickering meaning and sign,
Said, `Pass not, so cold, these manifold
Deep shades of the hills of Habersham,
These glades in the valleys of Hall.’

And oft in the hills of Habersham,
And oft in the valleys of Hall,
The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone
Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl,
And many a luminous jewel lone
— Crystals clear or a-cloud with mist,
Ruby, garnet and amethyst —
Made lures with the lights of streaming stone
In the clefts of the hills of Habersham,
In the beds of the valleys of Hall.

But oh, not the hills of Habersham,
And oh, not the valleys of Hall
Avail: I am fain for to water the plain.
Downward the voices of Duty call —
Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main,
The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,
And the lordly main from beyond the plain
Calls o’er the hills of Habersham,
Calls through the valleys of Hall.

***

Lots of other poems here. Here’s one with an evocative title … and it’s short … sure, let me include this one in the post as well:

A Song Of Eternity In Time

Once, at night, in the manor wood
My Love and I long silent stood,
Amazed that any heavens could
Decree to part us, bitterly repining.
My Love, in aimless love and grief,
Reached forth and drew aside a leaf
That just above us played the thief
And stole our starlight that for us was shining.

A star that had remarked her pain
Shone straightway down that leafy lane,
And wrought his image, mirror-plain,
Within a tear that on her lash hung gleaming.
“Thus Time,” I cried, “is but a tear
Some one hath wept ‘twixt hope and fear,
Yet in his little lucent sphere
Our star of stars, Eternity, is beaming.”

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The first five pages

From a blog called Live Write Thrive: The Burden of Your First Five Pages

Noah Lukeman, in his book The First Five Pages (published in 2000), says “Over the years I’ve read thousands of manuscripts, all, unbelievably, with the exact same type of mistakes. … Writers are doing the exact same things wrong.” I’ve found this to be spot-on in the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of manuscripts I’ve edited and critiqued too. He goes on to explain that the opening pages are indicative of the rest of a manuscript. Meaning, the weak writing or glaring errors or “bad” writing habits noticed on the first few pages almost always implies the rest of the manuscript will be more of the same.

Both believable and interesting! What are these typical “exact same type” of mistakes? I have guesses based on workshop entries I’ve seen. I’m ignoring anything like inability to write a clear sentence. I mean errors that you see despite perfectly good sentences.

A) No sense of place; “white room.”

“White room” openings seem pretty common to me, with people standing somewhere or talking about something, and you have no way to visualize the world around them. There’s nothing there. Or they’re standing on a platform at the spaceport, and that’s it. There’s no actual spaceport, just some sort of nebulous platform and the word “spaceport,” but … what does it look like? It’s not really there. And this goes on for the whole page or two pages or five pages.

B) No context; confusing action.

This is the “start in media res” problem, where the author tries to start with something exciting, but without enough context for the reader to know what to focus on. Also, starting with explosions and destruction right up front means no emotional impact because who are these people and why is all this happening? So lack of context creates both confusion and emotional distance.

I’m trying to think of others issues, but those are the two that spring to mind. Back to the post … Oh, I don’t see ANYTHING about mistakes; this post is actually “How to grab the reader with your first pages,” which is fine, but not what I thought the post was going to be about.

First pages need to be tight, with concise description, and jump right into dynamic action and hint of conflict. Every word counts, so excess verbiage and unimportant movement and speech must be eliminated.

Readers want to see the scene played out, not be told about it with lengthy narrative and explanation. They don’t want ordinary and predictable. They want their curiosity aroused and their hearts tugged as quickly as possible. They want to latch on to a character who intrigues them and who’s facing challenging circumstances.

I dislike the “readers want” and “readers don’t want” phrases, because readers aren’t that uniform in their tastes. I’m thinking once more about From All False Doctrine. Ordinary setting, no action, conversation — very possibly “excess verbiage,” depending on how you define that. There’s basically no perceptible hint of the challenging circumstances (there are hints, but delightfully subtle). Characters and curiosity … mostly characters. That’s what we have in that opening. Which is a great opening! It’s a fantastic opening! I resent this idea that you have to jump right into dynamic action — I resent that on behalf of From All False Doctrine! Which is funny, because I didn’t even write that, but I still resent this pressure toward opening with dynamic action! I don’t think it’s true, and to the extent it IS true, I think it needs to be MEANINGFUL action, not just dynamic action.

Here’s what this post says about action:

Writers are encouraged to open scenes in medias res. That means your character is dropped into the middle of something that’s been developing before the scene starts. It takes careful thought to come up with a strong opening moment in which to showcase your character. That scenario you put her in needs to covey her personality, core need, and immediate goal/objective and problem, as well as establish setting, hint at a bigger conflict (if possible and/or useful to the premise), and perhaps show and describe other characters in the scene.

Which is better, because “showcase your character” is context. Plus there’s “establish setting,” which is absolutely crucial in the opening pages, much more important than action. That’s what I think is most important in the opening — character and setting. And mood, or I guess I mean tone. If there’s action, fine, but that’s not nearly as important as establishing character, setting, and tone. And style. FINE, I keep adding more things I think are crucial, none of which are action. But THINK about the Wodehousian style of From All False Doctrine! That’s absolutely crucial to the opening. It’s the style that makes this opening engaging. For the right readers, sure, but that’s true of every style.

Character, setting, tone, and style. That’s it. That’s what you need in the first five pages. That’s what I think. Not action, not concise writing without a single wasted word — style, yes, but that isn’t a synonym for “concise;” we’re not all trying to write like Hemingway. And you know what? If something great comes across the desk of someone who says, “First pages need to be tight, with concise description, and jump right into dynamic action and hint of conflict. Every word counts, so excess verbiage and unimportant movement and speech must be eliminated,” and this great novel has zero characteristics that meet that description, I bet this person would say Yay, this is great! and simply not remember they gave this advice, because what they mean is, Your first pages have to grab me, and it doesn’t matter whether this great novel ignores all this advice as long as it’s great.

And … it would be nice if people noticed that and quit saying “readers want to jump right into the action” as though that’s a law chiseled into stone and handed down from on high. Granted, “Make your first pages great” is too vague to work as advice. Which is why writing advice is so useless. But that’s a different post.

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Should everything serve the plot?

A post at Writer Unboxed: I Finally Figured Out My Decade-Long Reading Slump

I’ve been in a “reading slump” for the last decade. … I don’t like it when books feel too much like a bad tour guide. … In this metaphor, the writer is the guide. A good guide will keep the pace of the group moving forward and on track without overexplaining or underexplaining. Every so often, they may stop or slow the pace of the walk to point out points of interest and share their specialized information … [but sometimes] the tour guide marches the group through the underbrush like a drill instructor, pointing out everything but stopping nowhere.

Increasingly, I’ve been noticing a trend in contemporary novels toward the overly aggressive tour guide. I pretty much feel like I’m being dragged along by the hair by a book while it yells, “LOOK AT THE PLOT. THIS IS THE PLOT!”

***

This is where I laughed.

***

I came to this conclusion while reading an adult fantasy novel published in 2022 by a Big 5 publisher. I actually finished the book, even though it gave me aggressive tour guide vibes, because the prose was so good I could mostly overlook how I felt like I was being breathlessly yanked along a single track, and that single track was the plot … What stuck out most was that that I viewed this book as extremely fast-paced to the detriment of the story. But when I went to record the book in my tracking app, I saw that 68% of people who had rated the book thought it was “medium” or “slow” paced.

I stared at this data for a while, wondering what planet I was living on.

***

And this is where I paused to think about various editorial feedback I have received over the past 20 years.

—Readers don’t like journeys. Can you cut the journey?

—Can you cut this incident, since it doesn’t serve the plot?

—Should this character be removed since he’s not contributing to the plot?

And so on. And I do think this sort of feedback is good and useful because it’s fine to consider whether something ought to be trimmed, but I also agree with the author of the linked post, Kelsey Allagood, that honestly, even if you’re heading somewhere, it’s fine to admire the flowers along the way. Allagood says she thinks this tendency is driven by publishers, not authors and not readers.

***

I wish publishers trusted us, the readers, more. Trust us to stay on the path if you’re not always holding our hand. There is still absolutely an audience for (what would by some be considered) “slow” books. … But this trend of consume more, consume faster, seems less like a natural evolution of our psyches and more like a trend being pushed from the outside. It takes a while to finish a book like Karamazov, which is less time posting covers on Instagram and pushing others to buy, buy, buy.

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I don’t know, could be both. I know I like stories with setting and a sense of place, and you have to build that. I’m a character reader (and writer, usually), and you have to build characters. All of that is on top of the plot. But I know I like many books that are comparatively very slow paced.

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Update: Brr, February

All right, so, February is going to be a slow, slow month compared to January. I accept that. January was an exceptionally fast month.

Anyway, I have managed to write 22,000 words this month so far, which is actually misleading, since I’ve also been trimming, so I don’t know what I’m complaining about, February is fine, I guess.

Not sure whether I’ll actually finish this book this month, but that’s not off the table. I mean the draft, of course. Primary revision will take a few weeks after that. I guess I can still say that I sort of expect to have finished AND get through the primary revision by the end of MARCH. That should not even be especially difficult, barring random weird disasters.

Anyway, I just finished beta/proofreading a really long book for Sherwood Smith, so that was in there too, and I’ll post about that book later. Soonish. Probably this week.

Other than that, not a lot to say. We’re traveling through the starlit lands, which are taking shape around us. We are meeting more Tarashana people, who are coming into focus. I sort of think something exciting might happen pretty soon. It would be kind of unrelated to the broader plot, so maybe not, unless I think of a way to connect it.

Are we going to find out about the kind of spirit that was trapped in the pass in MARAG?

Yes. Yes, we are. We have not, as yet, but that is going to happen. I’ve literally had that in mind since before I finished MARAG, or I think I have. I was pretty careful about how I described that spirit because I had this, or something like this, in mind the whole time. Some of the people who dealt with it perceived it as evil at least some of the time, but I think you probably noticed that was not really accurate. Though it was driven into a harmful form, obviously.

Anyway, we’re not there yet. That’s close to the end. I think.

Meanwhile, traveling through the starlit lands is like traveling into spring, and I’m right there for that, let me tell you. We’re expecting a low of -3 F in a day or so (-20 C to those of you who are used to Celsius). Is our new generator installed? Yes and no. The generator is sitting next to the house. The propane tank is sitting however many feet from the house. But the tank does not yet have propane in it, and the generator is not yet hooked up. Odds that it will be good to go before it starts snowing tonight: no chance. So … at least I’ve got the propane heater sitting in the house, which I would prefer not to use, but it is there. Along with a C0 detector because I would be pretty embarrassed to accidentally kill myself with a propane heater when I know perfectly well why those are dangerous.

Have I mentioned I’m ready for spring? I’m prepared to enjoy snow NEXT winter, when the generator is WORKING.

Meanwhile!

Max is also ready for spring. Joy is delighted by snow, so not so much.

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How can You Get People to Buy your Book?

There is a significant category of questions on Quora similar to this one:

How can I sell 10K copies of my self-published book in three months?

I just started publishing books on Amazon but I haven’t made sales yet. What do I need to do differently to scale up and make massive sales?

And a lot more questions that ask, more reasonably,

How could I get people to buy copies of my self-published book? No one has bought any of my books before.

What can I do to get people to buy my self published books I tell people on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram about my books I put links to where people can buy my books but nobody cares they don’t buy any copies of my books. What can I do?

Why is my self-published book having no reads?

I wrote a book and published it on Amazon Kindle direct publishing. How do I get people to buy my book?

And so forth, on and on, endless iterations. Some of the people who write these questions direct them to me.

I’m therefore writing this post partly so from now on, I will have something to point to when I am answering a question like this.

If you poke around using the author’s name and/or the book’s title, you may be able to find the book on Amazon. I’m going to take one of these books at random and take a look at it to explain what is wrong and why no one will buy this book. I thought about not pointing to a specific example, but the book is right there on Amazon, it was published last year and the author hasn’t unpublished it, so they must be okay with readers looking at it. Here it is:

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The Wizard In Training And The Secrets Of The Evil Lord the second book in the series

Price: $4.78 Length: 90 pages No sales rank, meaning that this book has never sold a copy OR hasn’t sold a copy in several years.

Cover: Despite the 2 and the title including “the second book in the series,” this is listed as Book 1 of 1 for its series.

Description: Laure Bell is a young teenage girl and things are not going well in Lauren’s life she is not very lucky in life and she doesn’t have many friends and most of the things she tries to do don’t end well. So one day young a witch in training named Kate Sands is sent from the wizarding world to our world to help Lauren to become the most popular student at her high school and if she is able to do that she will get her witchs hat and become a full-fledged witch. Also who is Evil Lord Crack and can Alex Spark Lauren Bell Mack Brickwell and Kate Sands stop him.

***

What is wrong? Some of this is obvious, but some is much less obvious.

A) The metadata is screwed up. The stuff on the cover does not match the “first in series” designation. Also, the title on the cover does not match the title as presented above the description. This is a significant problem for KDP. The titles need to match, the metadata needs to make sense. Also, obviously “the second book in the series” should not be part of the title.

Categories are invisible because this book has not sold; categories are not shown until the first sale occurs. I don’t know exactly why, but I bet it’s partly because the book has to rank in a category, and with no rank, Amazon has no way to show categories.

Anybody who wants to self-publish should take a few minutes … or hours, or days … to read posts about metadata best practices. This is particularly true because screwing this up badly enough will get your account suspended or possibly banned.

Metadata Guidelines for Books — KDP’s own guidelines

Mastering Metadata: How to Avoid KDP Account Suspension — from Written Word Media, which I consider a reliable source.

How to Improve Your Amazon Book Description & Metadata — from Jane Friedman, another reliable source.

And I wouldn’t stop there, either. Also, I would definitely look at KDP’s own guidelines, because other posts may be outdated. Though WWM stays up to date, I bet.

B) The price is too high for a 90-page short story or novella. Especially since the story is not actually 90 pages; it’s more like 40 pages; see “Interior Formatting,” below.

A stunning number of self-published books are nine pages long, twenty pages long, forty pages long. A lot of people just do not seem to know what a “book” or a “novel” actually is. Because KDP will allow you to self-publish something really short, they think they have self-published a “book” or a “novel” when they have published a really short novella, a short story, or a vignette.

This isn’t clear from this specific example, but something that I have seen quite a few times now is a self-published “novel” that is actually the summary of a novel. There is almost no setting, very little to zero dialogue, it is literally the synopsis of the novel. The only explanation for this is that the aspiring author does not know what a “story” is at all, never mind knowing how long actual novels are.

C) The cover is crappy. The image is unattractive, cluttered, and cartoonish. The title is basically unreadable, and this happens a lot, with at least some part of the text too close to the background color.

The cover creation tools at KDP are terrible. They are at best a starting point. Cutting a cover in half with the top black and the bottom pink, or anything like that, screams “KDP cover creator tool here.”

The cover creation tools at Canva are fantastic, but can be dangerous to use. One relatively common reason people get banned from KDP is because they have used Canva images without modifying them, the same images that a zillion other people have already used, and KDP brings down a hammer on that kind of image duplication. This is by far a bigger problem for “authors” making low-content coloring books or something of the kind. But it’s important to be careful (very, very careful) about images.

AND, if you use AI image generators, then you can make whatever image and definitely have the right to use that image, but you must check the “used AI tools” box at KDP and if you don’t they will probably ban you for lying to them. If you do check that box, then you’re probably going to find you have a problem sometime down the road, maybe soon, because there’s no division (yet) between “faked the whole book with ChatGPT” and “wrote the book, but generated the cover image.” The minute Amazon decides to unpublish all books where the “used AI tools” box is checked, they can do it. Therefore, all possible questions of ethics and quality aside, I would be very hesitant to use AI tools to generate any part of the text OR the cover.

D) The interior formatting is totally screwed up. Inside this book, half of each page is white space. The text is centered rather than left-justified (!).

The interior formatting of A LOT of self-published books is seriously screwed up, though I’ve never before seen one screwed up exactly like this.

It ought to be easy to do better, because you should be able to open ANY traditionally published book or ANY bestselling self-published book and look at the text. There you go, that’s how the interior of your book should look. Fiddle with the formatting until your ebook looks correct. Use the preview tool at KDP to make sure it does look right. Some authors swear that you have to upload an epub or whatever else they happen to like or else the formatting looks wrong. No, it doesn’t. You can load a Word file and it will look fine. I don’t know what they’re doing to make that not work.

Paperback formatting is harder. Use a KDP template of the size you want and copy and paste your chapters into the template. Boom, there you go, the formatting should now look basically correct, as long as the Word file you used for the ebook is basically correct.

E) The description is completely awful.

In this case, the description is awful because of the lack of punctuation. This is so screamingly obvious that everything else sort of disappears into the background and it’s therefore hard to evaluate any other aspect of the description. Here it is, this time with the punctuation corrected and a tiny bit of editing to make it less painful to read:

Laure Bell is a young teenage girl. Things are not going well in her life. She is not very lucky in life, she doesn’t have many friends and most of the things she tries to do don’t end well. So, one day, young a witch in training named Kate Sands is sent from the wizarding world to our world to help Lauren become the most popular student at her high school. If Kate is able to do, that she will get her witch’s hat and become a full-fledged witch.

Also, who is Lord Crack, and can Alex Spark, Lauren Bell, Mack Brickwell, and Kate Sands stop him?

Now, this is plainly terrible, but what precisely is wrong with it? And what are other common problems in self-published book description?

Description is genuinely hard to write, except for people such as commenter Mary Beth, who has an astounding knack for great, pithy, evocative book descriptions. However, this particular example of description is terrible because

–It’s repetitive and uses vague words like “things.”

–It’s confusing because it’s hard to tell who the protagonist is. I vote for Kate, who is the person in this story trying to achieve something.

–Why does Laurie’s problem concern Kate or any of the witches? That’s mysterious, not in a good way.

–Who are all the other people mentioned in the last line? That’s also mysterious, not in a good way.

However, this description is in fact good in one way: It is short. A typical failure mode for description of self-published novels is the attempt to cram the whole plot into a 2000-word description. This is a bad idea. The description is supposed to be evocative and intriguing. It is emphatically not supposed to be a plot summary.

My favorite book description ever is for The Hands of the Emperor —

An impulsive word can start a war.
A timely word can stop one.
A simple act of friendship can change the course of history.

Cliopher Mdang is the personal secretary of the Last Emperor of Astandalas, the Lord of Rising Stars, the Lord Magus of Zunidh, the Sun-on-Earth, the god.
He has spent more time with the Emperor of Astandalas than any other person.
He has never once touched his lord.
He has never called him by name.
He has never initiated a conversation.

One day Cliopher invites the Sun-on-Earth home to the proverbially remote Vangavaye-ve for a holiday.

Everything that is mysterious in this description is mysterious in a good way, and also in a way that appeals to me personally, but I think this is just objectively great description.

***

It’s also entirely possible for a good or great book not to sell either, and the reason that happens is

LACK OF PROMOTION

If everything else is okay — if the metadata is okay, the title is okay, price, length, cover, description, interior formatting — AND the book itself is good, then the only thing left is promotion.

Every now and then someone on Quora asks me for advice about promotion. Where I’m far from an expert! I can only suggest the things I have used, not the things I haven’t figured out myself, such as Amazon ads! Which I should indeed take a stab at figuring out! But, my point is, sometimes this person’s book looks just fine, which is a real pleasure to see.

This is a good cover, the fonts are good, the image is good, the design is good. The book is short, but not insanely short — 160 pp — and it’s priced at $2.99, which is as low as you can put it while still having a royalty of 70% rather than 35%, so that’s a reasonable price. Sales rank is over a million, so it’s not selling a lot, but I bet it could do better with promotion. Here’s the description:

The last place Tuskegee Airman Bob Dale pictured himself was shot down and surviving on the ground.

Yet here he was after his crippled plane caught fire and crashed, dodging Nazi patrols when he stumbles into the arms of a nun and a Partisan who determine to guide him to safety. They lead him to an orphanage just as Nazi SS troops are closing in on seven little Jewish children hiding there. Now Bob’s mission of survival takes on an urgency even larger than his own life!

This well-researched historical thriller captures the spirit of the heroic nuns of the Sound of Music and the courageous soldiers of Saving Private Ryan in a book you will find both exciting and inspiring.

And so on, various reader quotes added to the description.

There’s a lot to like about this, isn’t there? This description is short, it’s evocative and engaging, it’s clear about the problem. I would personally only bold the first line, but fine. I actually picked up a sample myself, which I haven’t ever looked at because, sigh, I don’t have time. But it looks to me like this book could be boosted effectively with reasonable promotion. As far as quality goes, it’s not just in a different zip code compared to the first book shown above, it’s on a whole different continent.

If an aspiring author hasn’t looked at well-presented books so they have an idea of the standard they should try to meet, they should absolutely do that, and the sooner the better. If that’s you, then just google “bestselling [my genre here]” and look at the top fifty books in whatever genre you have in mind. If you don’t know what genre your book is, here you go, this will get you started: 144 Genres and Subgenres Explained.

It does absolutely no good at all to throw an unreadable thirty-page “book” up on Amazon with a crappy cover and terrible description. You can do that if you want; it doesn’t cost anything but some of your time. But it won’t sell, and it very definitely won’t sell “massively” or ten thousand copies per month; it won’t be a bestseller; it won’t make you any money to speak of, and there is just no point.

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I hope this post was interesting even though ALL my regulars here are VASTLY more aware of what a book is, what a novel is, and how a book ought to be presented and therefore you knew all the above.

For anybody who is just starting out and has discovered that their book isn’t selling, that zero readers are buying it or reading it, I hope something here clarifies why there is a problem.

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